George Soros
FT: May 5, 2014

The war on drugs has been a $1tn failure. For more than four decades, governments around the world have pumped huge sums of money into ineffective and repressive anti-drug efforts. These have come at the expense of programmes that actually work such as needle exchanges and substitution therapy. This is not just a waste of money, it is counterproductive.

The London School of Economics has just completed perhaps the most thorough account of the war on drugs done to date. The conclusion, backed by five Nobel Prize-winning economists: it has done more harm than good.

Drug prohibition has created an immense black market, valued by some at $300bn. It shifts the burden of “drug control” on to producer and transit countries such as Afghanistan and Mexico. This approach also fails to grapple with a basic truth: drug markets are highly adaptive. Repress the business in one country and it springs up elsewhere.

Consider Colombia. When its law enforcement agencies made progress cracking down on the country’s cocaine trade, much of the criminal business and the violence that goes with it moved to Mexico. The LSE report estimates that after 2007, Colombia’s interdiction policies accounted for more than 20 per cent of the rise in Mexico’s murder rate.

Bogotá had a lot of mayhem to export. The explosion of the illegal drug market between 1994 and 2008 “explains roughly 25 per cent of the current homicide rate in Colombia. That translate into about 3,800 more homicides per year on average that are associated with illegal drug markets and the war on drugs”, according to the report. This type of violence takes a massive economic toll; corporations relocate, foreign investment dries up, industries decline and citizens flee in search of a better life.

The costs are not limited to producer countries; consumer nations suffer as well.

This is especially so in the US, which has less than 5 per cent of the world’s people but almost 25 per cent of the planet’s incarcerated population. Most are drug and other non-violent offenders for whom drug treatment and other alternatives to incarceration would probably prove cheaper and more effective in reducing recidivism and protecting society. Worldwide, 40 per cent of the 9m people who are incarcerated are behind bars for drug-related offences – and that figure is only likely to rise, as arrests of drug offenders in Asia, Latin America and west Africa are increasing steadily.

Despite the epic scale of human wreckage, services that could save lives and cut down on the costs to society go underfunded, or not funded at all.

(read the full article at FT)

By Marc Emery
Cannabis Culture: May 5, 2014

Dear Friends in the United States,

The US Sentencing Commission has just made a drug sentence amendment referred to as “Drugs Minus 2” that lowers the sentencing guidelines by 2 points, which, for newly sentenced drug offenders, will reduce their sentence by, on average, eleven months, effective on November 1, 2014.

What this amendment doesn’t do is apply retroactively to all currently incarcerated non-violent US drug war prisoners. I need your help in trying to change that.

As you may be aware, US federal penalties for drug offenses are among the most severe and unforgiving in the world. What I need my American friends to do is send a letter to the US SENTENCING COMMISSION and urge them to make this new AMENDMENT retroactive so all currently incarcerated federal non-violent drug prisoners, including those sentenced for marijuana offenses, have some time shaved off their sentences.

As my sentence ends in 2 months, on July 9, I do not benefit by this proposed amendment.

It would be tremendously appreciated by the over 100,000 non-violent drug war prisoners in US federal prisons if compassionate US citizens would write a brief letter to:

The Office of Public Affairs
U.S. Sentencing Commission
One Columbus Circle, N.E.,
Suite 2-500,
Washington, DC, 20002-8002

Please send a letter similar to or exactly as follows:

Re: Retroactive Application of Drug Amendment 3: Drugs Minus-2

Dear Member of the U.S. Sentencing Commission;

I am writing you as a US citizen in favor of the retroactive application of the recent amendment 3; commonly known as Drugs Minus-2 to the federal drug guidelines. I believe the benefit of this amendment should apply to all of the 100,000+ non-violent drug offenders currently incarcerated in US federal prisons, as well as those newly sentenced after November 1, 2014, when the new guidelines will take effect.

The Commission’s data reflects that public safety was not endangered by the retroactive application of the crack cocaine sentencing amendments. I urge you to make a similar decision in regards this amendment’s application also. Moreover, the federal courts have the institutional capacity and experience following the retroactive crack cocaine amendments to handle an influx of sentence reduction motions from incarcerated defendants.

Please make this Amendment retroactive, without limitation, to all who may currently be incarcerated in US federal prisons who would qualify.

Sincerely,
Name:
Address
City/State/Zip

Marc Emery is a Canadian marijuana activist currently imprisoned in the United States for selling marijuana seeds and using the money to fund political activism. Find out more about him at FreeMarc.ca

Source: Cannabis Culture

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Charlie Bell
The Tab Cambridge: May 3, 2014

Drugs are not something that many of us feel terribly comfortable talking about – but after hearing CUCA’s debate on the subject this week, it got me thinking. Because the main thing that simply wasn’t on the agenda is evidence – and to me, that’s where any debate on the use, abuse, or whatever, of these drugs should begin, continue and end with. Call me a boring medic, with slavish obedience to scientific method and evidence-based policy, but to tackle something like legalisation of drugs and its ramifications without it, you are an idiot.

We can all scream our political ideology and score cheap points – God knows I enjoy doing that – but drugs are too important to mess about with, and it’s time our generation started to demand the subject was properly covered. At the moment we live in a somewhat bonkers world where we all know of a lot of people who have taken, or are currently taking, illegal drugs (or their equivalent legal highs), but daren’t admit it just in case it wrecks our careers. Whilst arrests and criminalisation are very unlikely, any vicious ladder-climber who wanted to bring anyone in a profession down could do so pretty easily by alleging they took drugs.

Sometimes people get away with it – even politicians seem to be able to admit to breaking the law with drugs as kids and not getting sacked. You only have to open a copy of Closer or similar (those delicious shit buckets of gutter journalistic tripe) to read the most outlandish drug confessions or celebrity bustings. Whilst most of them are too stupid to realise the potential consequences, there seems also to be a consensus amongst the police and indeed politicians that drug abusers won’t, on the whole, be prosecuted, particularly if they use ‘soft’ drugs. Which, of course, is an entirely misleading word.

Illegal, and indeed legal, drugs often have the propensity to be very addictive – hence those who use them often become addicts. It’s not rocket science; and given the huge number of drugs that are illegal, these people immediately become criminals. Also criminals are the providers and traffickers – and you don’t have to look outside the traditional gap-yah destinations to find a nice death penalty waiting for you if you rock up with a suitcase full of heroin.

[…]

The argument as to whether people should be treated on the NHS is an old one – should patients be treated for heart disease even if they are the size of a cross-channel ferry? More pertinently, should drunken slobs be given free treatment to vacuum out their stomach on a Friday night, after they’ve quite deliberately overindulged? To many, the points are similar – if you do something stupid, you should pay, or conversely, if we live in a society where everyone pays in, you should be able to do what you like. These arguments will go on and on – but for drugs, it’s slightly different, because many of them are illegal in the first place.

But to me, all of this seems to illustrate my point – where is the evidence for what drugs actually do, for how addictive they are, and for the risks they bring? Just as importantly, where are the comparisons with alcohol, or smoking, or all the other legal substances we use to escape from the mundanity of exam term? Is history really a good enough reason for alcohol to be legal but other drugs not? What even is a ‘drug’? And how about tobacco? We know it kills, in a grim, grim way – it’s almost guaranteed – yet that’s still legal?

It’s time for us to have a proper debate about this stuff, and to re-evaluate exactly why these kinds of substances are legal or illegal. We’re not in a strong position at the moment – not that long ago, the government sacked Prof David Nutt from the drugs advisory board because his evidence didn’t support policy. Sure, it might turn out that alcohol is more damaging than other drugs – but that would already be the case if that were to be found out, and it’s better to know than to continue in dangerous ignorance. Not until we know the effects of these things can we start to decide how to properly police them – certainly not without the entirely justified allegations of arbitrary decision-making and legal laziness.

(Read the full article at The Tab Cambridge)

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