guardian.co.uk on the Drug War
Quote:
War on drugs: why the US and Latin America could be ready to end a fruitless 40-year struggleMexico's
president Felipe Caldéron is the latest Latin leader to call for a debate on drugs legalisation. And in the US, liberals and right-wing libertarians are pressing for an end to prohibition. Forty years after President Nixon launched the 'war on drugs' there is a growing momentum to abandon the fight
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It was against this backdrop of bloody crisis that President Felipe Calderón said something which could, maybe, begin to change everything. He called for a debate on the legalisation of drugs. "It is a fundamental debate," he said. "You have to analyse carefully the pros and cons and key arguments on both sides."
A statement of the obvious, but coming from Calderón it was remarkable. This is the president who declared war on drug cartels in late 2006, deployed the army, militarised the city of Juárez and promised victory even as the savagery overtook Iraq's. Calderón stressed that he personally still opposed legalisation, but his willingness to debate the idea was, for some, a resounding crack in the international drug policy edifice.
"This is a big step forward in putting an end to the war," said Norm Stamper, a former Seattle chief of police and now spokesman for the group Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (Leap).
Richard Nixon launched the war on drugs on 17 June 1971, a hard-line prohibition policy continued by successive US presidents. Four decades later there is growing momentum in the US and Latin America to abandon the fight and legalise drugs, or at least marijuana. There have been false dawns before but many activists say the latest rays of sunlight are real.
In November, California will vote on a plan – called Proposition 19 – to allow adults to possess small amounts of marijuana and let local governments tax its sale. Last week a cross-political lobby group encompassing Tea Party libertarians and leftwing liberals founded a new organisation, Just Say Now, to support similar legalisation across the US.
"We should give the [individual US] states the ability to regulate marijuana just like alcohol," said Aaron Houston, co-director of the campaign. "This is an idea whose time has come."
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The rest of the article is here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010...ico-california
Quote:
Drugs: the problem is more than just the substances, it's the prohibition itself
Maria Lucia Karam, a retired Brazilian judge, argues that drugs should be legalised - but regulated
Maria Lucia Karam The Observer
It made big news last week when the Mexican president, Felipe Calderón, called for a reasoned debate about the failure of drug prohibition. In doing so, he joined his already outspoken predecessors Vicente Fox and Ernesto Zedillo, as well as other former Latin American presidents like César Gaviria of Colombia and Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil. Latin American policymakers have learned that drug prohibition, more than the drugs themselves, is a problem. Prohibition of desire simply cannot work.
Since taking office in late 2006, Calderón has sent more than 45,000 soldiers into battle with the cartels, but, almost four years later, the Mexican drug business continues to thrive. This policy failure is not unique to Mexico. After 40 years of the international "war on drugs", the only consistent outcome has been that drugs keep getting cheaper, more potent and far easier for people – especially our children – to access everywhere.
This failure, however, is not even the main concern. More relevant are the immense risks, harm and pains caused by prohibition. Especially the violence.
A recent multi-decade review by the International Centre for Science in Drug Policy found that, when police crack down on drug users and dealers, the result is almost always an increase in violence.
Mexicans can confirm it. Calderón's offensive against the cartels has unleashed a wave of violence that has killed more than 28,000 people, including innocent civilians caught in shootouts. The folks in the Mexican bar who saw the decapitated heads roll over their dance floor as prohibition-funded gangs sent their message of dominance can surely confirm it.
Brazilians can also confirm it. In the city of Rio de Janeiro, in 2008 alone, there were 2,757 murders. One in five was a summary execution during police operations against drug dealers in the ghettos called favelas.
In the Brazilian drug war, these are the "enemies". They are mostly very young. They proudly hold their machine-guns that replace the toys they never had.
They battle for marginalised territories and for their occasional profits. Like most poor Brazilian boys, they dream of becoming famous soccer players, but they do not have the opportunity. They have no hope. They do not live long. They kill and die. Soon, other children take their places.
The tragic deaths of these lost children are inevitable outcomes of a policy that is defined as a "war", in which the "criminal" now becomes the "enemy", who must kill or be killed. They arm themselves against the police and their competitors. The police arm themselves against them. It is a self-fulfilling, bloody prophecy. It is the predictable hallmark of drug prohibition.
Violence is not necessarily related to drugs. As the alcohol or tobacco businesses demonstrate, the production and supply of drugs are not inherently violent activities. Weapons and violence only accompany those activities when undertaken in an illegal market. The prohibition yields the violence, as disputes must be settled out of court and on the streets. Paradoxically, when we prohibit these widely used substances, we are actually relinquishing meaningful control over them.
Prohibition consigns the drug market to criminalised actors not subject to oversight of any kind. Legalisation would mean regulation and regulation is the best way to control the dangers of drug use, while cutting the cartels off at the knees.
Every country that has provided a glimpse of what a regulated future might look like has experienced lowered rates of death, disease, crime and addiction. The Swiss policy of treating heroin addiction as a health issue rather than a moral or criminal one has been a resounding success with, among other indicators, a 60% reduction in criminal activity among participating addicts. When Portugal legalised the possession of all drugs, it experienced a decade of sharp declines in overall drug use, especially among the young. In Amsterdam, where over-the-counter marijuana sales have been tolerated for decades, rates of use among teenagers are much lower than they are in the US, where harsh penalties abound.
Latin America is advancing the debate, but even in the US there are efforts to undo the damage of prohibition, the most prominent being California's effort to legalise marijuana.
Hopefully, the thousands of Mexicans, Brazilians and people from other parts of the world who have been killed in the insane "war on drugs" will not have died in vain. Their deaths are already showing that it is time to put an end to all the pain and harms caused by drug prohibition; it is time to legalise and regulate the production, the supply and the consumption of all drugs.
Maria Lucia Karam, a board member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (Leap), is a retired judge in Brazil
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The above article is here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010...lisation-karam
Quote:
A unique chance to rethink drugs policy
Mr Cameron and Mr Clegg are perfectly placed to launch a national debate on whether we should try legalisation
Editorial The Observer, Sunday 8 August 2010
If the purpose of drug policy is to make toxic substances available to anyone who wants them in a flourishing market economy controlled by murderous criminal gangs, the current arrangements are working well.
If, however, the goal is to reduce the amount of drugs being consumed and limit the harm associated with addiction, it is surely time to tear up the current policy. It has failed.
This is not a partial failure. For as long as courts and jails have been the tools for controlling drugs, their use has increased. Police are powerless to control the flow. One recent estimate calculated that around 1% of the total supply to the UK is intercepted.
Attempts to crack down have little impact, except perhaps in siphoning vulnerable young people into jails where they can mature into hardened villains.
When a more heavyweight player is taken out, a gap opens up in the supply chain which is promptly filled by violent competition between or within gangs. Business as usual resumes.
The same story is told around the world, the only difference being in the scale of violence. Writing in today's Observer, retired judge Maria Lucia Karam describes the grim consequences of a failed war on drugs in the cities of Brazil: thousands of young people murdered every year by rival dealers and police.
Few nations are untouched by what is, after all, a multibillion pound global industry. Importing countries, such as Britain, must cope with the social effects of addiction and end up squandering the state's resources on a Sisyphean policing task.
But that suffering is mild compared to the destructive forces unleashed on exporting countries.
Mexico, from where cartels supply a range of drugs to lucrative US markets, has paid an extraordinary price for the illicit appetites of its rich neighbour. The border region has become a militarised zone with violence at the level of a guerrilla insurgency.
The more the authorities try to impose their writ, the more ruthless and ostentatiously cruel the drug cartels become in asserting their control. Decapitated and mutilated corpses are used to signal who is in charge to the local population. Civil society is withering away.
President Felipe Calderón, who has generally adhered to the standard US policy idiom of a "war on drugs", last week called for a debate on legalisation. That is a rare departure for an incumbent head of state, although last year three former Latin American presidents – César Gaviria of Colombia, Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil and Mexico's Ernesto Zedillo – all called for marijuana to be legalised to cut off revenue to the cartels.
The unthinkable is creeping into the realm of the plausible. In the US, several states have relaxed cannabis law, a trend driven by a loose coalition of hard right libertarians and soft left baby-boomers. American society is slowly coming to terms with the fact that drugs are part of its everyday reality and that control might be more effective if use was allowed within the law, not forced outside it.
That debate must be opened in Britain and the recent change of government provides a rare opportunity.
Politicians have generally shown little courage in confronting inconvenient truths about drugs. And the longer a government is in office, the more it feels bound to defend the status quo; to do otherwise would be admitting complicity in an expensive failure.
So the lazy rhetoric of popular moralism continues to shape our national conversation: drugs are a scourge and they must be rooted out of our communities.
It seems intuitive, up to a point, that if the consumption of certain substances is causing harm, those circumstances ought to be banned. We make exceptions for alcohol and tobacco, of course, out of deference to their embedded status in mainstream culture. Any other intoxicant that gains popularity – and notoriety – is swiftly proscribed.
Prohibition entails a double dishonesty. First, there is the pretence that the supply and demand can be managed by force. But anyone who has experienced addiction knows that banning a substance restricts neither access nor desire. Usually, it makes matters worse, bringing otherwise law-abiding people into contact with professional criminals. Most addicts, meanwhile, say their problems start with the need to annihilate feelings of despair or memories of trauma. Prosecuting them for those problems solves nothing.
The second pretence of prohibition is that drugs can be addressed within single national jurisdictions. Plainly, they cannot. The UK hosts a retail market for products that are cultivated and processed around the world. Around 90% of the heroin on British streets starts out as poppies in Afghanistan. So revenue from UK drug use funds corrupt officials, warlords and the Taliban, undermining Nato's military operation. Rarely is the connection made in public.
Honesty about drugs requires a clear-sighted appraisal of what policy can and should aim to achieve. Broadly, there is consensus that addicts need help quitting and should be prevented from committing crimes to fund their habits. But allowing doctors to prescribe heroin, as was the situation until the 1970s, might achieve that goal faster than heavy-handed policing.
By its very nature as a coalition, encompassing a broad spectrum of political views, the new government is well placed to inaugurate a free-thinking national debate on an issue that has been constrained by policy blinkers.
Neither David Cameron nor Nick Clegg seems much in awe of political taboos. Both men, in fact, seem to take pleasure in breaking them. But their ability to do so with impunity lasts for as long as there is goodwill towards their project.
This is a moment in which a political leader could steer the drugs debate out of its current dead-end track and towards something more meaningful and more likely to deliver what the public ultimately wants: safer, healthier, happier communities.
It is far from certain that decriminalisation, regulation or legalisation would work. But they should be examined as options, for it is absolutely certain that prohibition has failed.
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The above article is here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisf...form-marijuana
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The United States of America is for citizens only! Everyone else OUT.
Criminalize asking party affilation for voter registration! End the "two party system"!
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08-08-2010, 08:31 AM
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