War on drugs

[jugoso]

In a report formally released Tuesday, the Global Commission on Drug Policy — which includes six former presidents, British business magnate Richard Branson and former Supreme Court of Canada Justice and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour — condemns tough enforcement policies that focus on criminalization and punishment over prevention and public health programs

The following are some of the ways in which the report mentions the WoD has failed:

• has failed at preventing drug use and protecting people's health
  
• fuels the global HIV/AIDS epidemic by driving people away from treatment.
  
• is not slowing drug use
  
• has failed to reduce the supply and demand,
  
• prohibition laws have also led to a "war on users," in which people are driven underground, away from prevention and care
  
• a tough-on-drugs policy spreads violence and leads to mass incarceration.
  

The document calls on political leaders from all levels of government to ditch "repressive" drug policies in favour of an "evidence-based" approach

In other words: the document states that government should change their policies that have proven to be ineffective and in fact make the situation worse for policies based on empirical evidence that have shown to have beneficial social / financial results. On the surface, it seems to make sense. Unfortunately this one will probably get filed with all the other reports that have been stating the same thing for some time now.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2012/06/26/drug-war-hiv-aids-policy.html

[Babe Ruth]

Prohibition has been an abject failure, for nearly a century now. Good on Branson et al for speaking the obvious truth.

[+OverSword]

I work with a guy that has a good story about how stupid the war on drugs and in particular George Bush sr.'s zero tolerance policy is.

When he was fifteen his uncle bought a boat, and he took him out on a weekend cruise in the puget sound. At some point the coast guard boarded the boat for a random, routine search. My co-worker had packed in his things one pipe load of marajuana. The coast guard found it and confiscated the boat. Zero tolerance means no room for being reasonable. Your fifteen year old nephew brings $3.00 worth of pot on board and the government seizes your brand new boat???????

FAIL

_{edited for spelling}

Edited June 26, 2012 by OverSword

[F3SS]

Pot should be legalized, controlled and taxed like beer and cigs. I won't say it's harmless, though it mostly is, but it's safer than alcohol and cigs. The gov could rake in some serious dough by taxing it. Instead they waste serious dough by incarcerating harmless offenders and possessors.

I say scrap the WoD and build a big ass fence and pay a ton of trained servicemen to guard the borders with the money saved from the wasteful WoD. With legal pot taxes and money saved from scraping a near useless program building a fence and paying more border patrol would not only make financial sense it would also make the some of the harder drugs, like coke, harder to get through the border it would also help control the illegal immigration problem exponentially.

Legal weed and no WoD kills a lot of birds with just a few stones.

Edited June 26, 2012 by Is it for real

[jugoso]

The war on drugs is a "destructive" failure that is fuelling the transmission of HIV/AIDS, according to a former Supreme Court justice.

Louise Arbour, who has also served as UN High Commissioner on Human Rights, said a "repressive" approach to drug policies is not only a public health disaster — but a colossal waste from an economic perspective as well.

"The current cost world-wide of the law enforcement model, the repressive model, is astronomical and frankly is becoming unsustainable," Arbour told CBC News. "It's a massive industry that includes not only prisons, but increasingly heavy and sophisticated law-enforcement operations."

Arbour is a member of the Global Commission on Drug Policy, which formally released a landmark report Tuesday suggesting the criminalization of drug use is driving the global pandemic of HIV/AIDS. While the report did not drill down on the costs associated with law enforcement and incarceration, she hopes the commission will delve into the global finances in its next stage.

Arbour said political leaders must recognize that by investing huge amounts of money in enforcement and incarceration, they are depriving their governments of public health dollars that could be better applied to prevention and treatment.

Repressive drug policies that target intravenous drug users drive them underground into extremely unsafe practices that contribute to the spread of HIV/AIDS, Arbour said. One-third of new infections outside of sub-Saharan Africa are linked to intravenous drug use, she noted.

The report urges a shift in focus from treating addiction as a criminal justice issue to a public health one. Arbour said the war on drugs is putting lives at risk.

"It contributes to the spread of very deadly diseases by actually scaring people away from what should be their approach, which is to seek treatment and to the extent that their addiction is so intense that it can not be eradicated or at least not overnight, to accompany them through health practices that are safe: needle exchanges, safe injection sites … all these practices that are evidence-based rather than ideologically based," she said

[Babe Ruth]

I work with a guy that has a good story about how stupid the war on drugs and in particular George Bush sr.'s zero tolerance policy is.

When he was fifteen his uncle bought a boat, and he took him out on a weekend cruise in the puget sound. At some point the coast guard boarded the boat for a random, routine search. My co-worker had packed in his things one pipe load of marajuana. The coast guard found it and confiscated the boat. Zero tolerance means no room for being reasonable. Your fifteen year old nephew brings $3.00 worth of pot on board and the government seizes your brand new boat???????

FAIL

_{edited for spelling}

Sadly, variations on that story are fairly common, all around the country. Many innocent people have been killed by "mistakes" of zealous authorities.