Italy overturns 'absurd' drug law equating marijuana and hard drugs

[DeSwiss]

Published time: February 14, 2014 16:08


[font size=1]AFP Photo / Luis Robayo[/font]

Italy’s constitutional court has overturned a controversial law equating cannabis with cocaine and heroin. The decision could see around 10,000 people released from the country’s overburdened jails. The court ruled the law was “illegitimate,” without elaborating further.

The law, passed by former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi in 2006, has been blamed for Italy’s swelling prison population, as sentences for selling, growing or possessing marijuana effectively tripled. Official data shows that Italian prisons are operating beyond capacity, with 62,000 inmates residing in facilities meant to house a maximum of 48,000.

The prisoners’ rights group Antigone claims that 40 percent of all inmates are currently serving sentences for drug crimes. Following Friday’s verdict, the previous drug law and its far more lenient sentencing regime automatically takes effect.

Opinions on the issue clearly cut down party lines in the country’s centrist coalition government. Senator Carlo Giovanardi, one of the architects of the tough law, said the ruling was a "devastating choice from a scientific viewpoint and in the message it sends to young people that some drugs are less dangerous than others," Reuters reports.

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- It sends the message to young people that some drugs are less dangerous than others? You mean it sends the message of truth? What a concept! I can see why you're worried -- this thing could catch-on. Then where will you be? For lying-ass politicians, unemployed most likely......

[Ghost in the Machine]

1. K&R!! n/t

[DeSwiss]

2. Italian Overcrowded Prison System Close to Collapse....

[Ghost in the Machine]

3. Yes, I read about that in the article......

They need to do the same thing here in the U.S. because we have massive overcrowding, too. They need to change the drug laws, then overturn the convictions of all non-violent drug offenders and turn them loose.

We have a huge problem in this Country, and it's called the "For Profit Prison Industrial Complex". It's a hungry beast, and it takes billions of dollars a year to feed it, but it just keeps growing! Legalization, Taxation and Regulation would put it on one hell of a diet though! We could use those extra billions of dollars to start rebuilding our infrastructure and creating jobs for tens of thousands of American workers.

In 2012, Richard Branson did an article for cnn.com entitled "War on drugs a trillion dollar failure". Here's an excerpt:

Here we are, four decades after Richard Nixon declared the war on drugs in 1971 and $1 trillion spent since then. What do we have to show for it?

The U.S. has the largest prison population in the world, with about 2.3 million behind bars. More than half a million of those people are incarcerated for a drug law violation. What a waste of young lives.

In business, if one of our companies is failing, we take steps to identify and solve the problem. What we don't do is continue failing strategies that cost huge sums of money and exacerbate the problem. Rather than continuing on the disastrous path of the war on drugs, we need to look at what works and what doesn't in terms of real evidence and data.

The facts are overwhelming. If the global drug trade were a country, it would have one of the top 20 economies in the world. In 2005, the United Nations estimated the global illegal drug trade is worth more than $320 billion. It also estimates there are 230 million illegal drug users in the world, yet 90% of them are not classified as problematic.

In the United States, if illegal drugs were taxed at rates comparable to those on alcohol and tobacco, they would yield $46.7 billion in tax revenue. A Cato study says legalizing drugs would save the U.S. about $41 billion a year in enforcing the drug laws.

http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/06/opinion/branson-end-war-on-drugs/

It's well worth clicking the link and reading the entire article. It's high time (pardon the pun) that our elected dumbasses get together, pull their heads out of their asses and take a look around at what's *REALLY* happening to our Country!

Peace,

Ghost