Global war on drugs 'has failed'

[Gawdzilla Sama]

See?

right on que. I wonder, does predictability come with senility? Seems like it.

Evidently it has set in at 14 for you.

[Eriku]

I'm looking forward to buying some legal weed.

This, in the near future, would be ideal... Especially with Holland insisting on only Dutch people being able to buy from Coffeeshops, and having to register beforehand.

[Ian]

I'm looking forward to buying some legal weed.

This, in the near future, would be ideal... Especially with Holland insisting on only Dutch people being able to buy from Coffeeshops, and having to register beforehand.

Holland could very well wreck their own tourist industry with such laws.

[sandinista]

See?

right on que. I wonder, does predictability come with senility? Seems like it.

Evidently it has set in at 14 for you.

[Robert_S]

I heard on the radio that Obama called the study "misguided". He needs to stop being such a whore.

[sandinista]

I heard on the radio that Obama called the study "misguided". He needs to stop being such a whore.

what else would you expect from a US president. Same old same old.

[Cunt]

Didn't Portugal begin setting a good example a few years ago? How have they been doing with their experiment?

[Eriku]

In the face of a growing number of deaths and cases of HIV linked to drug abuse, the Portuguese government in 2001 tried a new tack to get a handle on the problem—it decriminalized the use and possession of heroin, cocaine, marijuana, LSD and other illicit street drugs. The theory: focusing on treatment and prevention instead of jailing users would decrease the number of deaths and infections.

Five years later, the number of deaths from street drug overdoses dropped from around 400 to 290 annually, and the number of new HIV cases caused by using dirty needles to inject heroin, cocaine and other illegal substances plummeted from nearly 1,400 in 2000 to about 400 in 2006, according to a report released recently by the Cato Institute, a Washington, D.C, libertarian think tank.

"Now instead of being put into prison, addicts are going to treatment centers and they're learning how to control their drug usage or getting off drugs entirely," report author Glenn Greenwald, a former New York State constitutional litigator, said during a press briefing at Cato last week.

Under the Portuguese plan, penalties for people caught dealing and trafficking drugs are unchanged; dealers are still jailed and subjected to fines depending on the crime. But people caught using or possessing small amounts—defined as the amount needed for 10 days of personal use—are brought before what's known as a "Dissuasion Commission," an administrative body created by the 2001 law.

Each three-person commission includes at least one lawyer or judge and one health care or social services worker. The panel has the option of recommending treatment, a small fine, or no sanction.

Peter Reuter, a criminologist at the University of Maryland, College Park, says he's skeptical decriminalization was the sole reason drug use slid in Portugal, noting that another factor, especially among teens, was a global decline in marijuana use. By the same token, he notes that critics were wrong in their warnings that decriminalizing drugs would make Lisbon a drug mecca.

"Drug decriminalization did reach its primary goal in Portugal," of reducing the health consequences of drug use, he says, "and did not lead to Lisbon becoming a drug tourist destination."

Walter Kemp, a spokesperson for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, says decriminalization in Portugal "appears to be working." He adds that his office is putting more emphasis on improving health outcomes, such as reducing needle-borne infections, but that it does not explicitly support decriminalization, "because it smacks of legalization."

Drug legalization removes all criminal penalties for producing, selling and using drugs; no country has tried it. In contrast, decriminalization, as practiced in Portugal, eliminates jail time for drug users but maintains criminal penalties for dealers. Spain and Italy have also decriminalized personal use of drugs and Mexico's president has proposed doing the same. .

A spokesperson for the White House's Office of National Drug Control Policy declined to comment, citing the pending Senate confirmation of the office's new director, former Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the U.S. Department of State's Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs also declined to comment on the report.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... nalization

Thought I'd go with what we'd all consider a decent source... but there are plenty of other illuminating articles out there with regards to Portugal's experiment.

Still people up here in Norway will go "oh, well us with our binge culture will surely fall into a horrendous decline, whereas the continentals are far more level-headed in their approach to substance usage of all kinds".

The police chief came out and said it was madness and stated that the panel who reached this decision, including the father of our prime minister, notably also the father of a former heroin-addicted daughter, obviously knows nothing about how best to approach the drug problem. The rest of the article was full of "I reckon"s and "I think"s that sounded all too familiar, and which have yielded the lovely results that we have in Norway... Oslo being the heroin overdose capital of Europe and all.

A report from the Council of Europe's narcotics-monitoring Pompidou Group says Oslo is first among 42 European cities in seizures and deaths caused by drugs. Oslo had 115 such deaths last year, down from a peak of 134 in 1998, but still the highest of the group. In Norway as a whole, the toll is rising, with 338 deaths in 2001, up from 75 in 1990.

Towing the American propaganda line has been supremely helpful... I recall when Gordon Brown first came into office he commissioned a report on cannabis, so that he'd have something to toughen the stance with... The Norwegian papers found what they needed to make the glorious headline: "CANNABIS INCREASES CHANCES OF SCHIZOPHRENIA BY 40 PER CENT!!!!!!!"... Neglecting to point out to the not-so-scientifically-literate readers that that's different from 40 per centage points, in that it means an increase on the 1 per cent, making the new figure 1,4 per cent, rather than 41 per cent.

People are dying and living a life that's not even preferable to a premature death, and politicians and papers are more concerned with scoring cheap points. Shameful.

[sandinista]

Towing the American propaganda line has been supremely helpful...

People are dying and living a life that's not even preferable to a premature death, and politicians and papers are more concerned with scoring cheap points. Shameful.

Oh, be careful Eriku, Ian's going to pop up and call you a bigot for criticizing freedomland.

[Robert_S]

Towing the American propaganda line has been supremely helpful...

People are dying and living a life that's not even preferable to a premature death, and politicians and papers are more concerned with scoring cheap points. Shameful.

Oh, be careful Eriku, Ian's going to pop up and call you a bigot for criticizing freedomland.

Politicians are politicians as far as I can tell. If you discount the products of Texas, I think ours are pretty much like the rest of the world's.

[Santa_Claus]

Be interesting to see if the Euro countries that are going broke decided they simply can't afford the US "solution" to drugs.

I personally don't see the answer as straight legalisation (otherwise we create "Big Tobacco"), but simply medicalising the addicts - which means free Heroin (accept no substitutes!) on prescription (how dispensed is simply a matter of practicalities). Most addicts will be happy enough to give up a criminal lifestyle - from laziness if nothing else. Everything else can stay illegal, but doesn't mean we have to bust a gut catching folks, the party drugs are not really a problem for society and for the individuals who can't cope with them - all roads lead to Heroin anyway, just giving them a nudge.

My guess is that number of folks dying overall will be much the same - just will include different folks.

[JimC]

If you can grow it, it should be legal...

[Atheist-Lite]

If you can grow it, it should be legal...

I say hang the pushers and deter with zero tolerance. Drugs ruin lives.

[sandinista]

Towing the American propaganda line has been supremely helpful...

People are dying and living a life that's not even preferable to a premature death, and politicians and papers are more concerned with scoring cheap points. Shameful.

Oh, be careful Eriku, Ian's going to pop up and call you a bigot for criticizing freedomland.

Politicians are politicians as far as I can tell. If you discount the products of Texas, I think ours are pretty much like the rest of the world's.

True enough for the most part, only not so many politicians have the cash and military to influence other countries policies as much as the US.

[Eriku]

Towing the American propaganda line has been supremely helpful...

People are dying and living a life that's not even preferable to a premature death, and politicians and papers are more concerned with scoring cheap points. Shameful.

Oh, be careful Eriku, Ian's going to pop up and call you a bigot for criticizing freedomland.

Heh. He can go right ahead, we know why marijuana was criminalised and we know how Anslinger swayed the masses. As far as your right to ingest whatever you want into your own body goes, the US is nowhere near freedomland... nor is most of the rest of the world.

Politicians are politicians as far as I can tell. If you discount the products of Texas, I think ours are pretty much like the rest of the world's.

To a certain extent, sure... if you discount that what's considered right wing in Norway is still fairly leftist by American definitions... And keeping that in mind I feel that your statement doesn't really work.

My point is that the brunt of anti-drug propaganda stems from the US, with its gateway theories, notions of the brain getting fried like an egg, that something like smoking marijuana can out of the blue CAUSE (note the choice of words, cause, not just work in conjunction with a 90 per cent chance of schizophrenia) a loss of your sanity, etc, and Norway's been one of the better disciples in spreading misinformation.

If that 40% increase in chances of schizophrenia headline didn't seem like horrendous opportunism on the part of the media, then what about this one: a few years ago there was a headline stating "is 2 grams of hash worth dying for?" What was the story behind that? Two teenage girls were fixin' to get stoned one night, and they needed a driver to go pick up the stuff. The car crashed en route, costing them their lives... The driver was influenced by alcohol and pills, but the headline laid everything squarely at the doorstep of cannabis. How the fuck does that get into one of the three biggest national newspapers in Norway? Fuck if I know.

What I do know is that it reflects a reckless disregard for the truth, and a shocking loyalty to an agenda... An agenda that's demonstrably detrimental to millions around the world.

Disgraceful.