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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.
Now if only the USA would follow suit and end this madness.
Prohibition II may soon be over.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Ending prohibition of drugs would eliminate the underground market, would stop the funding of terrorist groups, would do MORE for treating drug addicts, and would save the billions currently spent annually on prohibition and incarceration of drug offenders. We need to treat drug use and drug abuse as a health issue, not a criminal issue. We need free choice for consenting adults, not a nanny-state solution imposed by the government.
Unless the drug trade is legalized, the gangs and drug cartels will always hold a monopoly on its sale. Decriminalizing minor possession does nothing but keep users on the street where they can continue to fund the gangs.
Mexico is in the middle of a huge drug war. The fighting is real and assassinations and kidnapping are frequent occurrences. This step seems to be a way of curbing the violence by letting users stay out of the prisons.
You aren't ever going to win the battle against weeds by cutting the leaves off. You need to pull the plant out by the root.
You still have to deal with disreputable dealers, drugs which are laced with filler or worse, and the dangerous pain in the ass that scoring drugs usually is.
Legalize selling small quantities of these drugs and we will all be alot better off.
Score a bag of pot if you don't believe me.
The problem will likely be that they won't legalize the sale. If they only allow enough for personal use, the traditional dealers are out, and if they don't let people get licenses to sell or let doctors prescribe it (what doctor would prescribe meth? coke maybe.. but meth?) then the point of allowing possesion is sort of like DVDs and DECSS. "Sure, you can make backup copies! But no, sorry, you can't sell the software that can make them."
The war on drugs is over. Everybody lost.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Why is this news for nerds? As a nerd I try to remain rational and therefor to absorb the world as clear as possible. Drugs just don't fit in.
I have tried marijuana a couple of times to fit in with the others and to experiment the sensation. Sure I had a few great laughs but the effects on the awareness are horrible and take long to completely get out of your system. I'd have a similar story for alcohol.
Although I sympathize with less zealous drugs policies because tougher ones do not solve the problem -which possibly isn't truly there- but just create more criminals, I cannot see why this is of relevance in a nerds forum.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
Calderon is a conservative politician who hates the drug business. He hates it so much that he actually unleashed the Mexican army against the drug cartel. Unfortunately for him, the cartel has tremendous firepower (smuggled from the United States) and fought the army in the streets. The army hurt the dominant cartels just enought to splinter them. Now, the splinters are fighting each other.
Calderon is probably rethinking whether he can actually win the drug war. This decriminalization may be the first sign that he is accepting the fact that narcotics is an integral part of Mexican culture.
there's enough problems with legal drugs like alcohol
Prohibition didn't work for alcohol and it clearly isn't working for drugs.
why do you people keep insisting the answer is MORE drugs?!?!
You must have "rocks in your head" if you think that making drugs illegal stops people from using them.
Legalization would reduce the price of drugs and reduce crime. It would allow maintenance and treatment. And it would probably not increase drug usage any more; anybody who wants to use drugs is already using.
It's time for SANE drug laws. No Jail For Pot
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I don't know why I bother replying, but...
First, "Drug cartels" is not a monopoly. There are more than one.
Second, look at the tobacco industry. Tobacco has always been legal, but people who profit from human suffering at that scale have always been, and will always be, scum. Sure, legal drug cartels might finance fewer gangs, but they'd finance more lobbyists instead.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
I usually roll with the slashdot crowd on liberty issues but not here. There's a reason medicine is locked up in pharmacies behind a prescription. People are stupid; very stupid.
Generally speaking, I agree with you -- heroine is a much more dangerous drug than, say, marijuana, and it should be kept out of peoples' hands to the extent possible.
The tough question, however, is how do we go about doing that? The current method -- making heroine illegal to sell or possess -- had had limited success, to put it diplomatically. Heroine junkies can still get heroine whenever they want it and can pay for it; their only problem is raising the cash to pay for their addiction, which is often done through petty crime.
So making heroine illegal has made heroin expensive, and thereby encourages heroine junkies to become criminal heroine junkies. Not exactly the result we wanted. (It may have kept some unknown other number of people from trying heroine in the first place -- but it's impossible to know how many. Personally I would imagine that heroine's reputation is a more effective deterrent than law enforcement in that regard, but that's just a guess)
I don't have a solution to the problem; I wish I did.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
I've been to Mexico. You need to tackle corruption first, then worry about drugs.
I'm not sure I get how this will automatically reduce violent drug crime. Who is going to provide these small amounts of drugs? Take pot, for example. It's still illegal to grow pot. It's still illegal to distribute pot. It's still illegal to possess more than a few joints. You won't be picking up your joints at the pharmacy, so where are you going to get them? The only thing that has changed, is that law enforcement is being told to leave casual end users alone, and to instead focus their attention on the producers and distributors. This isn't really "legalization", this is just a shift in priorities. Violent drug crime in Mexico won't decrease, and we'll subsequently see Mexico bandied about as an example of the fact that drug legalization doesn't work, when in fact no real legalization has actually taken place.
Decriminalisation is no substitute for legalisation. In fact, in my view, it is actually worse than putting resources into enforcing the law, both from the perspective of society and from the perspective of drug law reform.
Instead of creating a legal industry of suppliers, decriminalisation keeps all supply in the black market. For gangsters, decriminalisation is a license to grow money, because users won't be harassed by the police. All of the problems of the black market continue to exist and get worse. This means more crime.
In turn, this means that prohibitionists* can point to "failed decriminalisation experiments" as evidence that drugs should not be legalised. I have heard Alaska, the Netherlands and Portugal used in exactly this way; if the drugs had been fully legalised, the prohibitionists might not be able to point to increases of certain social problems, objections of local people, etc. Far from being a stepping stone towards legalisation, decriminalisation is a step backwards.
* I am not one of these people.
The tao of democracy: the government you can vote for is not the real government.
This will increase demand, while not allowing legal supply to increase. It WILL be filled by gangs.
Probably... BUT...
It will reduce the number of cases police and the courts have to deal with, reduce the load on the jails, and reduce the corruption among the police (when it is no longer a crime to posses a small personal quantity, drug user can't be blackmailed by a corrupt police officer when it is found on him/her).
In short... this will create a better police force and also provide better crime statistics.
It is a small step, but a step in the right direction.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Here's something that amazes me about the war on drugs. The USA learnt the hard way that prohibition couldn't work. Yet even after learning their lesson they still tried the same fucking thing over again. It's been a continuous failure for decades, but it's still going on. "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it", but everyone remembers the prohibition. Everyone knows who Al Capone is, and everyone knows who Manuel Noriega or Pablo Escobar are, yet we fail to draw the parallels.
Well the problem is that in order to do the necessary changes you need the public opinion to back you strongly, and an administration with the political capital to make that happen. So it's no wonder it didn't happen before when political campaigns made the war on drug seem like a desirable thing, but for all we know the American public opinion may be soon ready for that to happen.
You just got troll'd!
I live in Mexico, and this will be just another excuse for cops avoid to do their work and let people sell drugs on streets, as it happens now.
You are right. Get the drug sellers off the streets and put them behind counters. Make the cops do their jobs enforcing regulations, not prohibitions. This is the road to drug peace.
It's easy for you say "bring me the drugs", you don't fear everyday to end in middle of a gun shooting for drug wars.
When have you feared being shot by alcohol, tobacco, or caffeine cartels? Those drugs are well regulated and made by a peaceful industry. Shouldn't we use that as a model for dealing with other drugs?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The legality of something never prevents people from partaking in it.
Honestly, if the reason you avoid doing something is because it's forbidden / you don't want to be caught, you've got some maturing to do.
I'd love to link to the Wikipedia article, but essentially, children display a few levels of maturity:
#1 - They don't do something because they'll be punished
#2 - They don't do something because they're told they shouldn't
#3 - They don't do something because they believe it is wrong.
Honestly, without being judgemental, it sounds like you're still on the first step, which is both a little scary and sad.