I have long been an advocate of treating drug use as a medical problem first. This is evidence that it may work (thought it is from the Cato institute, so there is an element of 'well they would say that, wouldn't they?'). I don't think the 'war on drugs' approach is ultimately going to succeed. As a character on 'the Wire' pointed out: "you can't call this a war, war's end."
(p.s. apologies for no link, I am using a crappy laptop after my desktop lapsed into a coma & the browser is unfriendly. The Economist site links to the original report)
Portugal's drug policy
Treating, not punishing
Aug 27th 2009 | LISBON
From The Economist print edition
The evidence from Portugal since 2001 is that decriminalisation of drug use and possession has benefits and no harmful side-effects
IN 2001 newspapers around the world carried graphic reports of addicts injecting heroin in the grimy streets of a Lisbon slum. The place was dubbed Europe’s “most shameful neighbourhood” and its “worst drugs ghetto”. The Times helpfully managed to find a young British backpacker sprawled comatose on a corner. This lurid coverage was prompted by a government decision to decriminalise the personal use and possession of all drugs, including heroin and cocaine. The police were told not to arrest anyone found taking any kind of drug.
This “ultraliberal legislation”, said the foreign media, had set alarm bells ringing across Europe. The Portuguese were said to be fearful that holiday resorts would become dumping-grounds for drug tourists. Some conservative politicians denounced the decriminalisation as “pure lunacy”. Plane-loads of foreign students would head for the Algarve to smoke marijuana, predicted Paulo Portas, leader of the People’s Party. Portugal, he said, was offering “sun, beaches and any drug you like.”
Yet after all the furore, the drug law was largely forgotten by the international and Portuguese press—until earlier this year, when the Cato Institute, a libertarian American think-tank, published a study of the new policy by a lawyer, Glenn Greenwald.* In contrast to the dire consequences that critics predicted, he concluded that “none of the nightmare scenarios” initially painted, “from rampant increases in drug usage among the young to the transformation of Lisbon into a haven for ‘drug tourists’, has occurred.”
Mr Greenwald claims that the data show that “decriminalisation has had no adverse effect on drug usage rates in Portugal”, which “in numerous categories are now among the lowest in the European Union”. This came after some rises in the 1990s, before decriminalisation. The figures reveal little evidence of drug tourism: 95% of those cited for drug misdemeanours since 2001 have been Portuguese. The level of drug trafficking, measured by numbers convicted, has also declined. And the incidence of other drug-related problems, including sexually transmitted diseases and deaths from drug overdoses, has “decreased dramatically”.
There are widespread misconceptions about the Portuguese approach. “It is important not to confuse decriminalisation with depenalisation or legalisation,” comments Brendan Hughes of the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, which is, coincidentally, based in Lisbon. “Drug use remains illegal in Portugal, and anyone in possession will be stopped by the police, have the drugs confiscated and be sent before a commission.”
Nor is it uncommon in Europe to make drug use an administrative offence rather than a criminal one (putting it in the same category as not wearing a seat belt, say). What is unique, according to Mr Hughes, is that offenders in Portugal are sent to specialist “dissuasion commissions” run by the government, rather than into the judicial system. “In Portugal,” he says, “the health aspect [of the government’s response to drugs] has gone mainstream.”
The aim of the dissuasion commissions, which are made up of panels of two or three psychiatrists, social workers and legal advisers, is to encourage addicts to undergo treatment and to stop recreational users falling into addiction. They have the power to impose community work and even fines, but punishment is not their main aim. The police turn some 7,500 people a year over to the commissions. But nobody carrying anything considered to be less than a ten-day personal supply of drugs can be arrested, sentenced to jail or given a criminal record.
Officials believe that, by lifting fears of prosecution, the policy has encouraged addicts to seek treatment. This bears out their view that criminal sanctions are not the best answer. “Before decriminalisation, addicts were afraid to seek treatment because they feared they would be denounced to the police and arrested,” says Manuel Cardoso, deputy director of the Institute for Drugs and Drug Addiction, Portugal’s main drugs-prevention and drugs-policy agency. “Now they know they will be treated as patients with a problem and not stigmatised as criminals.”
The number of addicts registered in drug-substitution programmes has risen from 6,000 in 1999 to over 24,000 in 2008, reflecting a big rise in treatment (but not in drug use). Between 2001 and 2007 the number of Portuguese who say they have taken heroin at least once in their lives increased from just 1% to 1.1%. For most other drugs, the figures have fallen: Portugal has one of Europe’s lowest lifetime usage rates for cannabis. And most notably, heroin and other drug abuse has decreased among vulnerable younger age-groups, according to Mr Cardoso.
The share of heroin users who inject the drug has also fallen, from 45% before decriminalisation to 17% now, he says, because the new law has facilitated treatment and harm-reduction programmes. Drug addicts now account for only 20% of Portugal’s HIV cases, down from 56% before. “We no longer have to work under the paradox that exists in many countries of providing support and medical care to people the law considers criminals.”
“Proving a causal link between Portugal’s decriminalisation measures and any changes in drug-use patterns is virtually impossible in scientific terms,” concludes Mr Hughes. “But anyone looking at the statistics can see that drug consumption in 2001 was relatively low in European terms, and that it remains so. The apocalypse hasn’t happened.”
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BigF, here's the Economist link.
Portugal's drug policy: Treating, not punishing
And here's the link to the mentioned Cato Institute report by Glenn Greenwald.
Drug Decriminalization in Portugal:
Lessons for Creating Fair and Successful Drug Policies
Last edited by Merlin; 03 Sep 09, at 11:19.
Thanks mate, much appreciated. If you see anything of mine that needs a link over the next week or so just jump in. We both seem to be keen 'Economist' readers.Originally Posted by Merlin
Win nervously lose tragically - Reds C C
Any other countries trying liberal drug laws?
It looks like some are Merlin.
Waging war on drugs is utterly mad
SIMON JENKINS
September 6, 2009
COMMENT
I GUESS it had to happen this way. The greatest social menace of this century is not terrorism but drugs, and it is the poor who will have to lead the revolution. The global trade in illicit narcotics ranks with oil and arms. Its prohibition wrecks the lives of wealthy and wretched, East and West alike. It fills jails, corrupts politicians and plagues nations. It finances wars from Afghanistan to Colombia. It is utterly mad.
There is no sign of reform emanating from the self-satisfied liberal democracies of the West. Reform is not mentioned by Barack Obama, Gordon Brown, Nicolas Sarkozy or Angela Merkel. Their countries can sustain prohibition, just, by penal repression and by sweeping the consequences underground.
No such luxury is available to the political economies of Latin America. They have been wrecked by Washington's demand that they stop exporting drugs to fuel America's unregulated cocaine market.
Push has finally come to shove. Two weeks ago, the Argentine Supreme Court ruled it was unconstitutional to prosecute citizens for having drugs for personal use. It asserted ''adults should be free to make lifestyle decisions without the intervention of the state''.
Nor is that all. The Mexican Government has been brought to its knees by a drug-trafficking industry employing 500,000 workers and policed by 5600 killings a year, all to supply America's gargantuan appetite and Mexico's lesser one. Three years ago, Mexico concluded that prison for drug possession merely criminalised a large slice of its population. Drug users should be regarded as ''patients, not criminals''.
Next to the plate step Brazil and Ecuador. Both are quietly proposing to follow suit, fearful only of offending the US drug enforcement bureaucracy, now a dominant presence in every South American capital. Ecuador has pardoned 1500 ''mules'' - women used by drug gangs to transport cocaine over international borders.
Former Brazilian president Fernando Henrique Cardoso declares the emperor naked. ''The tide is turning,'' he says. ''The war-on-drugs strategy has failed.'' A Brazilian judge, Maria Lucia Karam, said: ''The only way to reduce violence in Mexico, Brazil, or anywhere else is to legalise the production, supply and consumption of all drugs.''
America spends a reported $US70 billion ($A83 billion) a year on suppressing drug imports, and untold billions prosecuting citizens for drugs offences. Yet the huge profits available to Latin American traffickers have financed a quarter-century of civil war in Colombia and devastating social disruption in Mexico, Peru and Bolivia. Similar profits fund the war in Afghanistan.
The underlying concept of the war on drugs, initiated by Richard Nixon in the 1970s, is that demand can be curbed by eliminating supply. The concept marries intellectual idiocy - that supply leads demand - with practical impossibility. But it is golden politics. For 30 years it has allowed Western politicians to shift blame for not regulating drug abuse at home on to the shoulders of poor countries abroad. It is crashingly immoral.
The Latin American breakthrough is directed at domestic drug users, but this is only half the battle. There is no rational justification for making consumption legal but not the supply of what is consumed.
The absurdity of this position was shown by last week's ''good news'' that the Afghan poppy harvest had fallen back to 2005 levels. This was taken as a sign poppy eradication was working and depriving Afghan peasants of their most lucrative cash crop somehow wins their hearts and minds and impoverishes the Taliban.
The Afghan poppy crop is largely a function of the price of poppies compared with that of wheat. Since the NATO occupation it has boomed, polluting Kabul politics and plunging Western diplomats and commentators into hypocrisy over Afghan President Hamid Karzai's corrupt regime. The crop has shrunk because the wheat price has risen and the recession has dampened European demand. It will rise again. As long as there is demand, there will be supply. Water does not flow uphill, however much global bureaucrats pay each other to pretend otherwise.
Making supply illegal oils a black market, drives trade underground, cross-subsidises other crime and leaves consumers at the mercy of poisons. It is stupidity.
As the Brazilian judge pointed out, the violence associated with any illegal trade will not abate by only licensing consumption. The mountain that must be climbed is licensing, regulating and taxing supply.
From the deaths of troops in Afghanistan to the narco-terrorism of Mexico and the mules cramming Western jails, the war on drugs can be seen only as a total failure, a vast self-imposed cost on Western society. It is the greatest sweeping-under-the-carpet of our age.
GUARDIAN
Win nervously lose tragically - Reds C C
Interesting how Brazil is next, I guess since they share some cultural influences from Portugal their decision revolves around similar identity aspects. Hopefully the trend will spread to other countries.
Originally from Sochi, Russia.
Could that a number of their neighbours have tried it too.
Win nervously lose tragically - Reds C C
For the US to change, you need to wait for a few generations. Perhaps it is like asking a VLCC (Very large crude carrer) to change direction.
Fresh thinking on the war on drugs?
3 Sept [Reuters] Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own -
There are times when silence can be as eloquent as words. Take the case of Washington’s reaction to announcements, in quick succession, from Mexico and Argentina of changes in their drug policies that run counter to America’s own rigidly prohibitionist federal laws. No U.S. expressions of dismay or alarm.
Contrast that with three years ago, when Mexico was close to enacting timid reforms almost identical to those that became effective on August 21. In 2006, shouts of shock and horror from the administration of George W. Bush reached such a pitch that the then Mexican president, Vicente Fox, abruptly vetoed a bill his own party had written and he had supported. .....
Under the Mexican law that took effect in August, it is legal to possess small, precisely specified amounts, for personal use, of marijuana, heroin, opium, cocaine, methamphetamine and LSD. In Argentina, the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional criminal sanctions for the possession of small quantities of marijuana for personal use. The ruling opened the door to legislation similar to Mexico’s.
Brazil decriminalised drug possession in 2006; Ecuador is likely to follow suit this year. In much of Europe, drug use (as opposed to drug trafficking) is treated as an administrative offence rather than a criminal act. America’s hard-line approach has helped to make the United States the country with the world’s largest prison population. .....
Advocates of more flexible policies say they feel the winds of change beginning to rise in the administration of Barack Obama, a president who has admitted that in his youth, he smoked marijuana frequently and used “a little blow”(of cocaine) when he could afford it. But hopes for a break from long-standing orthodoxy might be premature, ...
"As regards to legalization, it is not in the president’s vocabulary and it is not in mine,” Obama’s drug czar, former Seattle police chief Gil Kerlikowske said in July. “Marijuana is dangerous and has no medicinal benefits.” ....
On a global scale, nothing much can happen unless there are changes in the world’s largest and most lucrative market for drugs, the United States. If they happen, they won’t happen fast. “I see this as a multi-generational effort, with incremental changes,” said Nadelmann, who has been involved in drug policy since he taught at Princeton University in the late 1980s. “But for the first time, I feel I have the wind in my back and not in my face.”
Last edited by Merlin; 06 Sep 09, at 10:31.
This is a new drug law for Indonesia.
They debated this law for 4 years and decided to criminalise drug addicts.
Drug addicts branded as criminals under new law
15 Sept [JakartaPost] The House of Representatives passed the anti-narcotics bill into law Monday amid criticism from anti-drug groups that the newly passed law will not help rehabilitate drug addicts. ....
Asmin also condemned an article that regulates the death penalty for drug users. ....
Meanwhile, Justice and Human Rights Minister Andi Matalatta said during his speech the law was aimed at saving younger generations from drug abuse. ....
In January 2009, there were more than 27,000 drug users in Indonesia, according to the National Narcotics Agency (BNN).
The number includes 12,689 users above 29 years of age, 6,790 users between the ages of 25 and 29, 5,720 users between the ages of 20 and 24, 1,747 between the ages of 16 and 19, and 109 users below the age of 16.
There are 24,989 male users and 2,067 female users.
Senior high school students rank the highest, with 17,503 users, followed by 6,017 junior high school students, 2,866 elementary school students and 669 university students.
Article 55 of the law stipulates that parents of underage addicts who fail to report their child’s addiction to the authorities will be subject to a Rp 1 million (US$100) fine and a maximum of six months in prison.
Last edited by Merlin; 15 Sep 09, at 16:41.
The drug war is a money making machine. For the US to give up it's stance millions of people would lose their jobs. I don't see it happening soon without people waking up and realizing that drugs are a social and health problem and have nothing to do with criminality.
And technically there are no drug laws, there are only 'statutes' and 'acts' which are part of of UCC Law (Commercial Law) which is applied in the US, UK, Canada and Down Under.
You cannot have LAW that prohibits people from taking drugs because it goes against personal freedoms and basic human rights which is in every constitution of the aforementioned countries. Basically drug 'laws' (statutes and acts) only exist because we agree to them and we don't stand up for our basic human rights.
Propaganda on the evil of drugs helps perpetuate this. And to this day I will never understand how people can condone "legal" pharmaceutical drug use while condemning 'illegal' drug use. You are taking the same substances, if not, sometimes more harmful substances... But it's okay, because someone told you it was 'legal' and beneficial.
Holland and Portugal are both prime examples of the reality behind drugs.
I have long been a fan of Wodak. He is (or was) heavily involved in the movement for drug law reform.
http:http://www.theage.com.au/opinio...23-g2m5.html//Jury in on heroin ban
ALEX WODAK
September 24, 2009
In October 1987, while travelling overseas to learn about HIV and injecting drug use, I spent an evening in a ''shooting gallery'' in Brooklyn, New York City. I watched for hours as four Hispanic men and women injected ''speedballs'' of heroin mixed with cocaine. It was a life-changing experience. We were in the basement of a dilapidated, abandoned tenement building. There was no electricity. Cars parked in the street were propped up on bricks with smashed windscreens. This was urban squalor unimaginable in Australia.
Carrying injecting equipment in the streets was far too risky, especially for minorities. Renting a ''shooting gallery'' for a few hours reduced the risk of being bothered by the police. Needles and syringes were supplied, but the catch was they had already been used by many other people.
I watched as the four injected with little regard for hygiene. Thinking of comparable situations in Australia, I wondered why these American injectors had such little concern for their future. Then I realised that a decent education, proper housing or a reasonable job would have been impossible dreams. Hope for a better life for their children or grandchildren? Forget it. By contrast, the revolving door of prison would have been an all too familiar reality. That was when I first became interested in inequality and illicit drug use.
Inequality has been a constant theme in illicit drugs. Australia's first laws on drugs in the late 19th century banned the smoking of opium in South Australia, Victoria and NSW. The only opium smokers then were the Chinese working in the goldfields.
American missionaries in the 19th century witnessed the appalling misery resulting from the British forcing opium on to the Chinese. China tried to stop the then more powerful British but lost both opium wars. The experience helped prompt the US to convene the International Opium Commission in Shanghai in 1909, setting the scene for global drug prohibition.
Sixty years later, then US president Richard Nixon declared a war against drugs. As Nixon aide John Ehrlichman said: ''Look, we understood we couldn't make it illegal to be young or poor or black in the United States, but we could criminalise their common pleasure. We understood that drugs were not the health problem we were making them out to be, but it was such a perfect issue for the Nixon White House that we couldn't resist it.''
Effective political strategy turned out to be a public policy disaster. While politicians in many countries competed to have the toughest policies, drug production and consumption soared and deaths, disease, crime and corruption steadily increased. The six deaths from drug overdose in Australia in 1964 rose to more than 1100 in 1999.
Multiple scientific studies suggest that prescribing heroin to the most severely dependent heroin injectors, who have not benefited from all other treatments and punishments, has real benefits for the individuals and the community.
In 1997, a large Swiss study concluded that for this minority of entrenched heroin users who had never benefited from repeated episodes of diverse treatments or prison, giving them heroin as part of their treatment provided huge benefits, with few side effects. Their physical and mental health improved considerably. Consumption of street drugs decreased. Crime, measured three different ways, decreased substantially. The treatment was much more expensive than the standard methadone treatment, but for every Swiss franc the program cost, there were gains of two Swiss francs.
Rigorous scientific studies were then also conducted in the Netherlands, Spain, Germany and Canada. All showed similar results. All were published in reputable journals. This month, the results of a British study were released. Again, the results were similar to the previous studies. In each, heroin was self-administered under stringent supervision. Abundant, high-quality psychological and social support was provided.
After a decade of heroin-assisted treatment in Switzerland, the treatment is still only provided to a steady 5 per cent of those seeking help.
This small minority of severely dependent drug users is so important because they account for a disproportionate share of the drug-related crime.
In a national referendum last year in Switzerland, 68 per cent supported retaining heroin-assisted treatment as a last resort. The Netherlands now also provides the treatment. Earlier this year, 63 per cent of members of the German parliament voted to allow heroin-assisted treatment. All major political parties in Denmark recently supported the treatment.
Australian researchers in the 1990s investigated heroin-assisted treatment for more than five years. In July 1997, health and police ministers voted six to three to support a trial but prime minister John Howard aborted the process, arguing that it would ''send the wrong message''.
Twelve years later, the message from the scientific evidence is clear: if we want to help drug users, their families and communities, then prescribing heroin should be part of the package we provide.
But we should also try to reduce the extent of inequality in our community. There is increasing evidence that more unequal communities have worse public health outcomes, with higher rates of illicit drug use, mental illness, obesity and crime. At a time when our taxation system is under review, reducing inequality is the debate that Australia has to have.
We don't need a debate about heroin-assisted treatment. We should be providing this now to the small minority with very severe problems who have not benefited from repeated episodes of other treatments.
Alex Wodak is director of the Alcohol and Drug Service at St Vincent's Hospital, Sydney. He is speaking at the ''Drugs in Hard Times'' conference on October 1 in Melbourne.
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I tried to find some stories on whats going on in Russia on this issue.
There was one story where two anti-drug agents overdosed in the basement sauna of the anti-drug agency and they were well connected.
Flood of Afghan heroin fuels drug plague in Russia - Guantanamo: Beyond the law - The Olympian - Olympia, Washington
"When I heard the Americans were going to enter Afghanistan I thought they were going to solve the problem, to stop the drugs," said Yevgeny Roizman, who had connections with Russian organized crime before he became a member of parliament. He now runs an anti-drug organization in the city of Yekaterinburg, another big heroin-distribution hub north of Chelyabinsk.
"But in the period after they came, there was a big increase in the region . . . ," Roizman added. "It makes me think the Americans have done nothing to stop the drug trafficking."(page 2 or 3 of the article I think)"I can name you a lot of politicians in Russia who said that the Americans specially arranged the situation in Afghanistan so that we would receive a lot of drugs, and this is the real aim of their occupation," said Andrei Klimov, the deputy head of the foreign affairs committee in Russia's lower house of parliament. "I'm not sure this is true, but who knows."
Google Translate
(hopefully the translated link works short story but still not bad)
Google Translate
(skimmed a bit very long broad overview but not law centric)
Google Translate
Google Translate
(law change and some comments on it not sure when this was published but there are snippets of organizations for like the one below)
Google Translate
(this should be good more to the point and on topic)
Originally from Sochi, Russia.
Nearly everybody thinks the war on drugs is a failure.
Make drugs legal, says former US police chief
3 Oct [BrisbaneTimes] RETIRED American police chief will tell a Sydney audience tomorrow that the war on drugs has been a failure, and a disaster for police forces.
Norm Stamper retired as chief of police in Seattle in 2000, and is a spokesman for Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, a fast-growing US organisation of 13,000 current and former police officers, prison warders, prosecutors and judges.
He says that since Richard Nixon began the drug war in 1971, the most common reason for arresting young Americans has been for non-violent drug offences. Millions have been jailed, with often devastating effects on themselves and their families. Mr Stamper said this had driven a wedge between police and many otherwise law-abiding Americans.
"Police need a partnership with the community," he said. "If they're to get the information they need to fight crime, there needs to be a strong sense of trust. But with tens of millions of young Americans having been arrested for non-violent drug offences, there's a widespread sense the police are there to do things to people rather than for people.
"You may be working a non-drug-related murder and hoping that citizens will come forward with information about the shooter. But you can have doors slammed in your face because of an unhappy experience with the police over a drug arrest."
He said the war had encouraged bad behaviour by police, ranging from illegal searches to involvement in the drug trade, further undermining public trust in law enforcement.
America's conduct of the war overseas had harmed police there too. In Mexico it had led to massive corruption and thousands of killings by drug cartels. "Many of the victims are police officers, who are often tortured and beheaded," Mr Stamper said. "Essentially, honest police in Mexico have a choice: they can co-operate with the cartels or they can die. This is a direct result of the prohibition model and the American drug war." ....
The US will eventually follow the example of Portugal, Switzerland and other countries that have decriminalizing drug usage and begun treating it as an illness.
When Nixon declared the War on Drugs to cut supply someone forgot to tell him that drug importers do not declare their wares at ports of entry. And like one of the articles points out, demand for drugs is unaffected by supply. Use might be. Temporarily that is, until the smugglers find another route in.
Portugal's approach is almost the right one: treat drug usage as an illness, not a crime. But IMO it falls short in that the drug market is still controlled by criminals. They should make drugs legally available through government-controlled outlets to drive the criminal element out of business. That will require some careful thought, as the object is to decrease drug use, not encourage it.
The US has to scrap the War of Drugs and try something more realistic. The drug culture is a cancer on society; it enriches people with the lowest moral character and deflects law enforcement from pursuing real criminals.
To be Truly ignorant, Man requires an Education - Plato
Espescially those that have fought in it. Over about 8 years I was involved in the battle from the front lines of production, to trafficking, to distribution one place or another. We didn't make a dent, and that was fifteen years ago. I only see where it has gotten worse and cost innocent people thier lives and untold millions wasted in an effort that seems to be more about control than curing a problem.
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