Slashdot Mirror
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.
How to build and support a R.A.I.D. (redundant array of independent (drug) dealers).
Now dealers will have backups and if one gets taken down, don't worry! There's another one that can be brought 'online' to do his workload. And it's all legal since they each only deal in small amounts!
Just remember: RAID != BACKUP!!
Well considering the smallest amount normally sold in North America is on average 100mg, (0.1g), does this mean all meth users are going to be criminals regardless?
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
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."
Legalization is necessary; our society simply can't keep paying for prosecuting and incarcerating non-violent drug users, or the criminal activity resulting from the drug trade. However, full legalization is going to be tough: both drug dealers and drug enforcement agencies (including the UN) have a strong financial interest in keeping drugs illegal. And the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs makes it hard for any single nation to change the status quo. That's one of the reasons why it's been hard for any nation to legalize drugs.
The war on drugs is over. Everybody lost.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Total decriminalization of drugs has been tried in Portugal since 2001, and by all accounts has been a raging success by just about any metric you care to use. I'm happy to see other countries jumping on board the clue train, not that I expect to see something similar in the US for the foreseeable future.
For more on the Portuguese experience, see: http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/03/14/portugal/
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.
Back in the 70s, Dexedrine was prescribed for weight control. A chubby GF was an asset. Usual dose was 10 mg per day and Valium was the come down drug if you overdid the Dexedrine.
Both were easily obtained, legally.
Ok, all of yours like to legalize drugs. You see this law with the light of US law enforcement, where things are always "perfect". 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. This only will encourage drug groups for sell more and more drugs always under the "dangerous size" and with time to not fear cops or any law enforcement groups . Like happens in Tijuana, Nuevo Laredo, Monterrey and the rest of the country.
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. Or a stoned dude does a silly thing like jump in the subway or harm you for money for get the "personal share" of drugs. You live so far of those troubles and of course is easy to say that, so you need drugs to "spark" your mediocre lifes. Bunch of hypocrites.
I'll surprised if this won't be cut off of the site. :P
It's time for SANE drug laws. No Jail For Pot
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
For another interesting datapoint, MDMA (aka ecstasy) is FDA approved for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
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.
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
AP piece says 0.015 mg of LSD, or 15 ug, a ineffective dose of LSD. 60-100 ug is common for street doses. Perhaps the AP misread the law and its 150 ug, a more realistic number compared to the other amounts.
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.
Before you outright state its a bad idea you might want to read about how it was before it was illegal.
I was going to point out a spelling error in multiple posts in this thread, but instead I'm going to choose to consider it spelled correctly, and read the entire thread as if it were talking about a female hero.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
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.
Both THC and psylocibin are known to NOT cause addiction. Also, users of these drugs do NOT show aggressive behavior (unlike with other drugs, especially alcohol (yep, that's right, that's one of the worst)). In light of this, I think it's high time to completely legalize the production, sale and consumption of these drugs. If that happened, I would expect that the consumption of the "harder" drugs would decrease as well, for two reasons:
1) Some people won't need the harder drugs, if they can access these other two aplenty.
2) By legalizing these drugs, of which marijuana is a very popular one, we reduce the contact between users and illegal dealers, who have a vested interest in encouraging the use of harder drugs such as cocaine, heroine etc.
I was quite depressed a couple of years ago, and the psychiatrist wanted to prescribe me an anti-depressant. Instead of using the prescription, I decided to educate myself on anti-depressants, and what I found was, well, depressing: not a single anti-depressant on sale is safe to use. They all have side effects that are either nasty or very nasty. But psylocibin and THC are both excellent anti-depressants (practically the most effective ones), and have NO side effects. This is when I started to become a supporter of legalization of these drugs.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Summer -> Autumn -> Winter -> Spring ?
profit!
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.
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.
In the early part of the 20th Century, you could not corner the market for pain relief. People had access to opiates and cannabis and coca products, which were cheap, natural, and if you weren't an addict, perfectly effective.
Since the prohibition of these drugs, there has been a network of businesses that have profited immensely. Pharmaceuticals, who effectively eliminated competition, profited early on. They get to sell pain relief with products which are still derived from the same natural source, but have the benefits of being riddled with horrible side effects and hundreds of times more expensive for the consumer.
Then the CIA discovered a fantastic way to fund their unconstitutional undercover operations. They could use the US military to transport the drugs they bought for peanuts in Columbia to fund all kinds of insane bullshit around the world, and they wouldn't have to consult any committee because they didn't need their money.
Now, private prisons are all over the country, and all of the sudden we have the highest per capita incarceration rate in the known world. (We also have the highest per capita health care cost in the world. Get the picture?) Prison guard unions, manufacturers of certain products, and I'll bet even commercial building lobbyists make damn sure the politicians deliver on promises to "clean up the streets," which is code for throw undesirably poor people in jail. Of course, we do need somewhere to throw our mentally ill citizens, why not mix in the schizophrenics with non-violent drug offenders and murderers and rapists and white collar criminals and see what happens?
So, the winners in the drug war are huge corporations that make a profit when someone is punished, when someone needs pain relief, and also the unconstitutional CIA.
As Plato said, "The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men."
No I won't advertise it. That's Peter Tosh's job http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhTf2C2N5OU
Look I think its great that Mexico will prioritize sending drug addicts to rehab instead of prison. However I don't think that's the real problem at all. The real problem is that drugs are illegal, and criminals with guns make tons of money. Drug abuse is made unnecessarily more unsafe due to lack of regulation (people often die from bad heroin or heroin that is too pure from what is commonly on the street). But the problem affects EVERYONE not just users.
Take California for instance. I was reading about marijuana grow shacks set up in California off-grid using diesel generators to power the grow-lights. (The marijuana was grown in a shack to conceal it from police-airplanes) and someone was just setting these probably very profitable grow shacks all over the place to run themselves and going back to collect the product. The unscrupulous farmers were sloppy and the diesel fuel ended up contaminating nearby waterways. This kind of thing could simply be avoided. Farmers do grow tobacco and tomatoes under the sun on the farms that they live on, and if it is legalized, taxed and sold in stores, production can be regulated.
Also do we really want a world where the most powerful people are drug-dealing crime lords? Drug *illegalization* encourages corruption. Police in Mexico and the USA are routinely bought by big dealers. Who knows how high up the political chain the drug money goes? They say there is more cocaine on bills in Washington, DC than in any other place in the USA. Perhaps coke-addicted politicians are made to do favors to crime lords to get their fix?
I'm not really in favor of drugs. Do Phillip-Morris and Anheuser-Busch bring a net benefit on society? I am sure there are some unknown things about legalization of drugs that would be downright scary. However the known dangers of illegalization are worse than any possible danger I can imagine. These dangers mostly affect non-drug users (shootings, political corruption, increased crime). Good step Mexico, but it's a baby step. Perhaps we can lead the way for our southern brothers and sisters by ending Prohibition in the USA.
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
"Hell, everything's legal in Mexico. It's the American way."
- Uncle Jimbo, South Park
http://www.quoteaddict.com/
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 don't use drugs because they are illegal. My employer could terminate my employment, I could be jailed, etc. If drugs were legalized, then there would be no barrier (however artificial) for me to start using drugs. Maybe I enjoy it and starts affecting my productivity, my way of life, I become addicted, etc. So while this might be in the minority, there are a number of citizens who are not using drugs for the sole reason that they are NOT legal. Legalizing them would remove this barrier and actually cause more drug use. I am not saying that is horrible, but it is a side-effect that is seldom brought up.