Eleven countries studied, one inescapable conclusion – the drug laws don’t work
Alan Travis, home affairs editor
The Home Office comparison of international drug laws, published on Wednesday, represents the first official recognition since the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act that there is no direct link between being “tough on drugs” and tackling the problem.
The report, which has been signed off by both the Conservative home secretary, Theresa May, and the Liberal Democrat crime prevention minister, Norman Baker, is based on an in-depth study of drug laws in 11 countries ranging from the zero-tolerance of Japan to the legalisation of Uruguay.
The key finding of the report, written by Home Office civil servants, lies in a comparison of Portugal, where personal use is decriminalised, and the Czech Republic, where criminal penalties for possession were introduced as recently as 2010.
“We did not in our fact-finding observe any obvious relationship between the toughness of a country’s enforcement against drug possession, and levels of drug use in that country,” it says. “The Czech Republic and Portugal have similar approaches to possession, where possession of small amounts of any drug does not lead to criminal proceedings, but while levels of drug use in Portugal appear to be relatively low, reported levels of cannabis use in the Czech Republic are among the highest in Europe.
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/oct/30/drug-laws-international-study-tough-policy-use-problem
= new reply since forum marked as read
Years ago I read an article by, IIRC, a professor of neurology or neuropsychiatry or some other similar esoteric discipline at UCLA. Said professor argued that blanket prohibitions on psychoactive substances were supremely idiotic for a simple reason - human consciousness is reflexive and curious about itself and its states of existence. For all of recorded history humans have sought to alter and explore their consciousness through countless methods, the most prominent of which have been asceticism and psychoactive chemicals.
Curiosity about altered states of consciousness is built in to the human brain. It has been postulated, rather convincingly, that the discovery that you could make a mind-altering "drug" by fermenting grains (we call it "beer"
was one of the things that contributed to the establishment of permanent human settlements and the eventual decline of hunter/gatherer culture in many parts of the world with ancient Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt being the two most prominent examples.
Modern society, especially a modern society informed and shaped by capitalism and the appalling Abrahamic religions, seeks to stamp out virtually all natural human tendencies in the name of control. Anything that threatens to break the control of the authorites is a dire threat indeed. Things that alter consciousness and lead to different ways of thinking are the most dangerous of all.
