With any Luck, He'll Resign

There will be a protest outside Thanet Council's offices at 5.30pm tomorrow (12 July) demanding Cllr Ken Gregory's resignation for leaving a voicemail message on Cllr John Worrow's phone saying: "With any luck you'll get AIDS."

To wish such a horrifying disease on someone known to be bisexual is sickening and it astounds me that a politician can say such things and seemingly be let off the hook. How Cllr Gregory has the gall to think he can carry on as an elected representative in the wake of this scandal is astonishing. Can you imagine the outcry if Cllr Gregory had wished cancer on somebody instead?

I genuinely believe Cllr Gregory should stand down. In my opinion, Cllr Gregory's comment far eclipses the offensive remarks Cllr Mike Harrison made as they veer away from insults and cross over into hate crime territory, anathematising in a homophobic misconception about the nature of the AIDS virus. Had it not occurred to Cllr Gregory that the majority of HIV transmissions in Sub-Saharan Africa originate from heterosexual intercourse?

To date, Cllr Ken Gregory has received a police caution for malicious communications; he's been suspended from the Conservative Group for just six months; and the standards committee has incomprehensibly cleared him of misconduct claiming Gregory did not break the councillor's code of conduct. It beggars belief that Cllr Ken Gregory should be allowed to get away with this. Personally, I think the picture is right - with a bit of luck, he'll resign.

DESIGNATED DRIVER

Cllr Ian Driver will be standing as an Independent candidate for the new Kent Police Commissioner role. Hoping to "save billions in police funding which can be re-invested into community policing," Driver told This Is Kent that if he is elected he will support "the reform of old fashioned and unworkable drugs and prostitution laws."

Driver's position on legalising drugs isn't entirely without substance. Journalist Nick Davies (author of Flat Earth News) has written extensively on the subject of drugs and makes the observation that:

"The core point is that the death and sickness and moral collapse which are associated with Class A drugs are, in truth, generally the result not of the drugs themselves but of the blackmarket on which they are sold as a result of our strategy of prohibition."

Davies goes on to add that, for instance:

"Heroin, so benign in the hands of doctors, becomes highly dangerous when it is cut by blackmarket dealers - with paracetamol, drain cleaner, sand, sugar, starch, powdered milk, talcum powder, coffee, brick dust, cement dust, gravy powder, face powder or curry powder. None of these adulterants was ever intended to be injected into human veins."

Nick Davies argues drugs like heroin aren't harmful in their purest form - it's the actions of unscrupulous blackmarket dealers which makes them dangerous. So if drugs were made legal and distributed safely, the blackmarket could essentially be eradicated overnight. But what do you think? Is legalising drugs the answer? I'm not fully convinced.

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