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.
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?
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
Except our new government (Conservatives) have lost their minds and are pushing mandatory minimum sentences.
The Union discusses the extradition of Marc Emory. At this point and time Marc is going to jail. Further failings of Canadian sovereignty and our failtard government.
We need to take charge as people and raise this issue. It's broader than simply people getting to ingest their drugs. It's about the corrupted War On Drugs mentality that fuels the legal monster which eats hard working and law abiding citizens in the name of meeting a quota.
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
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
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.
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
I don't know, everything I've read suggests that the average Mexicans don't like the drug cartels. Who would? They just cause violence and problems for normal people. They kill famous Mexican singers (in the case of Zayda Penya they failed the first try, then hunted her down in her hospital bed and did the job right). Who on earth really wants their town to be a battle ground for rival groups of any kind? Narcotics are no more an integral part of Mexican culture than gang warfare is of Los Angeles, or corruption is in Mexico.
Note that Columbia used to have worse problems with drug violence, but it's largely been eliminated (and pushed into Peru and Venezuela, but that's a different story). There will always be drug trafficking as long as it is illegal, but violent powerful drug cartels are not a necessary part of that (there is nowhere in the US that we have drug violence at that level, for example).
Qxe4
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?
Or maybe he thinks that decriminalization will reduce the street prices for the drugs. Decriminalization means that the lower tiers of the distribution network and the using individuals carry less risk, which means easier access, which should mean lower street prices and more competition based on quality. In the end, that's going to mean less money for the cartels.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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