Fighting drugs through jujitsu
Jan 18th 2011, 16:59 by M.S.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/01/harm_reductionVIA Kevin Drum, Keith O'Brien reports in the Boston Globe on a new study showing positive results from Portugal's nine-year-old experiment in drug decriminalisation. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, rates of hard- and soft-drug usage in Portugal were soaring, along with hepatitis and HIV rates. Faced with both a public health crisis and a public relations disaster, Portugal’s elected officials took a bold step. They decided to decriminalize the possession of all illicit drugs—from marijuana to heroin—but continue to impose criminal sanctions on distribution and trafficking. The goal: easing the burden on the nation’s criminal justice system and improving the people’s overall health by treating addiction as an illness, not a crime.
But nearly a decade later, there’s evidence that Portugal’s great drug experiment not only didn’t blow up in its face; it may have actually worked. More addicts are in treatment. Drug use among youths has declined in recent years. Life in Casal Ventoso, Lisbon’s troubled neighborhood, has improved. And new research, published in the British Journal of Criminology, documents just how much things have changed in Portugal. Coauthors Caitlin Elizabeth Hughes and Alex Stevens report a 63 percent increase in the number of Portuguese drug users in treatment and, shortly after the reforms took hold, a 499 percent increase in the amount of drugs seized—indications, the authors argue, that police officers, freed up from focusing on small-time possession, have been able to target big-time traffickers while drug addicts, no longer in danger of going to prison, have been able to get the help they need.
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...newspapers in the Netherlands reported today on a very American-seeming scandal: a website set up by an association of heroin users in Amsterdam, intended to provide addicts with advice on health and safe non-infectious usage, could be read as effectively providing how-to advice on how to shoot up, accessible to web surfers of any age. A conservative-leaning Dutch youth expert wants the site to be somehow restricted to those over the age of 12. But it's instructive to read the reaction of a council member from the right-wing, laissez-faire VVD party, which currently leads the Dutch governing coalition:
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This is a perfectly rational conservative perspective. And the fact is that
Amsterdam's heroin-addict population has been stable or falling for two decades. That's even though, since 2002, the Dutch authorities have been doing something even more radical than Portugal's for heroin users: they've been giving them free heroin, as long as they show up to inject at government-run "safe injection points", under the eyes of police and health staff. Dutch drug researchers now say that the youth population "doesn't relate to hard drugs at all", and that there's no danger that Dutch kids reading the advice site will find heroin use attractive. They're more likely to find it pathetic.
Drug abuse is driven to a significant extent by fashion. If there's one thing government has going for it, it's the ability to make anything unfashionable. This insight into government's jujitsu-like capability to render the cool uncool should be more obvious to conservatives than to liberals. And yet, in America, the very people who are most distrustful of government's ability to do anything right are the ones who are steadfastly opposed to letting the government use its secret power of deadly uncoolness to fight drug abuse. It seems like a huge wasted opportunity.
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