The War on Drugs Has Failed. Let’s Legalize and Regulate Drugs Instead.

from tapinto.net

By JILL LAZARE

July 21, 2015 at 5:01 PM

CRANFORD, NJ - Heroin overdose deaths in the United States have quadrupled since 2002. If that weren’t alarming enough, New Jersey’s rate of heroin overdose deaths is more than three times the national average and drug overdose is now the leading cause of accidental death in New Jersey. If it were not already clear, this recent surge in heroin deaths show that America’s drug laws are in need of drastic reform. We need to stop treating substance abuse as a criminal act and start treating it as a medical issue. We should end the War on Drugs and instead legalize and regulate the sale and use of narcotics.

I’m proud to say I have already been part of the fight to change New Jersey’s drug laws. In 2013 I testified to the legislature in favor of what is now the New Jersey Drug Overdose Prevention Act, which authorized paramedics and police officers to carry and administer the overdose prevention drug naloxone. I’m pleased that overdose deaths have declined since the law went into effect. Lives are being saved because our leaders realized that our drug laws were foolishly hurting vulnerable people instead of seeking to help those in need.

But there is still much work to be done. An obvious first step would be the legalization of marijuana. The success of legalization in Colorado and Washington should serve as a model to the rest of the country. Legalization will save millions of dollars in police and court costs, keep thousands of people out of jail and prison, and bring millions of dollars in new tax revenue into our state’s coffers. Simple possession of small amounts of more dangerous drugs by adults should be decriminalized immediately. Prohibition has only empowered drug dealers and organized crime.

Our drug laws should focus on treatment instead of punishment. We need to expand drug courts and alternative sentencing programs so that people whose crimes were a result of their substance abuse problems are not sent to prison to become career criminals. But we also need to get tougher on doctors who abuse their prescription writing power by overwriting scripts for pain relievers without seeing the patients in any meaningful way and then simply cutting the patients off without treatment or a plan to wean them off of the pain medication.  Such doctors create the addiction without liability or consequences to themselves. That is where the focus of the authorities should be, rather than on the people suffering from addiction.

The recent prison escape of Mexican drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman demonstrates the futility of an enforcement-only approach. This is the second time he has been able to escape from prison. How can you build a prison that will hold someone who has limitless resources? To me, it makes much more sense to cut off his source of wealth by legalizing and regulating narcotics. Prohibition has only empowered criminals like Guzman. We have tried every enforcement mechanism possible, and none of them have succeeded.

We will look back on the War on Drugs as one of the great follies in American history, alongside the prohibition of alcohol. The trajectory and failure of the two policies is strikingly similar. The prohibition of alcohol empowered bootleggers and the mafia much the same way the War on Drugs has empowered drug cartels. After 13 years of Prohibition, America came to its senses and legalized and regulated alcohol. It’s now time we do the same with drugs.

There is increasing bipartisan consensus for reform of our broken drug laws. While I have disagreed with Governor Christie on many issues, I was proud to work with him on the Overdose Prevention Act and have been heartened by his comments on drug policy reform. As a member of the New Jersey Assembly I will make reform of our state’s drug laws a top priority. I stand ready to work with members of both parties to help bring common sense and compassion to this issue. The War on Drugs has failed. It is time to bring it to an end.

-Jill LaZare is a candidate for New Jersey Assembly District 21

 

The opinions expressed herein are the writer's alone, and do not reflect the opinions of TAPinto.net or anyone who works for TAPinto.net. TAPinto.net is not responsible for the accuracy of any of the information supplied by the writer.

We're losing the war on drugs - U.S. should legalize their sale and then tax them: PennLive letters

from pennlive.com


By PennLive Editorial Board 
Email the author 
on July 10, 2015 at 8:30 AM, updated July 10, 2015 at 8:34 AM

The number of people murdered in the drug war in the United States is larger than the death toll of our military in Iraq and three times greater than the death rate of our soldiers killed in Afghanistan.

Mexican drug cartels kill more people than ISIS and they proliferate mainly in the United States - killing teens and adults indiscriminately.

The U.S. is on the verge of legalizing pot in many states. Why not all? In fact, why not legalize the sale of all drugs and tax them?

The U.S. is losing the war on drugs. Terrorists are using drug trafficking monies to fund their activities. Giving Afghanistan millions of dollar each year to stop growing poppy is just going toward making them cultivate and traffic more poppy, which becomes cocaine and heroin. This money is funding the Taliban, ISIL, al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, etc.  

If drugs were legal, the U.S. could license industry to sell them and then tax the profits. Some of the money could be used to rehabilitate addicts, and some could be used for internal needs. Addiction would be treated as a medical problem and not as a criminal problem. Jails would be less crowded. It is cheaper to pay for rehabilitation than it is to incarcerate someone for 10 or more years.

Alcohol and cigarettes were at one time illegal. This does not ensure that they run rampant now. Should we criminalize glue-sniffing?  

Stop the war on drugs, decriminalize them, and stop funding terrorism, all with one swift blow. 

ROCHELLE S. CLEAVER, Dillsburg 

Why Mexican billionaire Ricardo Salinas thinks drugs should be legalized

from reuters

By Ricardo Salinas

July 9, 2015

A group of protesters set fire to the wooden door of Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto’s ceremonial palace during a protest in Mexico City, November 8, 2014. Protesters were demanding justice for 43 students who were abducted and apparently murdered and incinerated by corrupt police in league with drug gang members in September. REUTERS/Edgard Garrido

“When Prohibition was introduced, I hoped that it would be widely supported by public opinion and the day would soon come when the evil effects of alcohol would be recognized. I have slowly and reluctantly come to believe that this has not been the result. Instead, drinking has generally increased; the speakeasy has replaced the saloon; a vast army of lawbreakers has appeared; many of our best citizens have openly ignored Prohibition; respect for the law has been greatly lessened; and crime has increased to a level never seen before,” John D. Rockefeller Jr., letter to Nicholas M. Butler, 1932

Did we learn anything from Prohibition?

Prohibition was a failure in the 1920s, and, for similar reasons, the so-called war on drugs has been a disaster. Forty years after Richard Nixon declared this war, consumption worldwide is up, violence has increased and the rule of law has collapsed, especially in Latin America.

Basic economics tells us that when there is artificial pressure on supply, prices go up and margins increase — the perfect incentives for criminal activities. The same mistake was made in the United States almost a century ago with Prohibition. As early as 1925, some observers started to see that this policy, far from stopping crime, was leading to the formation of large networks of well-funded crime syndicates.

Franklin Roosevelt was elected in 1932 partly due to his campaign promise to end Prohibition. People who originally favored Prohibition, such as John D. Rockefeller Jr., later fought for its repeal because of the devastating effects it had on agriculture and industry.

A world of crime

The dire results of the war on drugs are clear. Mexico is paying a very high price — a pound of flesh multiplied by a million– for a policy dictated in Washington with the clear support of the United Nations. At least 50,000 people have died in my country as a consequence of this policy in the past decade alone.

In a recent global report on homicides produced by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, it is suggested that poverty and inequality are the main factors that explain the increase in crime rates across Latin America. Curiously in Africa, a region much poorer than Latin America, homicide rates have not shot up and the U.N. report does not offer a coherent explanation why this is the case.

Nevertheless, the report offers valuable information. For example, in 2012, almost half a million people were murdered worldwide. More than a third of the killings took place in Latin America; Europe, by contrast, accounted for only 5% of the homicides. In most regions around the world, violence is decreasing, but not here.

The war on drugs is a war on Latin America

A great deal of the violence that is bringing down our region is a product of the war on drugs The criminal justice systems throughout Latin America and the United States have been undermined as the courts are clogged with victimless crimes such as drug possession. The prisons are overcrowded with victimless criminals. The United States, in particular, is a clear example of this phenomenon, with a quarter of the world’s incarcerations, almost half of them a product of drug-related felonies.

This generates impunity for criminals. They can’t all be caught, and they can’t all be prosecuted with criminal justice systems and law enforcement agencies that are so overwhelmed.

The U.N. report correctly points out that there is a clear correlation between levels of impunity and homicide rates, a phenomenon that is unmanageable in some regions of Mexico and Central America. It should be noted that seven of the eight most violent countries in the world are located on the cocaine route to the United States.

Countries such as Honduras, Venezuela, Belize and El Salvador reported rates of 90, 54, 45 and 41 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, respectively. These are intolerable levels. The inability of the state to bring murderers to justice is a key factor in explaining this violence. Something is definitely and fundamentally wrong in Latin American criminal justice systems, and this subversion of the justice systems is corroding everything else in its wake. The war on drugs is sustained by a circular logic in which the damage generated by this policy is attributed instead to drug-related activities in order to justify it, a perverse inference that generates never-ending violence.

We need to move on

It’s been more than 40 years since the war on drugs was declared in Washington. Mexico has blindly followed the lead of its northern neighbor throughout this period, and there is little to show for it beyond the rise of violence and the steady decomposition of society. The economic forces are too vast. This is a multibillion-dollar industry that has subverted social order and the rule of law. Prohibition only means that the state has renounced its right to regulate narcotics by leaving this activity and its enforcement at the sole discretion of the drug lords.

This war is ravaging our hemisphere. Many know this. But few have the courage to speak up. So here it is: Let’s legalize drugs and regulate them, starting with cannabis. It should be noted that campaigns against tobacco, which is more addictive than cannabis, have been successful. Let’s redirect scarce resources to healthcare and education to highlight the dangers of substance abuse and free up our law enforcement and judicial institutions to focus on violent crime, corruption and the enforcement of property rights, gradually reestablishing the rule of law.

The United Nations promised decades ago a “world free of drugs.” This never happened. Many more people are dying as a consequence of this policy than by consumption of illicit substances. Let’s face it, the war on drugs is a fiasco.