In its entirety,
a post from Boing Boing with news of how the most daring drug policy in Europe is working:
Here's a good
Boston Globe report on the first decade of Portugal's bold experiment with
drug decriminalization and increased treatment. Ten years ago, Portugal -- whose drug problem had been spiraling out of control -- decided to treat drug addiction as a public health matter, not as a criminal matter. They decriminalized possession of drugs, and increased treatment available to addicts, and experienced an immediate, dramatic and sustained drop in negative effects from drug use -- though the use of some drugs went up.
In this sense, one drug policy expert noted, the Portuguese experiment has become a sort of Rorschach test -- in the dark blobs on the page, people can see whatever they want to see. But Tom McLellan, the former deputy director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy under President Obama, said he's happy for the conversation. While not in favor of decriminalization, McLellan believes that the American debate over drug reform has become too polarized, with one side calling for incarceration and the other for legalization. "And I just don't buy it," McLellan said. The answer is likely somewhere in the middle, he believes, and perhaps that's where we can learn something from Portugal, a country that at least tried something new.
"I like that approach to drug policy," McLellan said. "Policy is really a product. And like a product, policy can be made better with experimentation and honest evaluation, rather than stupid polemic polarization of ideology."
4 comments:
The entire "economic" argument for drug criminalization is in the massive profits.
We are obsessed with Mexico and murder and "drug lords"... because that is all that is reported in our media.
It is obvious that massive profits are going to people who are wearing suits and ties.
We have drones that can zero in on a terrorist and his cousin sitting in a coffee shop in Yemen and take them out...
Yet we can not seem to spot mules carrying drugs in Afghanistan... Afghanistan where NATO controls the air space!!
Oh, I think it goes further than that. I'm certain that the US is complicit in the drug trade in Afghanistan as part of the price of keeping that treacherous toad Kahrzi happy. He's probably got all kinds of relatives making millions in the opium trade.
American are so delirious, we'd rather spend billions of fruitless dollars trying to staunch drug trade which will NEVER go away. Decriminalization would be good for the economy, too, in this time of fiscal peril.
Yes. We would have to look up the news back in spring 2010 when Karzai's brother or cousin got into a pissing match with some US envoy and there was a thinly veiled threat by him that he would tell all about the NATO troops involvement.
But you know what? Revelations that the US State Dept and military were involved to the eyeballs in facilitating the opium trade (as part of our ongoing campaign to bring the blessings of freedom to the Middle East, of course),would hardly cause an eye to bat in Congress or the media. We live in a wonderland that Alice would have trouble recognizing.
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