From Salon…
"In 2001, Portugal became the only EU-member state to decriminalize drugs, a distinction which continues through to the present. Last year, working with the Cato Institute, I went to that country in order to research the effects of the decriminalization law (which applies to all substances, including cocaine and heroin) and to interview both Portuguese and EU drug policy officials and analysts (the central EU drug policy monitoring agency is, by coincidence, based in Lisbon). Evaluating the policy strictly from an empirical perspective, decriminalization has been an unquestionable success, leading to improvements in virtually every relevant category and enabling Portugal to manage drug-related problems (and drug usage rates) far better than most Western nations that continue to treat adult drug consumption as a criminal offense."
Even with Obama bringing a measure of sanity to the power structure, so much arrant nonsense is still being talked about drug policy that I feel my head starting to explode. Everyone seems to forget that the vast profits in drug trafficking, that fund so much global mayhem, are created the very illegality of the product. Make it legal and they vanish. Drug legalization in the USA and Europe could be a domestic tax bonanza, and even, as an instrument of foreign policy, could stabilize both Afghanistan and Mexico. I have so much to write about all this that my other head wants to explode. But whether it will ever be published in this time of media crisis is a whole other matter.
"In 2001, Portugal became the only EU-member state to decriminalize drugs, a distinction which continues through to the present. Last year, working with the Cato Institute, I went to that country in order to research the effects of the decriminalization law (which applies to all substances, including cocaine and heroin) and to interview both Portuguese and EU drug policy officials and analysts (the central EU drug policy monitoring agency is, by coincidence, based in Lisbon). Evaluating the policy strictly from an empirical perspective, decriminalization has been an unquestionable success, leading to improvements in virtually every relevant category and enabling Portugal to manage drug-related problems (and drug usage rates) far better than most Western nations that continue to treat adult drug consumption as a criminal offense."
Even with Obama bringing a measure of sanity to the power structure, so much arrant nonsense is still being talked about drug policy that I feel my head starting to explode. Everyone seems to forget that the vast profits in drug trafficking, that fund so much global mayhem, are created the very illegality of the product. Make it legal and they vanish. Drug legalization in the USA and Europe could be a domestic tax bonanza, and even, as an instrument of foreign policy, could stabilize both Afghanistan and Mexico. I have so much to write about all this that my other head wants to explode. But whether it will ever be published in this time of media crisis is a whole other matter.
The secret word is 4261747368697421
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1 comment:
The wars only been going on for what? Eighty years?
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