MSimon wrote:But the important question to ask is this: if the people involved in the anti-Prohibition effort are so crippled by drugs why are they winning?
JUNEAU, Alaska (AP) — Alaska on Tuesday became the third U.S. state to legalize the recreational use of marijuana, but organizers don't expect any public celebrations since it remains illegal to smoke marijuana in public.
In the state's largest city, Anchorage police officers are ready to start handing out $100 fines to make sure taking a toke remains something to be done behind closed doors.
Placing Alaska in the same category as Washington state and Colorado with legal marijuana was the goal of a coalition including libertarians, rugged individualists and small-government Republicans who prize the privacy rights enshrined in the Alaska state constitution.
Too it's pretty obvious Denmark is headed back to enforcing the laws they set aside back kin the late 90's. They've had so much rise in drug abuse that they've learned their lesson and all the drug shops are closing. Portugal is headed that way. Will be less than a decade we're back where we were, save for those regressive states in the US like OR, WA, CO and CA, who just cannot read the writing on the wall.Diogenes wrote: For the same reason that people crippled with other forms of insanity are winning. We are in decline.
Rome went nuts too just before it collapsed. (and for the same reasons.)
Yeah any day now:GIThruster wrote:Portugal is headed that way. Will be less than a decade we're back where we were, save for those regressive states in the US like OR, WA, CO and CA, who just cannot read the writing on the wall.
Portugal's dictatorship had insulated it from the drug culture that had swept much of the Western world earlier in the 20th century, but the coup changed everything. After the revolution, Portugal gave up its colonies, and colonists and soldiers returned to the country with a variety of drugs. Borders opened up and travel and exchange were made far easier. Located on the westernmost tip of the continent, the country was a natural gateway for trafficking across the continent. Drug use became part of the culture of liberation, and the use of hard narcotics became popular. Eventually, it got out of hand, and drug use became a crisis.
At first, the government responded to it as the United States is all too familiar with: a conservative cultural backlash that vilified drug use and a harsh, punitive set of policies led by the criminal justice system. Throughout the 1980s, Portugal tried this approach, but to no avail: By 1999, nearly 1% of the population was addicted to heroin, and drug-related AIDS deaths in the country were the highest in the European Union, according to the New Yorker.
But by 2001, the country decided to decriminalize possession and use of drugs, and the results have been remarkable.
What's gotten better? In terms of usage rate and health, the data show that Portugal has by no means plunged into a drug crisis.
As this chart from Transform Drug Policy Foundation shows, the proportion of the population that reports having used drugs at some point saw an initial increase after decriminalization, but then a decline:
(Lifetime prevalence means the percentage of people who report having used a drug at some point in their life, past-year prevalence indicates having used within the last year, and past-month prevalence means those who've used within the last month. Generally speaking, the shorter the time frame, the more reliable the measure.)
Drug use has declined overall among the 15- to 24-year-old population, those most at risk of initiating drug use, according to Transform.
There has also been a decline in the percentage of the population who have ever used a drug and then continue to do so:
And a widely cited study published in 2010 in the British Journal of Criminology found that after decriminalization, Portugal saw a decrease in imprisonment on drug-related charges alongside a surge in visits to health clinics that deal with addiction and disease.
Not a cure but certainly not a disaster: Many advocates for decriminalizing or legalizing illicit drugs around the world have gloried in Portugal's success. They point to its effectiveness as an unambiguous sign that decriminalization works.
But some social scientists have cautioned against attributing all the numbers to decriminalization itself, as there are other factors at play in the national decrease in overdoses, disease and usage.
At the turn of the millennium, Portugal shifted drug control from the Justice Department to the Ministry of Health and instituted a robust public health model for treating hard drug addiction. It also expanded the welfare system in the form of a guaranteed minimum income. Changes in the material and health resources for at-risk populations for the past decade are a major factor in evaluating the evolution of Portugal's drug situation.
Alex Stevens, a professor of criminal justice at the University of Kent and co-author of the aforementioned criminology article, thinks the global community should be measured in its takeaways from Portugal.
"The main lesson to learn decriminalizing drugs doesn't necessarily lead to disaster, and it does free up resources for more effective responses to drug-related problems," Stevens told Mic.
The decriminalisation of drugs in Portugal has "halved" the problem of heroin abuse since the late 1990s, the country's national coordinator on drugs and drug addiction has said.
In 2001, the socialist government changed the law to turn possession of drugs into an "administrative offence", sending those caught with drugs for personal use to a "dissuasion board" rather than face prosecution.
Jaoa Goulao told Radio 4's Today programme that while there were initial fears the step could lead to higher rates of drug abuse, these "did not turn into reality".
His comments come as a government report in the UK found there is "no obvious" link between tough laws and levels of illegal drug use.
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4's Today programme on Thursday 30 October 2014.
Apparently throwing people in jail where they are beaten and a&% raped doesn't reduce drug use?! Who knew?At first, the government responded to it as the United States is all too familiar with: a conservative cultural backlash that vilified drug use and a harsh, punitive set of policies led by the criminal justice system. Throughout the 1980s, Portugal tried this approach, but to no avail: By 1999, nearly 1% of the population was addicted to heroin, and drug-related AIDS deaths in the country were the highest in the European Union, according to the New Yorker.
williatw wrote:Apparently throwing people in jail where they are beaten and a&% raped doesn't reduce drug use?! Who knew?At first, the government responded to it as the United States is all too familiar with: a conservative cultural backlash that vilified drug use and a harsh, punitive set of policies led by the criminal justice system. Throughout the 1980s, Portugal tried this approach, but to no avail: By 1999, nearly 1% of the population was addicted to heroin, and drug-related AIDS deaths in the country were the highest in the European Union, according to the New Yorker.
Local resident Colorado Wright, who knew both the Meyers' three sons as well as Nowsch, said the latter was known for being mixed up in drugs - including 'weed, meth probably, molly, ecstasy'.
'He was always dealing drugs,' Wright said. 'He had a moped at one time and he would go up and down the streets in this neighborhood selling to everybody.'
'He'd be walking down the street yelling out "I got weed" so loud and brazen about it'.
'Most definitely he'd have been under the influence of drugs on the night of the shooting'.
Those are the top-line findings of recent research published in the journal Scientific Reports, a subsidiary of Nature. Researchers sought to quantify the risk of death associated with the use of a variety of commonly used substances. They found that at the level of individual use, alcohol was the deadliest substance, followed by heroin and cocaine.
And all the way at the bottom of the list? Weed — roughly 114 times less deadly than booze, according to the authors, who ran calculations that compared lethal doses of a given substance with the amount that a typical person uses. Marijuana is also the only drug studied that posed a low mortality risk to its users.
These findings reinforce drug-safety rankings developed 10 years ago under a slightly different methodology. So in that respect, the study is more of a reaffirmation of previous findings than anything else. But given the current national and international debates over the legal status of marijuana and the risks associated with its use, the study arrives at a good time.
With recreation pot now legal in the states of Colorado, Washington, and most recently Alaska, Texas state Rep. David Simpson, R-Longview has introduced bill in the state legislature to completely decriminalize marijuana in the Lone Star State, according to a Tuesday story in the Houston Chronicle. The bill would essentially repeal every provision in Texas state law that refers to marijuana. Were the bill to be passed and signed into law, marijuana would be regulated in Texas just like any crop, such as jalapenos, rice, or citrus fruit.
The other three states that have legalized marijuana have done so within a complex system of taxes and regulation. Simpson’s bill dispenses with that approach and legalized pot without restrictions. In theory, under the Simpson bill, marijuana could be grown and sold anywhere and not just in specialized, government sanctioned farms and shops, as is the case in Colorado. Smoking pot may have to be regulated in the same manner as tobacco.
Simpson, as a conservative Republican, may seem to be an odd person to push for marijuana legalization. However, the push is in keeping with his limited government beliefs. He also invoked religion in defense of his bill. “Everything God made is good. Even marijuana.”
The odds of Simpson’s bill passing and being signed into law are very long indeed. Law enforcement groups have already lined up against legalization on the theory that, whatever the dangers of pot itself, it is a “gateway drug” to more dangerous recreational narcotics such as cocaine and meth. Law enforcement officers are also worried about the dangers of people driving under the influence of marijuana. Simpson responded that his bill would free law enforcement up from enforcing marijuana laws to concentrate on more violent crimes, such as murder and rape. However, even if Texas became the fourth state of the union to legalize pot, it would still be illegal on the federal level.
Police say they also found marijuana inside a lock box. Before they opened it, McDaniel had told police anything inside was his.
GIThruster wrote:And that is ignoring the cancer risk where it is much more toxic than tobacco.
Results of epidemiologic studies have not shown a clear link between marijuana and cancer risk. Many of these studies compared people with certain cancers that are linked to smoking and compared them to people without the cancer. Often, the people in these studies that smoked marijuana also smoked tobacco, which made it hard to see a separate effect of marijuana on cancer risk. Also, even heavy marijuana smokers don’t smoke as much or as often as most tobacco smokers. There is also concern that because marijuana has been largely illegal, people may not want to admit that they use the drug, making the studies less reliable. A few studies have linked testicular cancer to marijuana use in men, but the evidence isn’t conclusive.
More recently, scientists reported that THC and other cannabinoids such as CBD slow growth and/or cause death in certain types of cancer cells growing in laboratory dishes. Some animal studies also suggest certain cannabinoids may slow growth and reduce spread of some forms of cancer. There have been some early clinical trials of cannabinoids in treating cancer in humans and more studies are planned. While the studies so far have shown that cannabinoids can be safe in treating cancer, they do not show that they help control or cure the disease.
