Drugs law at odds with rights charter: judges
March 26, 2010
A DECLARATION by Victoria’s highest court that drug law is inconsistent with the human rights charter will force the state government to justify the limits placed on people’s rights.
But Attorney-General Rob Hulls says the government is not obliged to change the law.
The Court of Appeal ruled last week the human rights of a woman convicted of drug trafficking were breached because she had to prove an amphetamine stash found in her flat did not belong to her.
The court said this breached the presumption of innocence outlined in the charter.
Yesterday the court declared that a section of the Drugs Act, which deems drugs found at a person’s home to be in their possession, cannot be interpreted consistently with the charter.
Vera Momcilovic, 43, was convicted of amphetamine trafficking and jailed for a minimum of 18 months. She claimed drugs and money found in her flat belonged to her boyfriend and she did not know about it.
Court of Appeal president Justice Chris Maxwell and Justices David Ashley and Marcia Neave ruled Ms Momcilovic was properly convicted but suspended the rest of her sentence.
The judges said presuming a person’s guilt unless they can prove to the contrary ”is not so much an infringement of the presumption of innocence as a wholesale subversion of it”.
Rachel Nicolson, of law firm Allens Arthur Robinson, said in future the government would have to provide evidence why a law was able to limit human rights. ”Departments are going to have to understand they need to think whether there is a proper policy method and proper evidence for limiting rights,” she said.
Mr Hulls said: ”The charter simply requires Parliament to respond to the court’s declaration but places no obligation on the government to change the law.”
He said the provision dealt with in the Momcilovic case would be considered as part of a review of the Crimes Act and the law on illicit drugs.
Phil Lynch, of the Human Rights Law Resource Centre, said the declaration meant ”people need to consider human rights in the first instance and not as an afterthought”.
SELMA MILOVANOVIC
This article was published in The Age. The original story can be found here: http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/drugs-law-at-odds-with-rights-charter-judges-20100326-r084.html
July 6, 2010
In May 2009, ADLRF member Bill Bush wrote a piece about the need for an examination of drug policy. Here is the text from the article, including parts that were edited at publication for space.
This article first appeared in the Canberra Times on May 15, 2009 (p. 13):
Drug policy needs a deeper focus to halt snowballing risks
Urgent change is crucial to stop increasing budget wastage and greater harm in society, Bill Bush writes.
At least one advantage of hard times should be to cause governments to carefully examine their budgetary priorities. In good times there is never enough to go around; in bad times the capacity is reduced while need increases. In spite of the ACT Government’s preparedness to run a deficit of 5 per cent of expenditure, the ACT Council of Social Service lamented that the budget “fails to address the increasing pressure on community organisations as a result of the financial crisis” because “the community sector needs to be resourced to meet the already increasing demand for emergency relief, homelessness services and family counselling”.
There are reasonable grounds to take seriously the prospect that substantial budgetary savings are possible in these domains that will experience increased demand. The fly in the ointment is that this would involve looking at drug policy, which no political party, Liberals, Greens or Labor, wants to know about.
The grounds are simple. From research on risk and protective factors and the social determinants of health we know that by and large it is the same disadvantaged population that manifests most severely multiple problems, including substance dependence. The services required to address these problems are big budgetary items. There is strong evidence that recasting drug policy offers a cost-effective way of short-circuiting the cycle of disadvantage and regulatory theory tells us that existing drug policy uses the most inefficient means of regulation.
It is known that an aggregation of family, environmental or personal risk factors is predictive of further problems. The neglected child is likely to: have problems at school, mix with a dysfunctional peer group, get caught up in delinquency, start using drugs early, develop mental health problems and so on.
We are seeing the snowball of risk factors (and diminished protective ones) augmented down generations. The drug-dependent parent who has had a stint in prison is likely to bequeath her own risk factors in amplified form to her children.
The challenge is to stop the snowball growing. Services to address problems of this population are scattered in numerous government agencies. Most of the expenditure of the Department of Disability, Housing and Community Services, with 5 per cent of the ACT budget, is devoted to services for this group. It starts by providing an early intervention and prevention program for children from birth to age five and their families and extends to youth services and the very expensive child protection service. Special education programs, counselling and interventions to deal with children with behavioural problems are funded by the Department of Education and Training. The same disadvantaged population is a heavy drawer upon these services. The Department of Health attempts to meet their needs in mental health, maternal and child health, drug and alcohol and corrections health services. The same population has disproportionately high needs for acute services such as those arising from hepatitis C [contracted from injecting drug use that is widespread among prisoners]. The lion’s share of Housing ACT’s allocation goes to the same population. The police and corrections services funded by the Department of Justice and Community Safety are the sharp end of these government services.
The standard response is to pour more and more resources into individual services but we are always chasing our tail: in the best times, unmet need outstrips what government is prepared to spend. Skyrocketing child protection costs of recent years are a prime example. Early intervention to address underlying causes is another common call. More often than not it means looking for something that is irrelevant [even if it can be found]. Reflection on the growing snowball of problems of the disadvantaged population shows why. The original cause may be buried in the middle a generation ago.
Intervening early in the life (or before birth) of a child [is early intervention for the child but not for] the parent whose problems have to be serviced if the child is to have a chance.
We need to look instead for a circuit breaker: an affordable intervention that will reduce [significant] risk factors and make existing interventions on other risk factors more effective.
There is strong evidence that drug policy is such an intervention. The threat of a harmful criminal sanction is at the heart of existing drug policy. In the words of a United States authority, criminal law is designed to “make the life of the habitual user dangerous, arduous, frightening and expensive.” It is one thing to impose such stress to deter theft or violence. It is quite another to impose it to force someone with a roaring addiction to stop using.
The ubiquity of substance dependence in the target [problem-rich] population means that the intervention of criminal law is inefficient and that the intervention compounds the risk factors. To quote another US writer “stress gets in the way of our capacity to make good choices, and even to perceive our full options for choices”. Expensive measures of harm minimisation are then needed to ameliorate stresses imposed by the measure taken to tackle the problem.
A conservative guess of the contribution in this sense of illicit drug policy to the ACT budget is $385m or 10.6 per cent of expenditure. Not all of this could be saved. A further conservative guess of what could is 4.8 per cent – the size of the deficit. Moreover, studies suggest a potential for substantial quick savings in law enforcement and corrections budgets.
This is because overseas studies of maintenance interventions show sustained reductions in the region of 80 per cent achieved in a matter of months among severely dependent illicit drug users – those who make up the bulk of our prison population.
Regulation theory suggests another reason why we should consider drug policy. The theory looks at the optimum means to abate or control risk to society and promote the public good. Good regulation involves a spread of measures throughout a regulatory pyramid. Most regulation should be invested in the broad lower levels of the pyramid involving voluntary or persuasive measures rather than the narrow tip of command and control regulation. Only when persuasion fails should more resource intensive and intrusive regulation be considered. With drug policy the pyramid is reversed.
Existing drug policy is not effective in its principal goal of reducing the availability of illicit drugs. In 1951 Australians consumed 5.25 kg of heroin per million – all of it legal. By the end of the century Australians were consuming about 35 kg per million – all of it illegal. In the past few years there has been a boom in the availability of stimulants.
In short, there are more than enough budgetary reasons for political parties to agree at least to look at the issue. The matter is one of mainstream concern. The Australian Crime Commission believes that up to $12 billion in illicit drug money is flowing out of Australia annually and the turnover of the world’s illicit drug industry is on a par with world trade in oil or gas.
July 5, 2010
In May 2009, Ban Ki Moon gave this statement on HIV, which includes the following important statement:
“In addition to criminalizing HIV transmission, many countries impose criminal sanctions for same-sex sex, commercial sex and drug injection. Such laws constitute major barriers to reaching key populations with HIV services. Those behaviours should be decriminalized, and people addicted to drugs should receive health services for the treatment of their addiction’.
For example, in Eastern Europe, people who inject drugs represent more than 80 per cent of all people living with HIV but account for less than 25 per cent of those receiving antiretroviral treatment.”
Click here for the full report.
July 5, 2010
Click here for a link to videos from the 2009 International Drug Policy Reform Conference, which was held in Albuquerque, NM in the USA.
July 5, 2010
Take a look at this deck of cards, put out by the UK group Release as part of their “Nice People Take Drugs” campaign.
July 5, 2010
John Hyde (Labor member for Perth) recently gave this speech to the Western Australian Legislative Assembly.
March 25, 2010
Framing addiction less as enemy than as illness
Quietly, free of headlines and fanfare, the Obama White House is toning down the bellicose “war-on-drugs” position that has defined U.S. narcotics policy for the last 25 years.
Appearing in Vienna last week for the 53rd annual United Nations meeting on global drug policy, administration officials shifted from attacking drug use as a crime to be penalized and moved toward a strategy of tackling addiction as an illness to be treated, a number of health and human rights advocates who attended the event said.
Drug reformers for years have promoted so-called “harm reduction” measures as a more effective and humane way to treat drug addiction and the diseases that often accompany it — an approach that runs counter to the punitive attitude epitomized by the Reagan administration’s “war on drugs.” And while the Obama White House — behind Gil Kerlikowske, the White House drug czar, and his deputy, Thomas McLellan — remains officially opposed to the hot-button harm reduction language, officials have also conceded that the current strategy isn’t working, advocates say. That sharp break from past administrations has left reformers hopeful that the Obama White House will mark a new era in the nation’s fight against drug abuse — one that prioritizes treatment and prevention above rap sheets and prison time.
“There was virtually no reference to a criminal justice approach,” Allan Clear, executive director of the Harm Reduction Coalition, an advocacy group, said of the U.S. delegation in Vienna. “I’m just so used to being appalled by their behavior … It was very encouraging.”
Deborah Peterson Small, executive director of Break the Chains, another group advocating for drug-policy reforms, agreed, noting a brand new willingness among White House officials to embrace certain elements of the harm reduction strategy. When she spoke about treatment reforms to U.S. drug officials in Vienna in 2008, Small said, the entire delegation walked out on her. “This year it was completely different,” she said. “We finally had a sense that they were listening.”
The comments mark quite a departure from those that drug reformers were making a year ago at the same U.N. event, where the Obama administration killed international efforts to include harm reduction language as part of a U.N. document that will guide the next decade’s global drug policy. Harm reduction refers to things like drug-substitute treatments and clean-needle exchanges — programs being tried (with promising results) in a number of countries to battle the spread of HIV/AIDS, Hepatitis C and other drug-related illnesses. The White House has argued that the broad harm reduction language is “ambiguous” and could include controversial programs the administration doesn’t support, including drug legalization, drug consumption rooms and heroin prescription initiatives.
But there are clear signs that the attitude is changing — and the policies are beginning to follow suit.
With Obama’s vocal support, for example, Congress last year repealed the 21-year-old ban on federal funding for needle exchange programs. And last week in Vienna, not only did the United States endorse a new U.N. resolution promoting access to controlled medicines for legitimate medical purposes (commonly considered to include drug dependency treatments, like methadone for heroin addiction), but it co-sponsored a separate declaration designed to tackle the treatment gap plaguing HIV patients. The latter resolution, while it doesn’t mention harm reduction specifically, references a U.N. technical guide promoting certain harm reduction measures, like needle exchange and opioid substitution therapy. Rebecca Schleifer, advocate for the health and human rights division at Human Rights Watch, said this week that the HIV document represents “the most vocal support” the White House has ever given for HIV-treatment efforts focusing on human rights.
Opponents of needle exchange and other harm reduction measures argue that the human rights groups have misinterpreted the signals coming from the White House in Vienna. “If you read Kerlikowske’s statement,” said Lana Beck, spokeswoman for the Drug Free America Foundation, “clearly there’s nothing there to indicate any change.”
That part is true. The remarks prepared for Kerlikowske — officially the director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, or ONDCP — reiterated the administration’s opposition to the broader harm reduction language, arguing that the term “creates unnecessary confusion” and might be misused to “promote drug use.” Still, drug reformers were quick to point out that the drug czar declined to include those passages when he addressed the crowd in Vienna — more evidence, they say, that the U.S. is consciously toning down its traditional war-on-drugs rhetoric.
“Traditional advocates of harm reduction recognized that the United States was a different animal [this year],” Clear said.
The ONDCP did not return calls for comment.
For health and human rights advocates, there remains a long way to go. Like any number of emotionally charged issues, drug policy is often dictated more by entrenched ideology than evidence-based rationality. And on Capitol Hill, there remains a strong sense that drug users are criminals to be punished, not patients to be treated. For proof, look no further than the debate over needle exchange. Although a long list of public health organizations — including the National Institute of Medicine, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Health Organization and the American Public Health Association — had endorsed needle exchange as an effective way to reduce HIV/AIDS without increasing drug abuse, the politics of Washington kept the ban in place for more than two decades prior to last year’s repeal.
Not that some lawmakers aren’t trying to reform the punitive mindset surrounding drug use. Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.), for example, has long-criticized the criminal justice system for packing the nation’s prisons with non-violent drug users. A description of his reform proposal notes that the the war on drugs hasn’t diminished drug use, it hasn’t brought the multi-billion dollar drug industry under control, and it targets minority offenders disproportionately. The system, he says, is “broken, unfair, [and] locking up the wrong people.”
The Senate Judiciary Committee approved the Webb proposal in January, leaving supporters hopeful that Democratic leaders will bring the bill to the chamber floor later this year.
Meanwhile, health and human rights advocates have vowed to continue their push for health-centered drug reforms, encouraged by the tone of a White House that seems set to place a greater emphasis on treatment, health and human rights.
“That would put us on par with most other countries — like Iran,” Small quipped, “instead of being the leading jailer in the world.”
This article originally appeared in the Colorado Independent, accessed 23 March 2010.
March 23, 2010
This article was published in PS News.
The End of Drug Prohibition
By Evert Rauwendaal
As the submissions for the National Drug Strategy 2010-2015 come to a close, we are reminded that Australia is wearing a $56.1 billion a year alcohol and tobacco problem.
It is little wonder when you consider that alcohol continues to be sold and advertised at major sporting events as well as fast food type “drive-thru” liquor outlets.
There are no product warnings, no advertising bans.
Exposure to advertising is at saturation point and alcohol has never been easier or more convenient to obtain.
Tourism NSW advertises getaways to Wine Country on billboards and gives tips to ensure visitors are left feeling mesmerised by their cellar door experience.
The Department of State and Regional Development use phrases like ‘world benchmark’ when referring to the three-fold increase in wine production since 1995 (now a $5 billion a year industry).
Market share is won with elegantly landscaped vineyards, high quality product and clever advertising.
Cuddly bears are used to promote rum during cinema previews.
It would seem that increasing the sale and production of alcohol, using more efficient and innovative technology, using advertising with the widest appeal is to be hailed as success.
There are glimmers of hope though.
For while cigarettes can still be sold at corner stores in packets resembling children’s confectionery, consumption continues to fall.
Smokers are confronted with health warnings every time they light-up and the messages seem to be sinking in.
It would be impossible to reach smokers in this way if tobacco were prohibited.
Children are no longer exposed to tobacco products when mum or dad do the grocery shopping thanks to more recent display bans.
The Government should be congratulated for making these decisions.
Illicit drugs, on the other hand, account for $8.2 billion of Australia’s drug problem.
Unlike alcohol, the goal is to suppress, not increase the supply.
Prohibition is enforced by the criminal justice system despite having more than 30 years of evidence that drugs cannot be policed away.
Law enforcement Agencies are no closer to eliminating drugs.
Busts are pointless and futile for this very reason.
Drugs continue to be distributed by people without qualifications, without quality controls and usually become “cut” (adulterated) at points along the supply chain to maximise profit; which, because of prohibition, is tax-free.
Rivals in this industry settle disputes with guns and violence.
Victims see little to no recompense when harm befalls them.
Retribution awaits those who welsh on debts or involve the Police.
Market share in this industry isn’t won with glitzy ads, but seized at gunpoint.
The Federal Government has recently taken to reinvesting confiscated drug money in fighting the drug trade.
This policy actually ensures drugs remain a valuable commodity and even the smallest of drug transactions remains highly profitable.
The financial incentive to sell drugs has become so great that job vacancies (created by Police arrests) are instantly filled without the need to even advertise.
The grouping of recreational drugs as ‘licit’ or ‘illicit’ has done nothing to reduce the harms associated with the consumption of drugs in either category and should be considered a failed policy.
Licit drugs remain poorly controlled and socially destructive; the illicit drug market is not controlled at all.
The solution is to abandon the licit/illicit binary by ranking all recreational drugs according to their physical harms, imposing blanket advertising bans, prescription access to drugs designed to be injected and introducing a licensing scheme for the more addictive ones.
Drugs without habit forming qualities, such as MDMA and LSD, could be dispensed to adults by qualified pharmacists who have more to lose if they sell to someone they shouldn’t (unlike a desperate heroin addict).
All will be heavily taxed and boxed in generic packaging with graphic pack warnings.
The introduction of these measures will undoubtedly hurt sales and reduce consumption, but also deprive miscreants and thugs of tax free income.
If the Government is serious about crime and substance overuse, the solution is blindingly obvious – it must abandon the policy of arbitrary drug prohibition and address the conflict between business interests and public health.
It must create sensible and consistent evidence based policy to regulate drugs that are not always used for therapeutic purposes.
With countries like Denmark and others slowly coming to this realisation, Australia risks being left behind.
Evert Rauwendaal is a Bachelor of social work graduate. This article first appeared at www.onlineopinion.com.au
March 10, 2010
The text from this article is taken from the ADCA News, a copy of which can be found here.
Dr Stamper was a police officer for 34 years, serving as Chief of the Seattle Police Department from 1998 to 2000.
He was also Executive Director of Mayor Pete Wilson’s Crime Control Commission for three years. He is a major proponent of significant drug law reform believing the “war on drugs” has actually been a war on people.
Dr Stamper, from the Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) organisation in the United States of America (US), was brought to Australia in October 2009 by the Australian Drug Law Reform Foundation (ADLRF ). While here, he addressed the Australian Parliamentary Group for Drug Law Reform in Canberra, and met with police and other public and private figures around the country.
On his return home, Dr Stamper reviewed his “Down Under” experience for ADCA News:
“Back on American soil only after a couple of weeks and already I’m missing your beautiful country, and the wonderful new friends I met there. I spent most of October (2009) in Australia on a two-pronged mission to firstly learn about your drug laws, policies and programs, and secondly to urge you to please, please reject my country’s approach.
I spoke to universities; law schools and medical schools; think tanks; user groups; public health officials and frontline providers; police managers and police unions; elected and appointed representatives of cities, States, and the Federal Government; drug policy researchers; television, radio, and print journalists; and families and friends of loved ones lost to drug abuse and/ or drug laws.
An hour after I checked into my hotel in Sydney I was met by the first of my assigned “buddies”, there to help me navigate four States and six cities. (Thank you, Leah McLeod, for your extraordinary organizing efforts.)
First stop, the Opera House. I’d told American friends that if I was going to Sydney I simply had to see the Opera House. What a delight to learn I’d be speaking there, along with two exceptional co-panelists, Dr Alex Wodak and the barrister Greg Barns during the “Festival of Dangerous Ideas”.
Dangerous? What about our collective presentation, each of us favoring an end to the drug war, could possibly be labeled dangerous? The full house audience enthusiastically agreed with the direction we advocated.
Many Australians were surprised to learn that, unlike your country, the US does not embrace harm minimisation – yet. As you’ve taught the world, clean needle and syringe exchanges, supervised injection sites, and methadone clinics save lives.
“Trials” in Australia have proven themselves, many times over. Yet, in only a handful of American cities have our politicians shown the wisdom and the will to permit, much less encourage and fund, such programs.
In Melbourne, it was all about drink driving and alcohol-fuelled violence, a taste of which I witnessed on a beautiful, sunny Sunday morning.
I’d walked from my hotel to catch a glimpse of the thousands of runners in the Melbourne Marathon as they made their turn onto Flinders Street. I got tired just watching the race so I bought a coffee (you Australians work wonders with that drug) and wandered west.
Staggering out of a drinking establishment at 9.30am, three young drunks, one still swigging from a beer bottle, almost bumped into me. They were loud, obnoxious, physically threatening.
When a frail looking man of Middle Eastern appearance attempted to walk by them they blocked his path and taunted him. They called him a terrorist. The man managed to sidestep his ridiculers and hurry safely down the sidewalk.
The incident put me in mind of a conversation I’d had with Dr Wodak and a Detective Superintendent in Sydney. It was then that I first heard the term “glassing”. My response, once the Superintendent defined the practice, was
amazement.
In the US, such incidents rarely happen in bars or taverns. I half-jokingly suggested that our drunken rowdies use knives and guns but, in fact, liquor licensees realise that what happens in their establishments can seriously jeopardize their livelihood. In Seattle, we’ve closed bars permanently, because of persistent patron misconduct.
Of course, it helps that our minimum drinking age is 21, and alcohol establishments close by 2am.
On to Perth where I was met with the disturbing news that Western Australia’s Premier is keen on more or less “re-criminalizing” minor cannabis cases. Having already written on the topic in my Huffington Post blog, I’ll spare you details of my take on this development. Needless to say, the Premier’s initiative is jarringly out of step with the way the rest of the world, even the US, is going.
Next up was Brisbane where in addition to a full slate of well-attended public and private meetings, I was asked to help launch the “Safer Cannabis Use Guidelines” promulgated by the Nimbin Health and Medical Research Council.
Competing against a major fire for media attention, we garnered exactly no reporters at a news conference. A shame since the Guidelines are excellent. Recognising that millions of Australians use cannabis, these suggestions are
designed to reduce associated “health, social, legal and economic risks.”
It was also in Queensland that I “petted” kangaroos in the Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary one afternoon, only to feast on roo that same evening. My lovely hosts, Ruth and Simon, made a point of educating me about the vital role tourists play in preparing the animals for consumption – who knew the act of “petting” a kangaroo tenderises its meat? Thanks to Simon, I’m this close to becoming a vegetarian.
My final home base was Canberra where the estimable Michael Moore showed me around the nation’s capitol, introducing me to lawmakers and Ministers, and setting up meetings with terrific community based organisations, media, Members of Parliament, and a major Parliamentary committee.
On Saturday morning, Michael and his wife Helen picked me up at my hotel for a ride through the pleasant countryside to Cooma where I was scheduled to address 350 Rotarians.
My expectation, as I gazed out at a sea of service club members and their spouses, was that, given my “radical” views on drug policy, this gathering would turn into the true “festival of dangerous ideas”.
But the reception could not have been warmer. Not only were there no boos (Rotarians, constitutionally fun-loving yet polite and dignified, don’t do boos), the speech was greeted with fervent applause.
The real test, of course, is what one hears after. Many people throughout that afternoon and into the evening’s dinner, a musical “celebration of the sixties”, approached to let me know they too favour a robust regulatory model as an alternative to prohibition. Among them, a Federal Police Officer, an economist, and even a representative of a commercial drug company.
While the Australian people seem ready for fundamental drug policy reform, a good number of politicians are behind the curve. As with many US politicians, they seem to be misreading both the research and their constituents, or they’re gripped by fear and/ or inertia.
Yet I did meet several key government officials who acknowledged failures in current policy, and who professed an openness to negotiate a new course. Especially encouraging were the many police officers along the way who spoke of disillusionment with prohibition, and their desire for change.
I was a cop for 34 years, the first 28 in the Mexican border city of San Diego, and the last six (1994-2000) up near the Canadian border as Seattle’s Chief of Police. As a frontline warrior in the drug war, I witnessed evidence of the utter failure of American policy.
Since my retirement, I have been studying various approaches to drug control, and I’ve become an active member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, the National Organisation for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, and the Drug Policy Alliance.
All too familiar with the heartbreak of unregulated drug trafficking, I’ve seen children lose their lives to drugs, their families torn asunder. I’ve pulled bodies, sober and intoxicated, out of wrecked automobiles at crashes caused by alcohol, and mourned along with the multitudes, the drug overdose deaths of well-known musicians and other beloved artists.
While I agree that it’s “never about the drugs”, but rather an individual or a family’s underlying social and psychological issues, powerful chemicals, including alcohol, have contributed too much suffering in your country and in mine.
But the drug war is far worse. Here in the US we’re keenly aware of the limitations of prohibition – we tried it for 13 years with alcohol. For starters, it doesn’t work. And it guarantees death, disease, public corruption, crimes of violence and predation.
It’s the worst possible model on which to base drug policy. Yet this knowledge hasn’t stopped our leaders from the delusional pursuit of “zero tolerance”.
American taxpayers have spent one trillion US dollars since 1971 when President Richard Nixon pronounced drugs “Public Enemy Number One”, and declared all out war on them.
Tens of millions of Americans, disproportionately poor and young, black and Latino, have been incarcerated, many for years, many for minor possession arrests. Tens of thousands have lost student loans, been evicted from public housing, and watched their prospects for meaningful employment go up in smoke.
What do we have to show for this “investment”? Illicit drugs are more readily available, at lower prices and higher levels of potency, than when President Nixon made his famous declaration. Moreover, a 2008 study by the World Health Organization (WHO) shows that despite our harsh penalties, drug use rates are much higher in the US than in most other nations.
Why would any country look to us for guidance? After four decades of the US led global “war on drugs”, I believe you Australians are poised to show the rest of the world what enlightened drug policy looks like. Many of us in the US are hoping and praying you’ll do just that.”
March 4, 2010
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