5 Reasons People Who Hate Drugs Should Want to End the Drug War

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/5-reasons-people-who-hate-drugs-should-want-end-drug-war

1. Drug War = Mass Incarceration and Lack of Treatment

Let’s start with people struggling with drug misuse or addiction. Our drug war doesn’t keep drugs out of the hands of people who want drugs; drugs are as plentiful as ever. But getting caught with drugs can land someone in a cage for many years. Spending time behind bars is not the way to help someone who has a drug problem and most likely will make that person more traumatized. The sad fact is that we spend $50,000 a year incarcerating an individual for a drug offense, yet at the same time there is not enough money to offer treatment to people who want it.

2. Drug War = More Overdose and More Dying

People who have lost a loved one to an overdose feel unimaginable pain and often want to wipe drugs off the face of the earth. Tragically, the drug war leads to many such deaths. Despite 40-plus years trying to eliminate drug use, there is an overdose crisis in this country right now. Overdose is now neck-and-neck with car accidents as the leading cause of accidental death in the country. Most people who experience an overdose are with friends when it happens and would survive if someone called 911. But people often don’t call 911 because they are too afraid that the police will show up and arrest them. It is outrageous that people are discouraged from calling 911 to save a life because of laws that pit their interest to help a person who is ODing against their fear of being arrested.

***SNIP

3. Drug War = Unsafe Neighborhoods

People who live in neighborhoods where drug dealing is out in the open and therefore are afflicted by the violence associated with the drug trade are some of the most vocal supporters of the drug war. Of course people want and need to feel safe in their neighborhoods. But most "drug-related" violence stems not from drug use, but from drug prohibition. That was true in Chicago under alcohol kingpin Al Capone, and it is true now. The killings and violence in many U.S. cities are not from marijuana or other drug use, but because prohibition makes the plants worth more than gold, and people are willing to kill each other over the profits to be made.

4. Drug War = More Danger for Our Children

Many people may know the drug war is a failure but are afraid to change course because they worry about their children and want to keep them safe. Ironically, the drug war is a complete failure when it comes to keeping young people from using drugs. Despite decades of DARE programs with the simplistic "Just Say No" message, 50 percent of teenagers will try marijuana before they graduate and 75 percent will drink alcohol. Young people often claim it is easier for them to get marijuana than alcohol because drug dealers don’t check IDs. Young people also feel the brunt of marijuana enforcement and make up many (and in some places most) of the arrests for marijuana offenses. Arresting young people will often cause more damage than drug use itself. Teenagers need honest drug education to help them make responsible decisions. Safety should be the number-one priority. We have dramatically reduced teen smoking without tobacco prohibition and without a single arrest.

[In_The_Wind]

1. ~ K ~

[Fumesucker]

2. A little more data from the CDC

http://www.cdc.gov/homeandrecreationalsafety/rxbrief/

In a period of nine months, a tiny Kentucky county of fewer than 12,000 people sees a 53-year-old mother, her 35-year-old son, and seven others die by overdosing on pain medications obtained from pain clinics in Florida.1 In Utah, a 13-year-old fatally overdoses on oxycodone pills taken from a friend’s grandmother.2 A 20-year-old Boston man dies from an overdose of methadone, only a year after his friend also died from a prescription drug overdose.3

These are not isolated events. Drug overdose death rates in the United States have more than tripled since 1990 and have never been higher. In 2008, more than 36,000 people died from drug overdoses, and most of these deaths were caused by prescription drugs.4

The role of prescription painkillers
Although many types of prescription drugs are abused, there is currently a growing, deadly epidemic of prescription painkiller abuse. Nearly three out of four prescription drug overdoses are caused by prescription painkillers—also called opioid pain relievers. The unprecedented rise in overdose deaths in the US parallels a 300% increase since 1999 in the sale of these strong painkillers.4 These drugs were involved in 14,800 overdose deaths in 2008, more than cocaine and heroin combined.4

The misuse and abuse of prescription painkillers was responsible for more than 475,000 emergency department visits in 2009, a number that nearly doubled in just five years.6

More than 12 million people reported using prescription painkillers nonmedically in 2010, that is, using them without a prescription or for the feeling they cause.7

The role of alcohol and other drugs
About one-half of prescription painkiller deaths involve at least one other drug, including benzodiazepines, cocaine, and heroin. Alcohol is also involved in many overdose deaths.8

[xchrom]

4. +1

[Scuba]

6. Number of deaths from marijuana overdose = Zero.

Ever.

[MichaelHarris]

3. I wonder

have you ever seen the damage to a family heroin does? Have you ever seen a family put out on the streets because a bread winner becomes an addict? Have you ever seen a friend shoot up his dying Dad's morphine and die right in front of your eyes? I have. Get back to me on your desire to end the drug war when you've seen those things. Some things need to be regulated, some things need to be taken off the street.

[smokey nj]

5. I've seen it in my own family and I think the war on drugs should be ended.

The war on drugs does absolutely nothing to prevent what you describe. It makes things worse.

[pgallahue]

7. From the New Statesman

New Zealand, legal highs and sensible supply-side policies

Existing policy in the UK is rooted in the false assumption that if you make something illegal, people will stop doing it.

BY KASIA MALINOWSKA-SEMPRUCH

The UK government could learn a lot from New Zealand about how to sensibly control the proliferating supply of so-called “legal highs”, according to the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Drug Policy Reform.

While governments in Europe and the United States frantically ban substances to keep up with new synthetic drugs, lawmakers in New Zealand are using reason and a sensible legislative process to “to protect vulnerable consumers, particularly young people.”

Yet far from being another ham-fisted crackdown on drugs, the New Zealand proposal represents the first steps to a regulated market, which would require any new substances to go through a lengthy testing process before they could be approved for legal sale.

Potential manufacturers of new psychoactive substances will have to submit to roughly $180,000 NZD (£95,000 GBP) in application fees plus an additional NZ$1m to NZ$2m (around £526,000 to £1.05m) in costs to test each product they want to sell.

And there are strict penalties for attempts to bypass the law, which could go into effect later this year, including up to eight years in prison.

This is a monumental development for a number of reasons.

First, it has always been difficult to separate the impact of drugs from the impact of bad policies (as the peers group rightfully acknowledged). There is no doubt that so-called “legal highs” (sold as plant food, collector’s items or bath salts) can be very dangerous. But every time they are banned, new – even more hazardous – substitutes hit the market to take their place.

This creates a “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” situation where we find ourselves wishing we were only facing the original adversary. Consider that many synthetic substances in Europe are substitutes for cannabis. In 2011, the European Union officially notified 49 new psychoactive substances through its early warning system, 23 of which were synthetic cannabinoids.

While there are risks to using cannabis that should certainly be addressed, no-one is ever known to have suffered a fatal overdose on it and its health impacts are considerably better understood than its synthetic counterparts.

“Evidence presented here indicates that, paradoxically, the banning of one drug can make the situation worse by stimulating the production of yet more new, unknown and potentially dangerous substances,” the All-Party group writes.

The New Zealand policy aims to halt the legislative incentive to develop more new drugs.

Furthermore, one very serious danger of current policies on synthetic substances is that their main purpose for being is to evade accountability. As it stands, legal highs – though often using banned components – exist in a grey area. As various pieces of legislation scramble to control them, various substances often remain unregulated, unknown and out of control. No one knows their impacts and the only way to find out is by hard, sometimes deadly, experience.

And once the system takes control – via criminal sanctions – the process begins again with newer more enigmatic substances emerging.

“Each new substance may be more harmful than the substance it replaces,” the report adds. “But more than anything, young people are taking substances whose content and strength are unknown to them. The risks of harm/overdose must be greater than for well established substances.”

Which leads us to the most important factor in this new policy -- it may actually tell us something about prohibition in general.

In 2008, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime discussed unintended consequences of the current control system. One was referred to as “substance displacement” – which is to say, “If the use of one drug was controlled, by reducing either supply or demand, suppliers and users moved on to another drug with similar psychoactive effects, but less stringent controls … The increasing popularity of synthetic drugs can be better understood also in this light.”

This comes very close to acknowledging that potentially harmful legal highs are a byproduct of prohibition.

Existing drug policies are generally rooted in the false assumption that if you make something illegal, people won’t use it and hence they will be protected from its harms. In the end, the exact opposite tends to be true because once something is illegal, the standard policy levers of government are out of reach.

As the All-Party group writes, “A useful feature of New Zealand’s planned policy is to assess both the harms arising from a particular substance and the harms arising from controlling it.”

Might we the UK also be better served by begin regulatory processes to understand the drugs that people are taking and developing policies that address their relative risks?

That is precisely what New Zealand has started doing. It’s worth a closer look.

Kasia Malinowska-Sempruch is the director of Open Society Foundations Global Drug Policy Program

[SidDithers]

9. Welcome to DU...

In order to adhere to copyright rules, could you please edit you post to include just 4 paragraphs from the article, and add a link to the article so DUers can go read the rest of it at New Statesman.

Cheers
Sid

[Blue_Tires]

8. Good points, but I think the "framing" is a little off

We have to start by acknowledging that the "Drug War" hasn't been about stopping drugs in a long, long time, assuming it ever was....