Advertising for commercial products is much easier because almost all the advertising is directly paid for by the company that produces or sells the product in question.

What I was obliquely referring to is the fact that the US courts have taken a very expansive view of the free-speech rights of corporate entities (at the same time they’re busy restricting the rest of us). I don’t know for sure that this applies to commercial advertising, it might only be political advertising, but my impression is that it’s quite difficult to get anti-advertising rules to actually stick. (this might be due to “campaign contributions” and not the courts, though)

I wasn’t suggesting that the products would be “sold wildly” as soon as they were unbanned (by which I guess you mean sold without regulation). We have lots of restricted pharmaceuticals here — and many of them are advertised on television and elsewhere in order to convince as many people as possible to start using the drug. The ads have to meet certain requirements to be legal, but it hasn’t stopped them from making medically inaccurate (explicit or implicit) claims and attracting many buyers whose need for the drug is questionable. (this is all AIUI from second-hand information, I don’t get cable TV and I’m not a doctor!)

It may be, though, that in .au you can still expect the government to occasionally regulate corporations effectively on your behalf (especially with your new government — congratulations). If so, I could see this working out.

One possibility is that Heroin could be sold to registered addicts for a nominal fee (low enough that there is no possibility for a black market) and administered at government owned hospitals by nurses (who incidentally administer very similar chemicals to patients who suffer severe pain). Then no-one would benefit from advertising.

I agree that there should be greater controls on alcohol and tobacco advertising. I also think that there should be controls on sugar advertising (products which contain sugar as the main ingredient are routinely marketted as health-foods for children).

I’ve only twice in my life been approached by someone trying to sell me illegal drugs. I see ads for legal (and likely more dangerous) drugs on a daily basis. Even if we assume that kids tend to tune out advertisements and are attracted to the illicit dealers, that’s still a huge number of advertisements for them to ignore.

I suppose you could try to regulate advertisement at the same time you deregulate drugs, but I don’t know if the courts would allow that in this country (Australia may be a different matter here).

I agree that raising the salary doesn’t help on it’s own. Raising the salary while reducing the class sizes will get more good people to become teachers.

Good point about making them look stupid. Maybe they should provide free drugs to “big brother”… ;)

Alcohol is not a somewhat addictive drug. Deprivation syndrome (or however it’s called in English) is stronger for alcohol than for many of the illegal drugs. Quitting marihuana will not get you killed, while quitting alcohol can (assuming a heavy consumer of each).

Raising teachers salaries will not improve education. Raising the competitiveness will, though (better teachers will get better salaries, which in turn makes more people be teachers).

Making drugs legal will have another positive side-effect: elimination of black market and cartels (and the associated loss of power for those maffias).

In my experience, the most effective way to avoid children and teenagers from consuming drugs (legal or illegal) is to make them (drugs) look stupid, not bad/dangerous. Nobody wants to be stupid, although several will want to be “bad” or “brave” for consuming them.