What would happen if we legalized drugs?

[Ganoderma]

There are many opinions on this, and Portugal did an experiment. Whether i agree on all their points or not i give them a standing O for having the balls to actually do it and not give into peer pressure from other nations. Good job!

 

Drugs in Portugal: Did Decriminalization Work? - TIME

 

Drugs in Portugal: Did Decriminalization Work?

By Maia Szalavitz Sunday, Apr. 26, 2009

 

 

Pop quiz: Which European country has the most liberal drug laws? (Hint: It's not the Netherlands.)

 

Although its capital is notorious among stoners and college kids for marijuana haze–filled "coffee shops," Holland has never actually legalized cannabis — the Dutch simply don't enforce their laws against the shops. The correct answer is Portugal, which in 2001 became the first European country to officially abolish all criminal penalties for personal possession of drugs, including marijuana, cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine.

 

At the recommendation of a national commission charged with addressing Portugal's drug problem, jail time was replaced with the offer of therapy. The argument was that the fear of prison drives addicts underground and that incarceration is more expensive than treatment — so why not give drug addicts health services instead? Under Portugal's new regime, people found guilty of possessing small amounts of drugs are sent to a panel consisting of a psychologist, social worker and legal adviser for appropriate treatment (which may be refused without criminal punishment), instead of jail.

 

The question is, does the new policy work? At the time, critics in the poor, socially conservative and largely Catholic nation said decriminalizing drug possession would open the country to "drug tourists" and exacerbate Portugal's drug problem; the country had some of the highest levels of hard-drug use in Europe. But the recently released results of a report commissioned by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, suggest otherwise.

 

The paper, published by Cato in April, found that in the five years after personal possession was decriminalized, illegal drug use among teens in Portugal declined and rates of new HIV infections caused by sharing of dirty needles dropped, while the number of people seeking treatment for drug addiction more than doubled.

 

"Judging by every metric, decriminalization in Portugal has been a resounding success," says Glenn Greenwald, an attorney, author and fluent Portuguese speaker, who conducted the research. "It has enabled the Portuguese government to manage and control the drug problem far better than virtually every other Western country does."

 

Compared to the European Union and the U.S., Portugal's drug use numbers are impressive. Following decriminalization, Portugal had the lowest rate of lifetime marijuana use in people over 15 in the E.U.: 10%. The most comparable figure in America is in people over 12: 39.8%. Proportionally, more Americans have used cocaine than Portuguese have used marijuana.

 

The Cato paper reports that between 2001 and 2006 in Portugal, rates of lifetime use of any illegal drug among seventh through ninth graders fell from 14.1% to 10.6%; drug use in older teens also declined. Lifetime heroin use among 16-to-18-year-olds fell from 2.5% to 1.8% (although there was a slight increase in marijuana use in that age group). New HIV infections in drug users fell by 17% between 1999 and 2003, and deaths related to heroin and similar drugs were cut by more than half. In addition, the number of people on methadone and buprenorphine treatment for drug addiction rose to 14,877 from 6,040, after decriminalization, and money saved on enforcement allowed for increased funding of drug-free treatment as well.

 

Portugal's case study is of some interest to lawmakers in the U.S., confronted now with the violent overflow of escalating drug gang wars in Mexico. The U.S. has long championed a hard-line drug policy, supporting only international agreements that enforce drug prohibition and imposing on its citizens some of the world's harshest penalties for drug possession and sales. Yet America has the highest rates of cocaine and marijuana use in the world, and while most of the E.U. (including Holland) has more liberal drug laws than the U.S., it also has less drug use.

 

"I think we can learn that we should stop being reflexively opposed when someone else does [decriminalize] and should take seriously the possibility that anti-user enforcement isn't having much influence on our drug consumption," says Mark Kleiman, author of the forthcoming When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment and director of the drug policy analysis program at UCLA. Kleiman does not consider Portugal a realistic model for the U.S., however, because of differences in size and culture between the two countries.

 

But there is a movement afoot in the U.S., in the legislatures of New York State, California and Massachusetts, to reconsider our overly punitive drug laws. Recently, Senators Jim Webb and Arlen Specter proposed that Congress create a national commission, not unlike Portugal's, to deal with prison reform and overhaul drug-sentencing policy. As Webb noted, the U.S. is home to 5% of the global population but 25% of its prisoners.

 

At the Cato Institute in early April, Greenwald contended that a major problem with most American drug policy debate is that it's based on "speculation and fear mongering," rather than empirical evidence on the effects of more lenient drug policies. In Portugal, the effect was to neutralize what had become the country's number one public health problem, he says.

 

"The impact in the life of families and our society is much lower than it was before decriminalization," says Joao Castel-Branco Goulao, Portugual's "drug czar" and president of the Institute on Drugs and Drug Addiction, adding that police are now able to re-focus on tracking much higher level dealers and larger quantities of drugs.

 

Peter Reuter, a professor of criminology and public policy at the University of Maryland, like Kleiman, is skeptical. He conceded in a presentation at the Cato Institute that "it's fair to say that decriminalization in Portugal has met its central goal. Drug use did not rise." However, he notes that Portugal is a small country and that the cyclical nature of drug epidemics — which tends to occur no matter what policies are in place — may account for the declines in heroin use and deaths.

 

The Cato report's author, Greenwald, hews to the first point: that the data shows that decriminalization does not result in increased drug use. Since that is what concerns the public and policymakers most about decriminalization, he says, "that is the central concession that will transform the debate."

 

what do you think?

 

i say Bravo.

[Moontanman]

I agree, bravo! I honestly never considered hard drugs being legal. I do know that much of US government drug information/propaganda is BS. Like the idea that people who are high commit crimes of violence. Most people who are high like to enjoy the high, after they come down and withdrawal is snapping at their heels is when crimes are committed to support their habit. It stands to reason that cheap available drugs would circumvent the crime. I also think that much drug use is the "forbidden fruit syndrome" not to mention that most drug users are functional until they run out. I'm not sure how comfortable I am with total legalization but it seems to have worked in this study. I think it's important to get real information out to people, so much of the info we get is and has been government propagandas for so long I'm not sure if anyone knows the real unvarnished truth. Like lots of conspiracy theories the confusion has gone on so long I'm not sure if the truth would be believed or not but the public deserves the truth no matter how outside what is "known" the truth turns out to be.

[sanctus]

Wow are you sure this is really the case, I never heard of it til now. I just know that there was a votation in Switzerland in 1998 to legalize all hard drugs and which obviously did not pass. But that there was a country actually doing it I never had heard...

 

Anyway, it does not surprise me it works, repression can never work as well as acceptance. No hard drugs needed for this, just think at when alcohol was outlawed...

[sanctus]

Ok, I just talked to a portuguese working with me at the same institute it is all true.

[Ganoderma]

ya i never heard of it either until i saw this article. i was trying to think to myself that nations wont have the guts to do this. but i figure Time is probably a half decent reliable source, at least for this kind of thing :phones:

 

i wonder if Obama and his crew are going to start thinking about some new ways to give back the freedom US citizens have lost? And other countries as well.

 

i loved the bit about offering help, and they say the number of people seeking help has doubled....that sounds very promising!!!

[freeztar]

i wonder if Obama and his crew are going to start thinking about some new ways to give back the freedom US citizens have lost?

 

Well, there's this...

 

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on Wednesday outlined a shift in the enforcement of federal drug laws, saying the administration would effectively end the Bush administration’s frequent raids on distributors of medical marijuana.

...

In the Bush administration, federal agents raided medical marijuana distributors that violated federal statutes even if the dispensaries appeared to be complying with state laws. The raids produced a flood of complaints, particularly in California, which in 1996 became the first state to legalize marijuana sales to people with doctors’ prescriptions.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/19/us/19holder.html

 

Hmm...state's rights from a socialist??

[lemit]

Let's see. Using the logic of the logic of the gun lobby, if we legalize drugs, only . . . .

 

Anybody care to fill in the blanks? Some chemical support might help.

 

--lemit

[Ganoderma]

lemit, can you elaborate? i would say the gun example is a variable one. in the states there are many gun related crimes, but in other countries with similar amounts of guns, per person, the death rates are much much lower.

 

i think the thing the government fails to see is that if someone is going to kill someone, they will do it regardless of what weapons are illegal. if someone is going to get high, they will find a way in any of the thousands of plants, fungi. chemicals or animals that contain narcotic properties.

 

here in taiwan guns are strictly illegal except for police/military. so what do people do? kill with knives/swords, chemicals and many people make high power BB guns which are deadly. so there is really no way around stopping a person from getting high, or even.

 

the thing i think we should be looking at is WHY do we (as a species) want to get high, or kill people?

 

i am not saying getting high is in itself a problem, but in certain circumstances it can become one, especially with the way many are marketed these days. but i must confess i never saw an Indian rob and kill harvester to get his next peyote fix :)

[lemit]

The title of the thread for some reason reminded me of a popular U.S. gun-lobby bumper sticker: "If we outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns." The logic and the inanity of the bumper sticker are unassailable. Of course, anything you choose can be substituted for "guns" without any loss of meaning, since there isn't any meaning there anyway.

 

It seems to me we in the U.S. have the drug question upside down. Many over-the-counter drugs have more precautions, counterindications, and side effects than those available only by prescription and even those that are restricted. I hope other countries do better.

 

--lemit

[vanamoinen1]

We have to keep in mind that whether or not we "should" legalize what are currently classified as "illegal drugs", we (through our government) have made the decision that we should spend a certain percentage of our tax revenues on law enforcement and prisons. With only 300M of the worlds ~6-7 billion people, we have over 1/2 of the world's incarcerated population. The infrastructure and personnel needed to process all of these people (start with police, judges, DAs, private attorneys, cooks, laundry services, energy resources and so on and so on) adds up to a huge amount of money--money which someone out there is perfectly happy to earn. Were we to stop our prosecution of the "war on drugs" think of all the people who would be out of jobs. A few murders here and there and often in foreign countries do not weigh on the mind of the body politic in the same way that unemployment does especially in our current economic climate.

 

I'd propose that a more focused question would be of the form: "Were we to legalize drugs, in what manner would we redistribute the infrastructure and personnel currently utilized to enforce our drug laws?" It's fine to say that the drugs would become a taxable item, but how do you filter the generated tax income to the police officer/judge/prison cook who has now become redundant and thus, unemployed? Not saying it's "right" that they are employed, just acknowledging that our penal system does exist, does employ people and does consume resources--all of which contributes back into the system from which it was originally taken in the form of taxes.

[sanctus]

In exchange jobs in help systems (like therapies,etc.) would be created...you know it does not have to be a change from one day to the other.

[Ganoderma]

Were we to stop our prosecution of the "war on drugs" think of all the people who would be out of jobs.

 

that's the problem with people these days. The total loss of freedom, family and everything they worked is totally ok as long as we can keep our jobs. I find it sick that people don't mind the loss of others for personal gain.

 

people going to jail and losing their work, perhaps even house/life because they are not working and can't pay for any of it, because they grew a few marijuana plants, for example, is quite wrong. sure there are people that belong in prison. but i seriously question the logic for more petty "crimes" which in traditional societies would just seem retarded...and frankly is retarded.

 

its a good point you have about all the jobs created from people going to jail, one that is brought up time and again.....but when should forced imprisonment be an industry? when did that happen? lets just pretend (i don't have any numbers, so just making them up) marijuana was legalized and no more people in jail for that. lets pretend that accounts for $40 million US$ a year in the states (fake number). take that money, and invest it back into your country. You are not only making stupid amounts of cash from the taxes on marijuana (look at alcohol and tobacco profits for the gov) but you are saving lots of money elsewhere that you can use somewhere useful.

 

in places like the states the extra money would probably be used to pay off debts of war, but if a place had a half decent government that cared about its people, it could really go far. but it won't, cause society just has not evolved that far yet :phones:

[Buffy]

Some figures to think about:

America has less than 5% of the world's population, but almost 25% of its prisoners. It imprisons 756 people per 100,000 residents, a rate nearly five times the world average....For most of the 20th century America imprisoned roughly the same proportion of its population as many other countries--a hundred people for every 100,000 citizens. But while other countries stayed where they were, the American incarceration rate then took off--to 313 per 100,000 in 1985 and 648 in 1997.

...the war on drugs has pushed the incarceration business into overdrive. The number of people serving time for drugs has increased from 41,000 in 1980 to 500,000 today, or 55% of the population of federal prisons and 21% of those in state prisons. An astonishing three-quarters of prisoners locked up on drug-related charges are black.

 

So you have to ask yourself, given that this level of extremism in prosecuting drugs as a crime--really only short of the "possess drugs and you die" in Malaysia and a few other SE-Asian countries--doesn't really seem to do much good, is it really worth it, no matter how "bad" drug addiction is?

 

As I ask my customers every day: what problem are you trying to *solve*?

 

In the absence of clearly-defined goals, we become strangely loyal to performing daily trivia until ultimately we become enslaved by it, :phones:

Buffy

[Racoon]

The More Laws you create, the more people will break them.

 

The United States would do well to ease Drug Laws.

Because our laws have done nothng to ease Flow or Use, meanwhile we incarcerate Millions and destroy/hinder all those lives.. For what? for basic human weakness? For systematic disfunction?

 

 

The Money is better and more effectively spent in education and rehabilitation as opposed to prosecution and incarceration.

 

If the US legalized basic drugs, there would be an initial spike in use ,but regulated like alcohol and tobacco, it would gradually recind, As employers demanded non drug useage.

The money saved would allow Law Enforcement to tackle Real Crime. Instead of being bogged down with petty drug use.

Now there might be exceptions, and some drug convictions needed, but small time/ordinary users should be exempted from current law.

 

Every state is facing hard-core budget decisions.

We should legalize/Tax it. create revenue-reduce cost

As opposed to criminalize it-add expense .

[lemit]

Maybe we shouldn't change anything. The idea of a former federal judge at a fast food restaurant ("You are overweight and should not have the large fries. Next?") is enough to make me want to continue the current system.

 

--lemit

[sanctus]

Lemit, you always speak in riddles, I don't get what you mean :-) Can you elaborate?

[lemit]

Many years ago, I dated the daughter of a federal judge. Federal judges are not known for their humility and willingness to obey anyone at any time. They wouldn't do well at the unemployment office either, since they would interpret the laws in their own way.

 

Sorry to be obscure. Well, no, maybe I'm not sorry after all. I actually kind of enjoy stretching my brain a little. I know that can be a bumpy ride, but you have the option to disembark at any time.

 

--lemit