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Mexico Decriminalizes Small-Scale Drug Possession
Professor_Quail notes an AP story that begins, "Mexico enacted a controversial law Thursday decriminalizing possession of small amounts of marijuana, cocaine, heroin and other drugs while encouraging free government treatment for drug dependency. The law sets out maximum 'personal use' amounts for drugs, also including LSD and methamphetamine. People detained with those quantities will no longer face criminal prosecution when the law goes into effect Friday." An official in the attorney general's office said, "This is not legalization, this is regulating the issue and giving citizens greater legal certainty... for a practice that was already in place." In 2006, the US criticized a similar bill that had no provisions for mandatory treatment, and the then-president sent it back to Congress for reconsideration.
With some positive results. Drug dealers still go to jail, but addicts go to treatment centers. Their main goal was to reduce deaths due to overdose which, five years later dropped as well as users infected by dirty needles. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=portugal-drug-decriminalization
As a fellow nerd I have to tell you that some critical parts of our computer technology these days was built with the help of these 'drugs', or more clearly psychedelics and more precisely LSD. See: http://open.salon.com/blog/hal_m/2009/07/09/lsd_inventor_hofmanns_letter_to_steve_jobs and http://heroux.blogspot.com/2006/03/this-is-your-computer-on-lsd.html for a couple of good starting points for you too look at.
What I hear from it's a great way to boost you way of analytic, mathematical and engineering way of thinking. Now, I'm not saying we should promote use of any of these substances, but I'm saying we should aknowledge them and use them in a controlled way for the benefit of human kind. Psychedelics can unlock huge potentials in human beings, why are we denying this still ? The native people of different regions of the world have known this for centuries. Too bad we are still being led by medical companies and other huge colloborations of humans who like their materialistic ways of lifes too much to really let the human race take off.
GeoKone.NET
Except that most of the profits (thought to be more than 75%) that the drug cartels make are not from narcotics, but from cannabis.
Do you have sources and stats for this? I'm seriously interested, because it's the first time I've heard that these same cartels are responsible.
From where I come from (albeit from personal experience) the majority of weed in circulation seems to come from 2 groups. Personal connosieurs that have decided that they may as well grow an entire basement full, and turn a dollar or two, if they're gonna go to the lengths of setting up a small grow room to perfect the grow, which can get pretty expensive when done right. A small subset of these people are those that carry stuff back from Canada and Europe. Then there are the Mexicans, who apparently have some larger scale farms, with lower quality dope, but mostly within the U.S., just secluded from settlements, and hopefully from choppers and planes looking for them.
So this is the first time that I've heard anyone say that the "cartels" (I'm assuming Mexican) make 75% of their profit from weed sold in the U.S. If this really is true, and has sources that are more than just someone's day dream, I'm interested in learning. It gives all the more power to the legalization argument.
The firepower the cartels wield is not smuggled in from the US. 87% of the firearms Mexico asks the ATF to locate, are traced to the US -- but they only request that sort of thing on a small percent of the firearms they seize, 10%-ish I believe. Basically, they only request it when they have reason to believe the guns came from the US.
The M16s? The grenades? Those aren't being smuggled across the border unless the government is doing it. They're not, incidentally, most those sorts of things are sold to the cartels from the Mexican army (yay for corruption!). AKs and other soviet weaponry obviously is a lot easier to find on black markets, and that's not smuggled from the US either.
When you're making the kind of money the cartels were, you're not going out and buying semi-autos or hunting rifles, you're buying military hardware. And you don't buy that sort of thing in the US.
Other than that, though, yep. Clearly has something to do with the violence that's been going on down there, whether or not it works I think depends on how splintered the cartels actually are. Honestly would not be surprised if only certain cartels were targetted -- it's happened before, but I believe that involved police and not the mexican miltary.
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
I believe that Switzerland has heroin injection sites. People with existing addictions can buy a dose of heroin at a reduced price and have it injected by a nurse. The clinics sell heroin on a sliding scale to eliminate the need to steal to pay for drugs. Because getting drugs from the government is cheaper and safer than on the street, drug dealers don't sell heroin.
In this situation, heroin is easier for addicts to get, but harder for new users to get. Because heroin users don't have to hide from the government, they are less afraid to seek treatment. The injection centers even offer referrals to treatment programs. I believe that overall heroin use is down since the program started.
If people were less uptight about drugs, we could do the same thing here. Unfortunately, a program to give free heroin to addicts wouldn't pass here. It doesn't matter that keeping addicts from robbing citizens to pay for their addictions is better for everyone.
In Switzerland, they've been experimenting with providing the most severely addicted heroin users with legal doses of the drug, in small amounts. Enough to keep the withdrawal at bay, no more. They say they've had some success, and also claim the system has deglorified heroin, making it mostly an old junkies' drug, unappealing to young people. Not much cool factor in waiting in line at some state agency for your daily shot.
bolsters the notion that keeping 1 in 25 Americans in prison
That's 1 in 100 adults, or about 1 in 130 Americans. Not that this is a good number, but it's not nearly so high as 1 in 25.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
>Not all "soft" drug users are addicts, but pretty much anyone doing anything but marijuana are addicts as most recreational drugs are almost as addictive as nicotine.
No, not really. Most drug users, even heroin users, are casual users. For every tweeked out meth head, there are 10 people that just use it occasionally. I know quite a few people who have used all sorts of drugs without ever developing a problem. Quoting the linked article:
"A 1976 study by the drug researchers Leon G. Hunt and Carl D. Chambers estimated there were 3 or 4 million heroin users in the United States, perhaps 10 percent of them addicts. "Of all active heroin users," Hunt and Chambers wrote, "a large majority are not addicts: they are not physically or socially dysfunctional; they are not daily users and they do not seem to require treatment." A 1994 study based on data from the National Comorbidity Survey estimated that 23 percent of heroin users ever experience substance dependence.
The comparable rate for alcohol in that study was 15 percent, which seems to support the idea that heroin is more addictive: A larger percentage of the people who try it become heavy users, even though it's harder to get. At the same time, the fact that using heroin is illegal, expensive, risky, inconvenient, and almost universally condemned means that the people who nevertheless choose to do it repeatedly will tend to differ from people who choose to drink. They will be especially attracted to heroin's effects, the associated lifestyle, or both. In other words, heroin users are a self-selected group, less representative of the general population than alcohol users are, and they may be more inclined from the outset to form strong attachments to the drug."
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!