Tuesday, August 21, 2012

Intensify The War On Drugs -- In A Radically New Form

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By Andrew Bernstein

Drug Enforcement Administration special agents (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The War on Drugs must forcefully continue.

Toxic drugs destroy lives. No rational person wants to kill himself on drugs—or witness innocent others kill themselves in similar manner.

The first step of a rational, morally proper, and effective war on drugs is to fully legalize all drugs for consenting adults.

The government’s attempt to prevent drug use by legal prohibition is, morally and practically, a disaster. Full legalization will end this disaster and make possible a war on drugs both morally upright and practically effective.

Coercively preventing a consenting adult from ingesting his drug(s) of choice is a manifest violation of an individual’s right to his own life and body. The personal use—or sale—of drugs by or between consenting adults involves no initiation of force or fraud against innocent others; consequently, is not a crime. Currently, thousands of U.S. citizens are in prison for mere possession, use, or sale of banned drugs—and the sole crime is the government’s initiation of force against innocent individuals.

Such flagrantly immoral governmental policy leads to flagrantly impractical results.

For example, in 2010 the government spent $48 billion on its anti-drug crusade; between 1993 and 2003, roughly $180 billion. The result? According to the government’s 2010 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, more than 22 million Americans, aged 12 or older, use illegal drugs. Overall rate of drug use was up almost a full percentage point over the 2008 survey. The U.S. Office of Management and Budget said in understatement: “DEA [Drug Enforcement Administration] is unable to demonstrate its progress in reducing the availability of illegal drugs in the U.S.”

Over decades, the government’s war on drugs has incarcerated thousands of U.S. individuals innocent of initiating force or fraud—and robbed hundreds of billions of dollars from productive taxpayers; it has perpetrated all these crimes—and accomplished nothing.

There are reasons necessitating such failure. If substance X is in demand, i.e., desired by many who can afford it, then money can be made supplying it. If X is legal, it is supplied by honest businessmen; if illegal, by criminals. Either way, X is supplied. No government can repeal the laws of economics.

But the full truth is vastly worse—for the state’s war on drugs is responsible for an enormous increase in violent crime. For one thing, it makes criminal drug cartels immensely wealthy. Bloody gang warfare inevitably erupts as rival thugs vie for control of locales assuring profitable sales. The result is an endless string of murders, including of innocent victims caught in the crossfire.

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Monday, August 13, 2012

Jass Stewart defends ‘legalize all drugs’ remark during state rep debate

State representative candidate in favor of legalizing some drugs

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Emily J. Reynolds/The Enterprise

Councilor-at-large Jass Stewart is sworn in during the inauguration ceremony at Brockton City Hall on Monday, Jan. 2, 2012.

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Thursday, August 9, 2012

Uruguayan government proposes marijuana legalization bill

By Mariano Castillo, CNN

updated 3:08 PM EDT, Thu August 9, 2012

The government in Uruguay say the war on drugs has failed and have presented a bill legalizing the drug in the hope of controling its use.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

The Uruguayan government presented lawmakers with a bill this week
It would allow the government to control and sell marijuana
The bill did not specify how such a system would work

(CNN) -- With the intent of undermining the market for illegal drugs, Uruguay's government presented a bill to lawmakers that would legalize marijuana under a government monopoly.

The government of President Jose Mujica has argued that the war on drugs has failed, and that separating the market for marijuana from the market for harder drugs will have social and health benefits.

The bill was presented to congress on Wednesday, and includes no details of how legalization would be cultivated, regulated or sold. But it makes it clear that the government would be the sole manager of the "importation, production, acquisition ... commercialization and distribution of marijuana or its derivatives."

The idea was first announced in June, and at the time there were reports that such a law would require onerous identification and tracking requirements that consumers would object to.

The bill does not mention any requirements, presumably leaving it up to the congress to fill in the details.

Diego Canepa, pro-secretary of the presidency, said that current laws criminalizing the private sale of marijuana would remain in place, and campaigns warning of dangers of drug use would continue.

"No one is saying that marijuana is good. What is happening is that the foundation of the type of policy that we have followed for more than 50 years in this country have not had the expected results, and the worst thing that can happen to public policy is to not act when the evidence shows that persisting on the same path will not obtain different results," he said.

Consumption of marijuana is already legal in Uruguay, Canepa said. If passed, the law would make Uruguay the first country to produce and sell marijuana to its citizens.

While the bill itself was short on details of how such a system would actually work, it was accompanied by a 12-page letter that carefully laid out the argument for passage of the bill.

The goal is to create a government-run market that would "contribute to the reduction of risks and potential dangers that people who use marijuana for recreation or medical reasons face."

Read: Is Puerto rico the forgotten front in America's drug war?

Marijuana users put themselves in dangerous situations in the course of acquiring the substance, and expose themselves to other drugs that are more addictive and dangerous, the letter states.

The letter traces the history of drug use to pre-Columbian times, but focuses on the drug war of the last 50 years. The war on drugs has failed and had consequences that are worse than the drugs themselves, the letter states.

As evidence, the Uruguayan government points to a report last year by the Global Commission on Drugs, a body made up of several former presidents and other luminaries, who concluded that the war on drugs has failed to accomplish the goals it set.

Uruguay will not abandon its policy of combating drugs, but will do so through education of the harmful effects, rather than criminalization for marijuana, the letter states.

Marijuana is the most commonly used illegal substance in Uruguay, and drug traffickers net $30-40 million annual from the black market, the government said.

Friday, August 3, 2012

Human Rights Watch: Hundreds of Thousands Still Tortured in Name of Drug Treatment

ADDICTION

If we want to end human rights abuses in drug detention centers in Asia, we should start by addressing the abusive "treatment" practices being used in our own backyard

By MAIA SZALAVITZ | @maiasz | August 3, 2012 | 3

FIREHORSE / GETTY IMAGES

More than 350,000 people are held in filthy, overcrowded “drug treatment” centers — actually forced-labor camps — in Asia, where they are beaten and compelled to engage in harsh work for little or no pay, according to areport from Human Rights Watch (HRW). They are detained without due process, some tortured with electric shock, starved and deprived of food and water.

Although 12 U.N. agencies, including the World Health Organization and the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, called for the closure of these detention centers in March, little action has been taken, according to the new report. The centers are located mainly in China, Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand and Laos. Even countries that are against human rights abuses appear to be funding them inadvertently, according to the medical journal theLancet: in June, the American government pledged $400,000 toward the upkeep of one such abusive program, targeted in a previous HRW report, though the State Department denies that human rights abuses take place there.

Drug users and other people considered nuisances, such as the homeless, are often rounded up by the police and taken to these programs, where they may be held for years without trial or the right to appeal their confinement. Children as young as 7 are often detained in these programs with adults, and sexual and physical abuse is common. There is little financial incentive to close the centers or release the prisoners, however: their labor is free or extremely cheap and the goods they toil to produce can bring big profits to local companies.

As TIME reported last year, some centers in Vietnam produce what have come to be known as “blood cashews,” sold on the international market. Vietnam is the world’s largest exporter of processed cashews and the U.S.’s top supplier of the nut. But most consumers have no idea that the nuts are processed by what is essentially slave labor, in abysmal conditions that are advertised as a treatment for addiction:

[Vietnam's drug detainees] spend six to 10 hours a day husking and skinning nuts. It is drab and unhealthy work: cashew oil is caustic and burns the skin. “I would sometimes inhale the dust from the skins, and that would make me cough,” one man told HRW. “If the fluid from the hard outer husk got on your hands, it made a burn.” For their labor, detainees are paid nothing or a few dollars a month. Even this pittance is whittled away, says HRW, since some centers charge detainees for food, lodging and what they term “managerial fees.”

(MORE: From Vietnam’s Forced-Labor Camps: ‘Blood Cashews’)

The forced labor is believed to “treat” the detainees’ drug addictions, but it fails miserably. Human Rights Watch reports on the case of Que Phong, a Vietnamese man who voluntarily sought treatment for heroin addiction in 2004, when he was in his late 20s. Asked why he and others agreed to perform cashew-husking work for little to no pay, even though it did not help their addictions, Que Phong explained, “If you refused to work they slapped you. If you still refused to work then they sent you to the punishment room. Everyone worked.” In the punishment room, inmates were held for weeks at a time in a small, crowded space with no beds and were allowed to shower only once a week.

None of this, of course, is effective in treating addiction. When released from their stints in abusive detention centers, most people return to drugs. Research shows, in fact, that such traumatic experiences increase the risk of relapse and the severity of addictions.

Yet the misguided idea that harsh treatment helps solve drug problems is widespread, stretching far beyond Asia. The tactics used in U.S. treatment centers — including boot camps, rehabs, emotional growth boarding schools and wilderness programs — tend to be less extreme, but they have included beatings, forced labor, deprivation of sleep and food, and excessive exercise to try to break participants.

Just this week, California legislators moved to regulate private boot camps for teens in response to a widely circulated video of youths in one such program, who were made to drink water until they vomited and forced to engage in endurance exercise beyond their capacities while instructors yelled at and taunted them. Earlier this year, another California boot camp instructor was charged with five counts of sexually assaulting and raping two 14-year-old girls in 2004; it’s not clear whether these particular charges were connected to the boot camp, but the instructor has previously been charged with physically abusing boot camp youth.

Over the years, dozens of teens have died in such programs, which are unregulated at the federal level and continue to be permitted to operate despite data showing they are ineffective. Several states — including Florida,Maryland and South Dakota — have endured scandals involving widespread abuse or deaths of children in state-run or state-funded programs.

As in Asia, the U.S. uses its courts to sentence addicted people and youth to tough boot camp programs — again, despite evidence showing that they don’t work. If we want to urge Asia to end its abusive practices in addiction treatment, we can’t ignore similar problems in our own backyard.

MORE: Viewpoint: Why Tough-Love Rehab Won’t Die

Maia Szalavitz is a health writer for TIME.com. Find her on Twitter at @maiasz. You can also continue the discussion on TIME Healthland’s Facebook page and on Twitter at @TIMEHealthland.

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