Eleven countries studied, one inescapable conclusion – the drug laws don’t work

Organised crime would target the legal-drug supply chain. Counterfeit medication making its way into legitimate supplies is already a problem.

When you tax something you create a space for the illicit market. See the UK for one example where very many cigarettes are counterfeit. And criminal gangs don't just sell real but untaxed product; they produce counterfeit product which can be more dangerous than the actual product. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-sussex-16786358

(I am strongly in favour of decriminalising all drugs)

>The ethical question is if drug use would go up and thus a legalise-drugs policy would be guilty of leading people down a bad and potentially deadly path. If the article is right that won't be so.

Historically it's worth remembering that governments are notorious for drug dealing.

Iran-Contra is the poster-child in the US (see also Gary Webb) but I'm not sure how many people know that the British Empire had significant funding from state-sanctioned narco-terrorism. See the history of the opium wars for details.

Some people claim the links are still there today. It may or may not be a coincidence that imports of Afghan opium increased after the US/UK invasion. The usual justification is that local warlords make most of their money from opium sales, and the West has to accept that if it wants to keep them on as mercenaries and political allies.

Bottom line is that prohibition doesn't seem to be applied consistently at nation-state level.

Meanwhile at US state level, prohibition brings obvious financial benefits to owners of privatised jails.

So given the history, I find it difficult to be anything but cynical about the supposedly moral basis for prohibition.

Clearly psychoactives are far less corrosive socially than - say - alcohol. But recommendations for rational scientific management of addictions are routinely ignored in favour of juvenile rhetoric about 'tough' action in public, and - not impossibly - profit in private.

So we are taxing drugs to go into medical care, which will be increased from all of the health-reltated problems due to increased drug use? If all drugs are legalized, drug testing should be mandatory for medical coverge/insurance. If you test positive, your rates are increased accordingly.

Before any of this happens, we ned to have tort reform. You can't sue a company for getting addicted or dying from the now legal drugs that they sell.It has been known for 50 years that smoking causes dancer, yet people still use the it, bad, cigarette companies.

In New York, they have had soda bans and in most parts of the country, there is a sin tax on cigaretts. Why are we so worried about these, yet even more addictive drugs re now going to be legalalized an fine?

In a now more health conscience society, the logic doesn't make sense. Hell, people here have even called McDonalds evil for selling fatty foods. Somehow selling heroin is a-ok.

> The ethical question is if drug use would go up and thus a legalise-drugs policy would be guilty of leading people down a bad and potentially deadly path.

Depends on the drug. Drugs can be objectively ranked based on the harm they do to users and others. For example, heroin is worst, alcohol is the second worst (so I've heard Dr David Nutt proclaim), crack third.

If less harmful drugs are used as substitutes for more harmful drugs -- cannabis in lieu of alcohol, for example -- the path will be 'good' and less deadly.

Alcohol related deaths each year are around 3 million, in the UK. Tobacco related deaths around 6 million...

I don't believe there's any amount of evidence that would move the current UK government on the legal status of cannabis et al. The only way drugs less dangerous than the current legalised drugs will be made legal is if most of the world legalises them first; thus, highlighting Britain's current draconian stance.

Alternatively, a political party such as the Liberal Democrats could come to power (unlikely!).

There's an 'interesting' logic used with drug such as cannabis, in Blighty:

* Illegal drugs are dangerous. * Cannabis is illegal, therefore cannabis is dangerous

On marijuana legalisation, I'm looking forward to the upcoming second wave of votes in the US.

If you get a chance to vote, please do! It has consequences not just for your state, but for the rest of the world.

I understand that the argument that drug legalization would bring additional tax revenue to the state is effective.

That is, however, a sad state of affair when hundreds of thousands are jailed or have their lives ruined for a victimless crime.

It is not unlike defending abolitionism on the ground that the freed slaves would contribute to the income tax.

> The ethical question is if drug use would go up and thus a legalise-drugs policy would be guilty of leading people down a bad and potentially deadly path. If the article is right that won't be so.

Why not pass a law with a clause stating that the legalization of drugs will be reversed if drug use goes (significantly) up?

> The ethical question is if drug use would go up and thus a legalise-drugs policy would be guilty of leading people down a bad and potentially deadly path.

I suspect you'd see recreational drug usage go up, but drug addiction go down. Legalization would decriminalize (obviously) and destigmatize addiction, which should lead to higher availability of treatment.

Exactly:

article: there is no direct link between being “tough on drugs” and tackling the problem.

Well, what problem is that?

If we define the problem as "property crime and collateral violence", then those tough-on-drugs laws directly cause the problem, beyond the shadow of any doubt.

That is the problem that anyone reasonable cares about, not what "immoral" things other people are doing to their bodies.

I've been having similar thoughts about the purposes behind the prohibition being misunderstood. There are many effects that the war on drugs is having, and the people that are executing the process are more aware than any of us what those effects are. As a clueless civilian, I have been attempting to come up with some completely conjectural ideas about what those might be:

- Strengthen law enforcement through constant practice, and provide revenue to supporting companies

- Siphon money from one industry (drug trade) to help support the government and therefore support other industries that it feels are more beneficial to society

- Stigmatize unproductive habits, conditioning society to more productive/controlled behavior, incarcerating individuals who resist to make the society seem more productive overall

I'm sure there are many intentions that are well known that might overlap with what I'm suggesting, but I think the main point is that the war on drugs is not for the purpose that most people assume: to eliminate drugs from society. I think in a lot of ways it intentionally has the opposite effect. Also I think if society would have tolerated alcohol prohibition that the government would have been happy to keep that going as well for similar reasons.

In ths US, drugs are basically the opiate of the masses. In particular, minorities. The drug laws are basically the rich white people saying: heads I win, tails you lose. As such, nothing will change. Nobody runs faster from a school with minority over-represenatation faster than a (white, affluent) liberal in an expensive zip-code.

> I'm not quite tin hat enough to think that they were actually created for these purposes

There doesn't have to be just one purpose. I think a lot of supposedly progressive legislation comes out of a union between genuine well-intended progressives and the special interest groups which will benefit from the actual version of the progressive legislation that ends up getting passed.

FWIW this article is about the UK where we don't usually have these issues.

You were downvoted for this an I'd like to hear the reason why. Ignoring the UK / US argument, it does feel like there's a lot of effort pumped into "fighting" drugs when it's fairly obvious it doesn't do anything to stop drug use. Which does call into question the many people who have full time jobs analysing and enforcing this work.

As though the government's prison system isn't for profit. Of course it is. That's exactly what all those jobs, tax dollars, and slave labor represent.

The for-profit prisons are nothing compared to the money being generated by the government in "non-profit" prisons. It's a small fraction of the prison system in the US.

The government puts innocent people in jail in numbers radically greater than the for-profit prison system; this spans everything from dirty cops, dirty prosecutors, dirty judges, and the government's drug war - and the government has been doing it to the tune of millions of innocent people put in prison over decades. And yet somehow the tiny corporate prison system is the big concern, it's laughable.

I wouldn't call prohibition a triumph of democracy; just a different kind of failure mode for democracy. There was a relative minority of the population that wanted prohibition and were able to form a very effective "lobbying" effort, otherwise known as destroy any candidate who was against prohibition in the primaries. It is the same type of thing we see today in issues such as gun control, where we have massive popular support for one side of the issue (increased background checks), but it is still politically dangerous to pursue it because of a powerful lobby.

I think Singapore honestly remains as a serious anomaly to political science. Defacto one party government with extremely illiberal policies and yet the people are happier, more educated and more well off than many other countries that have liberal democracies. What's further more surprising is that it remains very multiethnic and yet the people get along with others just fine unlike other parts of the world.

Japan could just be an outlier.

The people executed by Saudi Arabia eg [1] four people executed for possession of marijuana are not accounted as drug related deaths. Singapore also kills people for drug possession. Relative to this, drugs are pretty safe.

[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/08/19/us-saudi-execution...

How about reading the article?

The point the article makes is that the numbers are all over the place, irrespective of legal approach, so you have to look elsewhere than enforcement to find the causes for low rates of usage and death.

That e.g. Japan is lower than "decriminalized Portugal" is does not contradict this all the time numbers in Portugal were higher before decriminalization.

And Japan is high up on the suicide list. Maybe it's from a lack of self-medicating?

And Switzerland has a very low death-by-gun rate compared to most countries that allow ownership of guns.

How would that make sense as an argument in favor of all nations allowing gun ownership for all citizens? It wouldn't, because it's obviously a matter of culture. Different countries, different cultures, different results.

What's wrong about state run/controlled? Just like you control pharmacies.

> It might be true they don't work but do we really want the likes of Big Heroin, Big Cocaine and Big Marijuana like we have Big Tobacco?

That would certainly be better than what we have now. Big Tobacco does not kill people in turf wars over who gets to sell where, so I think Big Heroin would be an improvement over cartels and gangs. Maybe it is not the perfect solution, but Big Cocaine is likely going to be better than warring black market factions.

An issue with the government running it or taxing it like crazy is that behavior can still support a black market due to artificially high prices. There's a black market for cigarettes in NYC[0], driven by the high taxes. The government running things is not a silver bullet.

[0] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/03/cigarette-smuggling...

You might not have to worry about "Big Marijuana", as it seems much easier to grow your own Marijuana then it is to make your own cigarettes. There would be so much competition between big and small companies who are selling it. The following article was written in 2011 but I still think it makes an interesting point about the business of growing and selling marijuana vs tobacco.

"Why is marijuana banned and cigarettes legal? There are two reasons. They are the same two reasons why marijuana will never be legalized. Money and horticulture.

Approximately 20% of the population smokes, just over 40 million adults. That is tens of millions of dollars a day in local, state, and federal taxes.

The government has a captured cash cow in cigarette smokers. People cannot just grow tobacco and manufacture their own cigarettes. Tobacco is a land, labor, and time intensive crop. After it is harvested it must be cured, aged, and dried in a specific manner.

It would take a good sized plot of land, a lot of work, and about a year and a half for you to produce a few cartons of cigarettes. You need more than one plot of land as tobacco depletes soil and the crop must be rotated, or you must invest in expensive fertilizer and nutrient mixes. You cannot easily or economically grow tobacco to make cigarettes for personal consumption.

Marijuana, on the other hand, can be cultivated anyplace. You can grow enough in pots to continually supply you and your friends. If you have enough space you can turn it into a cash crop. All you need are seeds or plantings, and in a short time you can fly higher than a kite. Anyone, anyplace can grow marijuana. And they do.

The government cannot control, regulate, or easily tax pot. This is why marijuana will never be legalized. There is no way to make it a commercially viable and profitable product and no way to effectively tax it."

Read more: http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/middle-c... Follow us: @wtcommunities on Twitter

As a matter of fact, the scheduling of cannabis is under the gun right now:

http://blog.sfgate.com/smellthetruth/2014/10/30/tables-turne...

Some good history in there. Note the circular benefit to law enforcement: Schedule I prevents testing for medicinal qualities, so the government gets to try arguing that it can't be a medicine because it's not FDA approved. These people are the glue that hold the gears of progress together.

One idea that I have not thought through well, and don't know what the consequences would be, would be

to instead of possession of sale of the drugs being illegal, making it so that, for some collection of other crimes, if the crime was committed in a way related to the drug, the penalty for the crime would be greater.

The idea I was thinking is that this would create a disincentive to have the crimes and the drugs related, and might cut down on "drug crime" more than just removing the ban on the drugs?

I believe I've seen some say that even where a drug is legalize, there still remains a black market for that drug in that situation in order to avoid taxes on that drug. If tax avoidance had a greater fine if caught if money from (non medicinal) drugs was involved, would that perhaps discourage sellers from not paying taxes on the income, and as a result reducing the black market type stuff?

I don't know. I am not saying that I support this idea, its just an idea I thought was interesting.

I don't know what one would reasonably/realistically expect the results to be.

Does anyone have any ideas as to what results would result from such a law?