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World Health Organization Calls For Decriminalization of Drug Use
An anonymous reader writes: We've known for a while: the War on Drugs isn't working. Scientists, journalists, economists, and politicians have all argued against continuing the expensive and ineffective fight. Now, the World Health Organization has said flat out that nations should work to decriminalize the use of drugs. The recommendations came as part of a report released this month focusing on the prevention and treatment of HIV. "The WHO's unambiguous recommendation is clearly grounded in concerns for public health and human rights. Whilst the call is made in the context of the policy response to HIV specifically, it clearly has broader ramifications, specifically including drug use other than injecting. In the report, the WHO says: 'Countries should work toward developing policies and laws that decriminalize injection and other use of drugs and, thereby, reduce incarceration. ...Countries should ban compulsory treatment for people who use and/or inject drugs." The bottom line is that the criminalization of drug use comes with substantial costs, while providing no substantial benefit.
This is one of the most messed-up issues in the history of humanity. Hopefully we'll see an end to the insane war on drugs in our lifetime! Drugs are made more dangerous by being illegal, I don't know why so few of us in the United States didn't learn the lesson from alcohol prohibition.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
...if its goal was to prevent drug usage.
No ads, no public displays of drug use, no public drug use, not even in designated public venues, and no brown paper bag bullshit either. Keep it private. No operating heavy machinery or participation in traffic while intoxicated. But yeah, the drug use itself should not be criminal.
We're seeing more places around the world with so called "safe injection sites" which seem to be helping people's safety. I've often wondered if it idea was taken a step further. Create safe haven drug houses, drugs are free, safe from impurities etc provided by the government (likely far cheaper than current policing costs). But you have to stay in a small padded room with nothing to do until the drugs leave your system, and be monitored by nurses. Would they be very popular? Would this all but eliminate the illegal drug trade if drugs were free and safe? I would think for all but the worst addicts, the novelty would be gone, and they would hopefully move on in life.
The problem is, once we get away from pot and other light drugs, the heavier ones have a pretty significant net economic cost. Historically, before our modern drug laws went insane, trying to get drugs out of a local community was a response to local economic collapses when things like opium were introduced to a region. Physically addictive drugs can be pretty devastating to a community as more workers exit the pool and more resources go to taking care of the addicts.
No, this is the old "Reefer Madness" mentality, meant to make happy both the Puritans and the prison profiteers while keeping the politicians in an elevated state of power.
What actually happens, and Portugal ran this experiment with a sample size of over 8 million people during the past decade, is that when drug use is decriminalized, the usage rate quickly falls to about half.
Most of those are people who are no longer afraid to seek treatment. Some are folks who wind up court-ordered to get treatment, and a few were drug users who were only doing it because drugs seemed cool because they were illegal.
At the end, though, the incontrovertible fact is that the community has half the number of drug users as it did under Prohibition. Prohibitionists are responsible for a doubling of the drug usage rate in the community. Does that seem counter-intuitive? So what? The data is in.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Relevant quote: "I have slowly and reluctantly come to believe that this has not been the result. Instead, drinking has generally increased; the speakeasy has replaced the saloon; a vast army of lawbreakers has appeared; many of our best citizens have openly ignored Prohibition; respect for the law has been greatly lessened; and crime has increased to a level never seen before." - John D. Rockefeller, Jr.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Unfortunately, these are not facts, but pure fantasy. First, outlawing drugs does not reduce their usage. The alcohol prohibition indicates that the converse is true. Hence this prohibition increases harm. Second, the harm done is massively increased by outlawing drugs. Most drugs are actually relatively cheap to produce in medical-grade quality, with clear instructions and standardized quality, yet the dangerous low-quality stuff on the market fetches premium prices that then go to criminal enterprises. This situation is purely crated by illegality. Finally, people that are in prison for no good reason are unproductive and cost money as well.
The whole thing is nothing but a massively misanthropic effort by religious and other authoritarians to prevent people from deciding about their own lives and to punish those that have other ideas as heavily as possible. It has zero intention to reduce negative effects and zero effect in that direction. It does increase negative effects massively though.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
- John D. Rockefeller, Jr., 1932
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
There hasn't been a good one since David Tennant
Here is a recipe from my great-grandma's cookbook. Cough Syrup Syrup of squills four ounces, syrup of tolu four ounces, tincture of bloodroot one and one-half ounces, camphorated tincture of opium four ounces. Mix. Dose for an adult, one teaspoon repeated every two to four hours. She used to be able to go to the pharmacist and get tincture of opium.
Say a government wants to reduce harm without too much of a shock to the prison industry. Perhaps it could split the difference by approving medical diamorphine but giving the trademark on HEROIN® (diamorphine) back to Bayer. That way the feds could still go after street dealers for misusing the name "HEROIN".
Heroin, etc. are dangerous and they weren't just banned because of moralizers.
The 'land of the free and the home of the brave' would not violate people's fundamental liberties for safety. These things are banned because of freedom-hating scumbags who despise the thought of living in a truly free country, and yet pretend that that is their goal. But we have the TSA, the NSA's mass surveillance, constitution-free zones, free speech zones, protest permits, DUI checkpoints, mass warrantless surveillance, unrestricted border searches, and a number of other policiies or agencies that violate the constitution and people's fundamental rights (thanks to people like you), so of course we've never been 'the land of the free.'
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The use of drugs is not exactly confined in its impact to the immediate use, which is the theory behind why it was a crime in the first place.
No, the theory behind the first drug laws in the United States was that chinese immigrants smoked opium, so the consumption of opium via smoking was prohibited while oral consumption (the white peoples consumption method) remained legal. A racist law written by racist people to harm a racial group.
Drug laws continue to be completely racist, even though the excuses for the laws no longer are. When it wasn't racism against the chinese-americans, it was racism against the african-americans...
"His name was James Damore."
You can be addicted just as easily to legal drugs as to any substance on the federal schedule. You can be addicted to behaviors like gambling and eating. This problem needs to be addressed medically.
As someone else pointed out: as counter-intuitive as it might be, the data is in since Portugal ran the experiment.
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
This is a great debate between Glenn Greenwald and GWB's drug czar and in it, reference to Portugal and studies related to that are made. From there, you can do your own searching:
http://vimeo.com/32110912
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good