NOT police abuse: Police Raid Home, Find Nothing

[Grumman]

Do you have a source for this idea that drug prohibition actually serves to make a significant dent in the use and addiction rates for hard drugs?

Do you need a source to tell you that people are more willing to do legal things than illegal things?

[loomer]

Do you have a source for this idea that drug prohibition actually serves to make a significant dent in the use and addiction rates for hard drugs?

Do you need a source to tell you that people are more willing to do legal things than illegal things?

The issue is that what you're asserting is a damned controversial thing with evidence against it. I'll ask again: Do you have evidence for your positive claim?

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Do you need a source to tell you that people are more willing to do legal things than illegal things?

Actually yes, as plenty of evidence suggests illegality drives increased youth rates of use. I also remain unconvinced that powder cocaine is actually addictive in a physiological rather than psychological sense. The different processing component of crack seems to make it addictive, but of course we could sell freebase in stores and simply make it a felony to process into crack. Then we could eliminate the impurities and control the dosage rate, so that most of the causes of morbidity and illness are eliminated. (most crack addicts given the opportunity try to voluntarily wean themselves to cocaine when it is available, but it is much more expensive so poor people can rarely do this).

Or, as this article explains, cocaine and heroin are less addictive than Oreo cookies. So there's one argument in this thread flushed. Why not ban Oreos from the supermarket if we're not going to have a regulated market in cocaine? It slightly increases the risk of heart attack, but not as much as smoking does! That's it. At least with Heroin you can construct a much better argument of how it will destroy your life and health.

I am very much in favour of legalizing Marijuana, Cocaine, Khat, Ketamine, probably Ecstasy, definitely Peyote simply to make Native American use less problematic. None of these have any particular risk except to really stupid people who would have died driving their car into a telephone pole while drunk if they didn't overdose. I would keep meth, other amphetamines, heroin/opiates illegal, and make it illegal to process powder cocaine into crack. I would also ban all forms of nicotine consumption except for nasal snuff (no evidence of increased cancer rate over baseline world cancer rates for nasal or other cancers in countries with high rates of use) and vaping (probably safe, which is an improvement over definitely not safe), with religious and ceremonial exceptions. I'd also ban smoking Marijuana. They could vape it or turn it into Bhang, the traditional preparation in India.

Oh, and I made one more specific claim: Eliminating the criminalization of drug use reduces rates of drug consumption.

Do I have any evidence that legal drugs = less drug use?

Yes, I do.

An entire bloody country's worth!

Also rates of HIV infection go down, which is a nice side bonus.

So in the end what we see is that we should outright legalize and regulate a large spectrum of existing illegal drugs, and keep the rest illegal but decriminalize simple possession. And you may observe this argument is from a strait-laced woman who pathologically hates the smell of marijuana and has evicted someone for smoking it before.

[Simon_Jester]

The issue should surely be "How do we ensure the least harm to the population?". Are recreational drugs harmful? Of course they are, but banning them has simply placed supply into the hands of the criminal fraternity in all its forms.

The question is whether the harm from banning them is worse than the harm from not banning them.

Ban them, and you have problems with crime and less-safe-than-necessary drugs. Decline to ban them, you have more widespread addiction to the drugs, which will have social consequences even when they're legal, as alcohol and tobacco have demonstrated.

Proper regulation of drugs would make the whole activity of recreational drug-taking safer, it would drastically reduce cash available to criminals, it would reduce costs of law-enforcement, it would eliminate the need for drug dens, it would enable drugs education (beyond "just say no") to be more acceptable to parents and would make it easier for addicts to seek treatment, as they are not criminalised. You could also tax them.

The only problem is that we already do all this with alcohol and tobacco and it's still a net cost to society. The matter of whether it'd be worth it is at least open for debate.

Yes, it would result in different issues/problems - I'm aware of that - but the benefits seem to me to be so overwhelming it has to be worth a try. Hell, the resources saved on law-enforcement could fund all sorts of beneficial programmes that might even reduce drug-taking below the levels they are today.

It'd be worth experimenting with and considering as a gradual phase-in, but I don't recommend going there in one big jump.

Or, as this article explains, cocaine and heroin are less addictive than Oreo cookies. So there's one argument in this thread flushed.

I think this revelation does more to call into question our definition of "addictive" than anything else; I don't imagine I'd be strong-willed enough to resist cocaine after years of childhood use as easily as I can resist Oreos in the supermarket.

It slightly increases the risk of heart attack, but not as much as smoking does! That's it. At least with Heroin you can construct a much better argument of how it will destroy your life and health.

I am very much in favour of legalizing Marijuana, Cocaine, Khat, Ketamine, probably Ecstasy, definitely Peyote simply to make Native American use less problematic. None of these have any particular risk except to really stupid people who would have died driving their car into a telephone pole while drunk if they didn't overdose.

I'm not confident about cocaine, and I don't know enough about ketamine to predict, but I would not object to legalizing the others.

Oh, and I made one more specific claim: Eliminating the criminalization of drug use reduces rates of drug consumption.

Do I have any evidence that legal drugs = less drug use?

Yes, I do.

An entire bloody country's worth!

Also rates of HIV infection go down, which is a nice side bonus.

Your article isn't displaying properly; do you have another one? I gather it's about Portugal but I can only see half of each line.

So in the end what we see is that we should outright legalize and regulate a large spectrum of existing illegal drugs, and keep the rest illegal but decriminalize simple possession. And you may observe this argument is from a strait-laced woman who pathologically hates the smell of marijuana and has evicted someone for smoking it before.

So that was what that was about...

Anyway, I'm not disagreeable to this- but it really, really depends on the drug.

[madd0ct0r]

Oh, and I made one more specific claim: Eliminating the criminalization of drug use reduces rates of drug consumption.

Do I have any evidence that legal drugs = less drug use?

Yes, I do.

An entire bloody country's worth!

Also rates of HIV infection go down, which is a nice side bonus.

Your article isn't displaying properly; do you have another one? I gather it's about Portugal but I can only see half of each line.

works fine for me:

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.

(See the world's most influential people in the 2009 TIME 100.)
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."

[Simon_Jester]

Thank you.

While I would prefer to have more than one data point before making a confident statement, the Portuguese case is certainly promising and suggests that targeted legalizations of certain drugs would be worth trying.