2 posts tagged “conference”

The last question of the Q&A was an amalgam of 3 questions emailed in on drugs, mine(with a typo introduced) and two others on a similar theme - i.e. prohibition, crime and prescribing heroin to addicts.

And then after merging the 3 questions together they talked about addiction for a couple of minutes, and the need for more evidence before making diamorphine available by prescription.. for a handful of addicts.. cost 15 grand a year (but only because we have a monopoly supplier that charges 7 times more than the dutch pay).

Nobody talked much at all about how prohibition was causing problems, only the lady from the Prison Reform Trust mentioned the problem of criminalisation, and the fact that most addicts turned to drugs because they had other problems - essentially the drug addiction was the symptom of their problems rather than the cause, and how criminalisation makes that worse rather than better.

All in all a very very disappointing response, totally ignoring the 2 questions that asked directly about prohibition and decriminalisation, and Brian injecting random punctuation into my question.

Thanks to the amazing Ryan Cullen for leading me to it, answering my bitching about how hard it is to find any specific piece of information about what actually happened at conference.

.. so how do I find out if I got an answer?

I can't find video, let alone transcript on the Crime Q&A on Monday morning, only 4 hour long broadcasts from BBC parliament that may or may not include the Q&A I'm looking for (which I can't even find a time for beyond "monday morning", let alone the location).

The alternative to 4 hour long BBC videos is wading through dozens of unlabelled 20 minute segments on ustream.. no wonder most of the videos there have less than a dozen views.

This looks like a repeat of last year - if you want to know want to know anything beyond the headlines that the press and bloggers care to share you have to pay out hundreds of quid and waste a week of holiday time away from wife and kids. *sigh*

And this is after a mailshot saying that it was opening up to people who couldn't attend and invited questions - what a half hearted effort.

WTF aren't all the Q&A panels etc transcripted and published on the lib dem website - no wonder the press doesn't go beyond soundbites like Vince Cable's mansion tax and Nick Clegg unilaterally removing a manifesto promise on tuition fees for universities - you can't bloody well find any useful detail or information anywhere.