Heroic Uruguay deserves a Nobel peace prize for legalising cannabis

[Judi Lynn]

Heroic Uruguay deserves a Nobel peace prize for legalising cannabis

The war on the war on drugs is the only war that matters. Uruguay's stance puts the UN and the US to shame

Simon Jenkins
The Guardian, Thursday 12 December 2013 15.35 EST

used to think the United Nations was a harmless talking shop, with tax-free jobs for otherwise unemployed bureaucrats. I now realise it is a force for evil. Its response to a truly significant attempt to combat a global menace – Uruguay's new drug regime – has been to declare that it "violates international law".

To see the tide turn on drugs is like trying to detect a glacier move. But moving it is. Wednesday's statute was introduced by the Uruguayan president, José Mujica, "to free future generations from this plague". The plague was not drugs as such but the "war" on them, which leaves the world's youth at the mercy of criminal traffickers and random imprisonment. Mujica declares himself a reluctant legaliser but one determined "to take users away from clandestine business. We don't defend marijuana or any other addiction, but worse than any drug is trafficking."

Uruguay will legalise not only cannabis consumption but, crucially, its production and sale. Users must be over 18 and registered Uruguayans. While small quantities can be grown privately, firms will produce cannabis under state licence and prices will be set to undercut traffickers. The country does not have a problem on the scale of Colombia or Mexico – just 10% of adults admit to using cannabis – and stresses that the measure is experimental.

This measured approach is still way in advance even of American states such as Colorado and Washington, which have legalised recreational as well as medical cannabis consumption, but not production. While the Uruguayan law does not cover other drugs, by depriving traffickers of an estimated 90% of their market, the hope is both to undermine the bulk of the criminal market and to diminish the gateway effect of traffickers pushing harder drugs.

More:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/12/heroic-uruguay-deserves-nobel-prize-cannabis

[Peace Patriot]

1. The 'war on drugs' has nearly destroyed western civilization.

It is exactly like Prohibition in the 1920s, only a thousand times worse, and folks in those days took only about a decade to grasp the fatal error of Prohibition and soon put an end to it, whereas the folks in our era have tolerated this horror for nearly half a century.

The evil impacts of the 'war on drugs' are many-fold and devastating, and include...

--prolonged imprisonment for millions of poor people guilty of only minor crimes--if guilty at all, the 'justice' system has become such a corrupt tool of the rich;

--the destruction of their lives, their children's lives, their spouses' wives, their extended families' lives, in the ways that prison destroys people, by subjecting them to long term violence, bullying, degradation, subjugation, bad food, overcrowding and dozens of other conditions that kill souls; harm also to communities, especially to minority communities; arbitrary confiscation of property--further impoverishment; massive deprivation of the right to vote--and on and on;

--the corruption of the justice system, the courts, the prison system and all policing agencies, from the Feds to the local sheriffs;

--the militarization of society; the furtherance of fascist elements of society;

--the utter WASTE of trillions of taxpayer dollars;

--the spread of this cesspool of fascist corruption to other countries, most notably and tragically to Latin American countries, where the "war on drugs" was used, in Colombia, for instance, as the excuse to brutally displace FIVE MILLION peasant farmers from the lands, and to murder thousands of people--most of them union leaders and other advocates of the poor, all this as prep for U.S. "free trade for the rich."

In some counties in this country, the local or state police will stop a car, claim to smell marijuana, and abuse and arrest the car's occupants and seize all of their property, and, before they ever find themselves in a court, that property becomes part of the police BUDGET. This is PLANNED: false arrests, based on lies, then grab the money, the car and anything else they can get their hands on. In the case of Federal "raids" on marijuana dispensaries, which occur even if the business is LEGAL in the state, the consequences to the people doing this LEGAL business are ruinous--lives, families, broken apart; everything they've accomplished destroyed; all their property--land, buildings, money, vehicles--taken, and this, too, occurs before any conviction.

The 'war on drugs' has become lawless in addition to everything else that it has become--a marauding monster, ripping individual people and society itself--all the values of western civilization--to pieces.

[Flatulo]

2. Applaud this move. The War on Drugs has led to the biggest abuse of State power since

Prohibition. Millions of lives crushed, freedoms lost, property confiscated - and for what? People smoking a weed that grows out if the ground. It's fucking insanity on a global scale.

Let's hope this 'experiment' spreads.