Air quality

Do you mean we will all die laughing? There's a thing!

Ahem, cough, splutter, gasp, horrible rasping noise, sorry about that, cough, there are too many of these big toxic fires. It might help to change insurance conditions for industrial premises to make it more cost effective not to have fires.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leeds-36699036
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leeds-36697998

The stock-take turned out to be unsatisfactory and so they decided on a fire-sale instead. I don't know what is strange about that? Usual procedures followed I don't doubt.

Maybe the combination of hot weather and hot lamps, this is just one of a recent spate of cannabis farm fires.

http://www.itv.com/news/granada/2016-09-07/watch-kids-left-vomiting-after-cannabis-farm-fire/

More likely an electrical fault - doesn't go well with water. It's time they stopped messing about and decriminalised drugs starting with 'weed' (which should be already being used for medical purposes) and then moving on. Control it and profit by it. Keep it sensible and you will have the best that can be obtained from mankind. Over tax it and you will recreate a black market. Again it's not rocket science.

To decriminalise drugs would be a complicated project. Someone would have to decide what was fit for human consumption and what wasn't.

Someone already decides such conundrums with almost everything we buy or experience throughout the whole of our lives. So 'what's new'?????

It should ultimately rest with 'what is logical'. Not 'expedient'. What is potentially possible?

The smallest of brains should see that the 'war' on drugs could never have been won and was an impossible objective to start with. Similarly the war on the sex trade. If man has a 'need' for it he will obtain it regardless of others who may think and decide otherwise. I call it 'natural proclivities'. As required to many as breathing. Again it's not rocket science. Strive for what is logically possible and leave the rest to nature.

What's new? In recent years, a whole range of 'leisure' drugs. Marijuana selectively bred into new psychosis-inducing cultivars with little resemblance to the traditional herb. Brain damaging chemicals are constantly being synthesised. The 'legalise drugs' lobby needs to update it's information and think again.

Exactly. You hit the nail right on the head - leisure drugs. In other words something some people want because it gives them pleasure. Sex does that. Hard drugs do that. Alcohol does that. Tobacco does that. Music does that.Some foods do that. In other words it is what some of the people want - and you think you can ever successfully ban it -. No I do not think so. Therefore WHY are you spending billions of my money on trying to????????? I consider it is exactly like the morality police on homosexuality prior to sanity pervading our societies. It's always the 'we know better than you' brigade who prolong the agonies for the 'best of intentions'. Time our species lost some of its patience and put the 'we know better than you' brigade where the monkey puts its nuts and used some other methods to 'keep the lid on'.

A very risky strategy.

Breathing is risky - as per your original post. All life is a risk. Cowering in the corner and putting cardboard cut-outs in view as protection doesn't cut-it for the buggers will eventually find you and bite you on the ass. In other words - if at first you don't succeed, change tack and try again. Using the same old method which has failed time and time again are the methods of the insane. Cowards cover themselves in the protections of established norms. Brave men are required in times of uncertainly. I rest my case.

Your case looks rather wobbly. The state has a duty to protect it's citizens. Changing the laws to unleash totally uncrontrolled drugs of all kinds on an unsuspecting public, if that's what you are advocating, would lead to all kinds of damage.

At the end of the day, the genie is already out of the bottle. A heroin habit and a whiskey habit is about as affordable and about as damaging. The legal drugs we have got there because they were there first and are easy to produce.

Try legislating against natural psycho-active fungi (Magic mushrooms) - it does not work effectively.

Quite. My point exactly. You cannot effectively legislate against the public's desires in any shape or form. Control has to be 'accepted' by the majority which in the case of drugs (all drugs) has never been accepted and I maintain never will be. To spend 'billions upon billions' trying to catch criminal drug barons, dealers, pushers, users, and having failed then continue to do so is crass stupidity quite beyond belief. How about spending some billions on providing food and shelter for the growers at the one end and billions on de-criminalising and 'controlling' drugs on the other. We effectively control tobacco and alcohol and both keep it under reasonable control and have it pay, in taxation, for the bad results it produces in some people and we try to educate the problem in the hope that some day it will become far less a problem. I would maintain the same will have to be done with social drugs as time goes by regardless of all the stupidity ( policing) that the 'powers that be' seem to think is the answer. Intelligent they may be. Common-sense they have none.

A general re-think is in order. The idea of a Mexican style free for all drug fiesta might appeal, but as the corpses piled up by the roadside, we might look back on the days when drugs were under some semblance of control with nostalgia.

Perhaps a study and pilot project, legalising the use of the leisure drug krokodil would inform as to what sort of policies could best be adopted.

Whatever there certainly needs to be 'someone' with a brain to be put in charge of it all and come up with a 'logical, workable solution'. Whomsoever it is will first have to be given a mandate that excludes all moral/ religious grounds for inaction as it is the moral high ground that has provided the drugs war with its useless programmes of continuous death, destruction and social upheaval.

Mexico - the problem there is poverty and the ignored masses allowing the criminal bosses to become in some respects the 'governments' of the areas within which they operate and the social welfare for the poorest in those areas. Mexico (governments) cannot win without having a great deal more conscience regarding its people and their immediate welfare needs - and that means a sea-change of wealth distribution and social justice and opportunities to become self-sufficient.

The "'logical, workable solution'" to the control of drugs is, some measure of intelligent and informed control. A simplistic 'free market', everything legalised arrangement would have tragic results.

There are no quick and easy answers and those who think that there are only show that they do not understand the true nature of the situation.

The same as tobacco and alcohol. What's difficult about that? Education in moderation and eradication. It's about the 'governments' taking control with a more 'modern' outlook as opposed to a 19th century outlook. It wouldn't be a free-for-all but it wouldn't be prohibition either. Again I come to the reasons we haven't done anything constructive before and it's about religious moralities rather than common-sense rationalities.

It's not quite clear how religious moralities are responsible for the rise of the international drug cartels.

Not the cartels. The policing -. If you want to get rid of most drugs you must first attack the cause. Market forces. Affluent people with nothing else better to do. Desperately poor people who have no other method of a decent survival. Middlemen who will use any method to become rich and powerful. Suckers and ignorant who want kicks or oblivion.

Feed and look after the poor. Tax and control exorbitant profits. Provide the goods through legal manufacture and distribution. Educate from birth through every medium possible. Put the onus on the individual for his own outcomes. And fund it from the savings by stopping using my money on 100 years of fruitless, idiotic, lethal and unsuccessful war games on drugs.

Back to air quality with a huge fire at a recycling centre in Liverpool, sending up a massive plume of probably toxic smoke.
http://www.wirralglobe.co.uk/news/14817985.Firefighters_battle_blaze_at_Liverpool_docks/
The number of fires at recycling centres is - too many, too frequent and too toxic. They are supposed to help the environment not trash it.

http://www.ifsecglobal.com/recycling-centre-fires-causing-huge-health-risk/

We all have to breathe the air, whatever is going on with all these recycling centre fires is everybody's problem.

Liverpool recycling fire now in it's third day, burning plastic.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-37744150
Could go on for a few days.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-37744150

What price incinerators now?

It's a losing battle yet again. We are already exceeding dangerous levels of Co2 and half the world has yet to become industrialized so what our puny recycling efforts are going to do is laughable. The only one's making money from this are governments and the elite - so surprise, surprise as nothing changes.

Polluting the air we breathe with burning plastics and other recycled materials is something that needs to change. It isn't something theoretical or far away, all that crap of chemical smoke is taking years off people's lives with cancer etctera.

Making massive piles of toxic combustible recycled materials and not expecting them to be set on fire one way of the other is criminal incompetence.

No. It's the law that is inadequate to deal with the situation. People will always take advantage and use the law to enhance their own situation. It's not illegal nor incompetent. It's certainly immoral. But who is going to care? if the storage of the items in question is covered by any laws and those are being broken then it's the job of the Environmental Health and should be reported to them for appropriate action to be taken.