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"We called on governments to adopt more humane and effective ways of controlling and regulating drugs. We recommended that the criminalization of drug use shoul
by tokenadult 13y ago
"We called on governments to adopt more humane and effective ways of controlling and regulating drugs. We recommended that the criminalization of drug use should be replaced by a public health approach." So the request here is not to say that everyone should use drugs however they wish without regulation, but rather that use of certain drugs should no longer be subject to criminal penalties. A few years ago, Richard Branson's blog post on drug regulation[1] similarly pointed to reducing criminal penalties without saying that drugs should be entirely unregulated, by looking at the example of Portugal. (How is Portugal doing these days?)
The state I live in in the United States, Minnesota, has a low rate of incarceration in large part because it has a low rate of criminal prosecution of drug offenses, with even the small number of persons convicted of drug offenses being unlikely to do time in prison. But this state has a thriving private industry of drug treatment centers, drawing in people from all over the world who want to become clean, and responses to drug use often include judicially ordered drug treatment. Stopping a war on drugs waged by the police and courts and prisons doesn't have to include giving up on discouraging drug use.
[1] http://www.virgin.com/richard-branson/time-to-end-the-war-on-drugs http://www.virgin.com/richard-branson/time-to-end-the-war-on...
AFTER EDIT: I'll use the last bit of my edit window to post two more links to news reports about the experience of Portugal. These links are in chronological order, and newer than Richard Branson's blog post.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/evaluating-drug-decriminalization-in-portugal-12-years-later-a-891060.html http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/evaluating-drug-d...
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-05-01/news/ct-met-portugal-drugs-20130502_1_treatment-facility-portugal-drug-policy http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-05-01/news/ct-met-po...
- ryanatkn 13y ago"Ten Years After Decriminalization, Drug Abuse Down by Half in Portugal" http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2011/07/05/ten-years-after-decriminalization-drug-abuse-down-by-half-in-portugal/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2011/07/05/ten-years-af...
- mgkimsal 13y ago"Stopping a war on drugs waged by the police and courts and prisons doesn't have to include giving up on discouraging drug use." There's big business in prisons and law enforcement. There's also big business in rehab and pharma. Getting the monied interests to shift their focus from one of incarceration to one of health shouldn't be this hard. We just need to shift dollars from one big industry to another. Perhaps pharma and health companies need bigger lobbying efforts?
- rayiner 13y agoMan the "money" argument for the drug war is so stupid. Private prisons are a small minority of prisons even today, and were very uncommon in the 1980s and 1990s when the drug war really heated up. Blaming monied interests is a cop out here. They are just the opportunists. Its "just say no!" moms and dads, teachers and school officials, that keep the drug war alive.
- criley2 13y agoPrivate prisons are a small minority. However, we do pay an ENORMOUS AMOUNT of money to support our INSANE prison population, and a lot of that money does indeed go to private hands through contracting. The money argument is not stupid. It's big business, even in public prisons.
- nostromo 13y agoDo you know that you can place emphasis on a word on HN by surrounding it in *?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- crusso 13y agoTo be fair it's a complete puritan/authoritarian culture thing. Most of the media avoids tackling the issue as well. If it wouldn't be for John Stossel's show, I doubt that there would be any news program talking about the positive outcome of Portugal and the negative aspects of the drug war itself.
- adventured 13y agoAnd it perfectly matches up with the numerous other authoritarian aspects of American culture that have arisen over the last few decades. - Criminalizing anything and everything they can - SWAT teams abusing and murdering at will, serving warrants with extreme violence - militarization of police forces - the espionage state, from the NSA to the FBI - destruction of justice, through techniques such as parallel construction - the treatment of all individuals as potential terrorists - the spread of the TSA and DHS throughout American society, whether it's needed or not, including trial runs of setting up checkpoints on interstates and at sporting events - military projection by the federal government, war and bombings without any authorization by Congress - droning, the murder of civilians anywhere and at any time just based on supposedly trying to kill terrorists - trial balloons for arresting people based on free speech issues, eg saying something on Facebook - using the espionage act, among other laws, to prosecute leakers and journalists; and or otherwise intimidate journalists, including with illegal spying (tapping the phones of the AP / Fox) and on and on it goes
- spikels 13y agoGlen Greenwald wrote a nice piece on drug decriminalization In Portugal back in 2009. http://www.cato.org/publications/white-paper/drug-decriminalization-portugal-lessons-creating-fair-successful-drug-policies http://www.cato.org/publications/white-paper/drug-decriminal...