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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.
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.
Canada already turns a blind eye to small time Pot. (Check out the documentary The Union)
USA has the highest rate of incarcerated people per capita of any country other than possibly China. (who doesn't release stats like that)
I can come home and destroy my liver after a long day at work, but I can't sit down and enjoy some THC?
The war on drugs is over. Everybody lost.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
At this point and time Marc is going to jail.
This is rather absurd, isn't it? The world economy is in the shitter, the US debt out of control, violent crime rises as does unemployment... yet these moronic, relentless conservatives in the Justice Dept. somehow believe they deserve a pat on the back for spending ?millions battling Canada for extradition of a single man that sold... seed. And our taxes will be paying to board him for a few years.
I'd like to ask these idiots: "in what way has the pursuit of prosecution of Marc Emory NOT hurt America?"
The Admin and the Engineer
It's time for SANE drug laws. No Jail For Pot
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Why ban it when you just have to stop using it? If you are worried about others then in reality you have to accept there is really fuck all you can do about it. Get rid of booze and people will make it in their bathtubs, get rid of pot or coke and they will grow it in their backyards. You have to realize what part you really play in your community and realize in the grand scheme of things you only have yourself. So if you find yourself innondated by people who don't see yor side of the coin lobby to have them kicked out or leave yourself.
That is all
A loop, by its nature, continues. If that didn't make sense, start reading this sentence again.
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.
Except that most of the profits (thought to be more than 75%) that the drug cartels make are not from narcotics, but from cannabis. The only real way to seriously cripple the Mexican drug cartels and minimize the violence is to completely legalize cannabis (better yet, all soft, nonaddictive drugs) in the United States (where the vast majority of their market is in), and let the legal, taxed, free market steal the cartels' business. After all, what stoner would want to buy crappy Mexican schwag from shady dealers when he can get high-quality product from the local coffeeshop, or just grow it in his back yard?
I have read a post some time ago detailing how legalizing some drugs can effectively stop criminality. I think it was mostly about cannabis. Think about it, drugs finance huge businesses:
- Gangs
- Terrorist cells, Al Kaida
- dictatorships such as North Korea (I read some days ago)
Imagine the huge effects that it would have if these would run out of money -> No new weapons -> Losing importance -> Dictatorships can be overthrown.
Maybe I am thinking too blue-eyed, but it is a lot of money. Stopping the money flow at the source could have global consequences. We tried stopping the drug users from using.
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
I'd go a step further and make hard drugs prescription drugs. Go to a doc, get a receipt telling you're addicted and get your dose in the next hospital. Sure that works easier with social healthcare, but according to Obama the US are gonna get that soon anyway, can as well append that to the deal.
Yes, a lot of addicts want to get out, but we don't have enough rehabiliation centers and drug withdrawal clinics, and since there's no money in that and it's not really something you can sell to your voters if you make it public funded ("why should I pay for their addiction"), we won't see many come into existance. So why not do the next best thing and at least hurt the ones that profit from it?
If you want to win the war against drugs, you first of all have to cut off the bigwig dealers from money. You can't fight against the addicts and trying to weed out the little dealers isn't going to work out either. Locking up addicts and small drug dealers only makes your prisons even more to places where drugs are dealt and pushed. And small dealers are easily replaced, for every small dealer locked up 10 are stepping up and hoping to move in on their turf. And of course you can't lock up the big dealers because they are almost untouchable, either not in your country or so far removed from the actual deals that you can't pin the drugs to them.
You want to win that war? Hit where it hurts, at the wallet of the bigshots. To do this, all you have to do is offer the addicts a cheap, reliable and clean alternative to the expensive, uncalculable and usually adulterated drugs they have to get in a shady back alley. What addict would not use your government issue drugs? Drugs aren't expensive to make. Especially if you can manufacture them in a wholesale fashion. They get expensive due to the risk associated with them and the amount of middlemen involved.
Cut their money supply. Bleed them dry. And you'll see that war is over before long. Instantly you will see a sharp drop in money related crimes because addicts no longer need huge amounts of money to supply themselves. At the same time a lot of the resources currently wasted on monitoring and fighting drug trafficking and dealing will be free to be used in other, more beneficial ways. In the end we might even have enough money to put more addicts that want out on withdrawal and give them a chance to find their way back into society.
The current 'war' will only lead to more crime, more people in prison and more money being wasted to fight those crimes and monitor those prisoners. How the hell does that help me, make me safer or protect me from drugs? Because so far, I can't see a shortage in any kind of drugs, even after decades of 'war'.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
This brings up a point that the self-proclaimed "drug warriors" don't like to think about: essentially every street drug is available to people IN PRISON. Read another way, it means that even if the entire country was run like a prison - there would still be a drug "problem". Just exactly how far are people willing to go to enforce these laws?
I agree with most of what you say. However you seem to be operating under the illusion that all drug users are addicts. This is simply untrue. In the same way that most people that drink alcohol aren't alcoholics most drug users aren't addicts.
A race is where people see it and racial divisions are certainly not a universal concept. Closer to a social construct if you ask me.
So we need to accept all of that "it means whatever you think it means" bullshit, merely because words like "race" and "ethnicity" and "nationality" and "religion" and the differences among them are too hard? Really?? How about we instead decide that if someone doesn't have a working understanding of what those terms mean, then perhaps that person is not qualified to speak about them. That's so much better than lowering the standards and this is one area that has a particularly low signal-to-noise ratio.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein