##What is a drug?

A drug is a substance which affects you in some way. Most drugs are used for medicinal purposes and prescribed by a registered physician. This isn’t all drugs are used for. Many affect the mental state of the person taking them. This could be that they relax the person in some way, depending on what we mean by “relax”; or they could cause hallucinations of some description.

##What drugs are prohibited?

Currently, in the U.K., we do prohibit most drugs, but is this the right policy? Alcohol and tobacco are legal and regulated. That is to say you require a licence to sell them and you have to be over 18 years of age to buy them. Then there are a whole class of pharmaceutical drugs which you can only obtain with a prescription from a doctor, further we have some so-called over-the-counter drugs. Such as paracetamol, basic pain-killers which aren’t particularly addictive so it has been deemed safe enough to allow people easy access without the hassle of visiting the doctor. The idea is then that everything else is illegal. There are however substances not covered by the relevant laws and thus legal to take. They are used for the same purpose as more well known drugs such as cocaine or cannabis. These are often referred to as legal-highs.

Most people take drugs, particularly alcohol and tobacco, because they enjoy the altered state that the drug produces. It seems to me the current policy is geared to this idea that drugs users are addicts who can't control themselves and are thus a danger to society. The UN, in a report (page 7), suggest that globally roughly only 10% of drug users are “problem” users. As I said, most users are normal people, like you and me, going about their daily lives and enjoy the occasional responsible experience of drugs.

##Why are we prohibiting most drugs?

People put forward several arguments for the prohibition of drugs.

• That the drugs are bad you your health.
• That the drugs are cause you to act in an uninhibited and antisocial way, thus harming society.
• And also a concern with the link between drugs and organised crime, the concern being causing an increase in crime and gang activity.

These are potentially valid reasons to prohibit drugs, but let's look closer. Particularly, I want to note society’s acceptance alcohol and tobacco. We have the idea that drugs are bad for you. This does seem reasonable, we discovered that asbestos is a carcinogen and so banned its use as an insulator in construction. We stop lead being used in paints to stop heavy metal poisoning. But shouldn’t we be rational and consistent about this? Alcohol and cigarettes are also damaging for your health. Alcoholism is a real problem that has taken many lives over the years. Worse we have cigarettes which are a known carcinogen. These are still legal. Perhaps then it should be a question of severity, after all everything gives you cancer.

I feel this question of severity is the right one to ask. Absolutely there are highly dangerous drugs like heroin. There are also drugs that most people can enjoy in a responsible fashion, like alcohol. A sliding scale where only the genuinely dangerous drugs are prohibited is something I feel we should move toward. Some people more liberal than I will say even this is wrong and who is the government to say what I can or cannot do with my body. That all drugs should be legal. The thought is a nice one, if perhaps a little too naïve for the real world.

##Where should we stand on the slippery slope?

Given the position that there are some drugs that reasonably cannot be taken responsibly, they are simply too addictive or dangerous, or any other criteria we may have. The question must then become the clichéd “where do we draw the line?”

Emotion nor tradition should be allowed to determine the answer to this question. This is an ethical question that we must try to answer rationally through reasonable discourse. Taking into account the actual affects that drugs have, both on individuals and society as a whole. People don't seem willing to do this. Though things appear to be turning in this regard.

Prof. David Nutt is someone who’s opinion I respect on the matter. He voices a view similar to mine, that policy that is detached from the reality of drug use isn’t going to be an effective policy. If we want our policy to genuinely reduce the harm and suffering that drugs can and do cause then we need to take am honest look at drug usage.

The linux distribution Fedora have announced their new version release name, Schrödinger’s Cat, inspired by the famous thought-experiment trying to conceptualise quantum mechanics. But this has brought about some perhaps unforeseen issues regarding the handling of text. The name isn’t simple and contains non-ASCII characters. This is where a slight digression on what a string is would be advisable if you aren’t already comfortable. May I recommend Spolky’s excellent What Every Programmer Should Know About Unicode. If software hasn’t taken this into account then things can go wrong. Things went wrong. The folks over at LWN have detailed the events.

What interests me is the behaviour of Chrome on Mac; given the suggestion of naming the release “Schrödinger’s ?”. That final symbol is the Unicode character for a cat. Specifically a smiling cat face with heart-shaped eyes. Which leads to certain problems. Specifically for me that character will render correctly in title tabs in Chrome, but not in the document body. This isn’t a problem with Firefox however, which handles the symbol without issue. Further Chrome on either Linux or iOS seem to behave properly as well. This appears to have been a known problem for some time.

It’s 2013 and Unicode is still a problem, sigh.

I have my local dev box and my VPS which this site resides on. I don't want to make changes directly to the PHP code on the server, mistakes happen and that would be bad. So I write code on my dev box, and when I'm happy everything works, put the code on to the VPS. Git is a godsend for tasks like this. It also helps that Laravel is developed with Git.

First we set up a git repo on the dev box tracking the develop branch of the Laravel git repo. Then we change the origin to our own github repo, we shall call Laravel's repo upstream. Obviously we need to first go to github.com and set up a new empty repo. This means any changes we make to the code will get pushed to our repo, not Laravel's (not that we could push changes directly to them, that requires a pull request).

$ git clone -b develop git://github.com/laravel/laravel.git my-laravel
$ cd my-laravel
$ git remote rename origin upstream
$ git remote add origin git@github.com:username/my-laravel-on-github
$ git push -u origin develop

When the guys at Laravel update their code we need to incorporate those into our codebase, which is easily done.

$ git fetch upstream
$ git merge upstream/develop

Once we have made any changes we want to it is a simple case of committing and pushing those changes

$ git add <file>
$ git commit -a
$ git push -u origin develop

We also need to run the last command once we've pulled any changes from upstream. We can then pull the changes from our github repo onto the VPS. This way we can make sure nothing is going to break before we put any code in production. *[VPS]: Virtual Private Server

I've updated the blog to use Laravel 4. Laravel 4 is currently in beta development, a complete rewrite of the PHP framework to use Composer to be more modular and interoperable.

Currently I'm not doing things the best way as my Git knowledge isn't up to scratch. I followed the instructions on the Laravel docs page. I also installed Composer system-wide by putting the phar file in /usr/local/bin. Thus all I need to do is go into my Laravel directory and run composer update and all the components are updated to the latest version; including any extra packages I've added to the composer.json file myself.

I find this incredibly exciting. It's simply a case of going to http://packagist.com/ and going I like the sound of that, all I have to do is add one line to one file and I can use it. For example, I'm using Markdown in my posts, so I use this package by dflydev. Admittedly it's not as simple as just adding a line to the composer.json file. Due to how packages are loaded, anywhere I want to use the file I need to add the line

use dflydev\\markdown\\MarkdownExtraParser

Though I am sure there are better ways of doing this. I believe this can be done by editing the providers and aliases arrays in app/config/app.php, but I'm yet to look into this properly.

I'm also doing a basic redesign of the site, focusing slightly on the layout, but mainly the colour-scheme, incorporating the Solarized colour palette. Maybe even a little SASS/LESS magic to switch between dark/light schemes.