Tag: decriminalization

Oregon’s Drug Problems Were Not Caused by Decriminalization

Three years ago, 58 percent of Oregon voters approved Measure 110, a groundbreaking ballot initiative that eliminated criminal penalties for low-level possession of illegal drugs. Last week, a group called the Coalition to Fix and Improve Ballot Measure 110 proposed two versions of an initiative aimed at reversing that reform, and recent polling suggests most Oregonians are open to the idea.

There are two main reasons for that reversal of public opinion, neither of which goes to the heart of the moral and practical case for decriminalization. Oregonians are understandably troubled by the nuisances associated with public drug use, and they are dismayed that, despite Measure 110’s promise of more funding for treatment, opioid-related deaths have continued to increase.

The main idea behind Measure 110 was that consuming politically disfavored intoxicants should not be treated as a crime. Since drug use itself violates no one’s rights, it is hard to argue with that premise.

Eliminating criminal penalties for drug possession, however, does not require tolerating conduct that offends, incommodes, or alarms people who have an equal right to use sidewalks, parks, and other taxpayer-funded facilities. That problem—which many major cities face, regardless of whether they routinely arrest people for drug possession—is distinct from drug use per se, just as disorderly alcohol-related conduct is distinct from drinking per se.

The alcohol comparison is instructive in another way. Even during Prohibition, which banned the production and distribution of “intoxicating liquors,” drinking was not a crime. The situation created by Measure 110 is analogous, with all the dangers that criminalizing the drug supply entails.

Just as alcohol prohibition exposed drinkers to the potentially deadly hazards of bootleg booze, drug prohibition forces users to rely on black-market products of uncertain provenance and composition. Measure 110 did nothing to address that problem, which has led to record numbers of drug-related deaths across the country.

Keep reading

It’s Time to Decriminalize Personal Possession of All Drugs. Yes, All of Them 

Drug addiction is a chronic disease. It alters the way the brain works, stripping people of self-control and their ability to resist further drug consumption. Yet unlike responses to other diseases, in the United States, arrests and incarceration serve as the primary treatment for drug addiction.

This approach has been a failure. It’s time to treat drug addiction as a public health matter and not a criminal law one. This begins by investing in a treatment infrastructure and decriminalizing the personal possession of drugs.

Police in the United States make 1.16 million arrests a year for drugs. The vast majority of these arrests, 87 percent, are for personal possession or use of drugs, meaning that police arrest a person for drug possession, not drug selling, every 32 seconds. Drug arrests represent the number one activity that police engage in, at nearly 2.5 times the volume of arrests for all FBI-classified violent offenses combined (homicide, rape, robbery and aggravated assault). Despite people of all races using drugs at similar rates, Black people comprise 27 percent of all drug-related arrests—even though they make up just 13 percent of the U.S. population. There are about 350,000 people incarcerated in jails and prisons for drugs.

Yet for all these arrests and incarceration, we have little to show for it, other than more people in handcuffs and jail cells. New data released just last month revealed that nearly 110,000 people in the United States died from drug-involved overdoses in 2022, compared to fewer than 20,000 in 1999. The CATO Institute estimates that taxpayers spend approximately $47 billion a year on drug prohibition. In the 23 years that drug overdoses rose from 20,000 to 110,000 a year, taxpayers spent more than $1 trillion.

Keep reading

The War on Drugs Has Failed And It’s Time to Decriminalise, Scotland Says

The Scottish government wants to legalise drug possession for personal use and potentially the entire drug market as part of a massive change in the way addiction is tackled. 

Scottish ministers want to reform drug laws to enable people with drug problems to be better supported instead of being criminalised. They want to address record drug death rates in the country, which are 15 times more likely to affect the poorest 20 percent, and are the highest in Europe. 

Currently the Scottish government, led by the Scottish National Party with the Scottish Greens, has no power to change the laws in this way. VICE News has contacted the UK Home Office for a response to the proposals.

In 2021 the crisis prompted a £250m investment by the Scottish government into the country’s addiction services, with former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon admitting her government had “failed” every person who had died as a result of drug addiction.

A policy paper outlining the plans published Friday, entitled A Caring, Compassionate and Human Rights Informed Drug Policy for Scotland, called for the decriminalisation of personal drug possession, the expansion of harm reduction tools such as heroin assisted treatment, supervised drug consumption facilities and drug checking, and a roadmap to explore legal regulation of drugs. 

“We want to create a society where problematic drug use is treated as a health, not a criminal matter, reducing stigma and discrimination and enabling the person to recover and contribute positively to society,” said Scotland’s drugs policy minister Elena Whitham. 

She said that as a strategy to reduce drug use, “the global war on drugs has failed in its objectives”.

“To improve and save lives, we must be innovative, bold and radical. We are clear that nothing should be considered off the table. We must start by recognising that no country, anywhere in the world, has succeeded in eliminating drug use. A fairer, safer and healthier country must care about all its citizens and be inclusive of those with health conditions such as drug dependence.”

In order to achieve these objectives, which Witham said were supported by the public, the UK government needed to change its half a century old drug laws to enable Scotland “to appropriately tailor policy decisions to our unique challenges”.  

The paper said decriminalising small amounts of drugs for personal use “could provide a framework within which we can better pursue our existing policies to help, treat and support people rather than criminalise, stigmatise and fail them”.

Keep reading

UN report calls for decriminalization of all sexual activity, including between adults and children

A new report from the United Nations has called for all forms of drug use and sexual activity to be decriminalized globally.

Written by the International Committee of Jurists (ICJ), UNAIDS and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), the report was released on International Women’s Day, with the goal of guiding “the application of international human rights law to criminal law.” Called the “8 March principles,” the report calls for offenses related to “sex, drug use, HIV, sexual and reproductive health, homelessness and poverty” to be decriminalized.

The United Nations experts say that criminalizing offenses related to these issues constitute an attack on human rights.

“Criminal law is among the harshest of tools at the disposal of the State to exert control over individuals… as such, it ought to be a measure of last resort however, globally, there has been a growing trend towards overcriminalization,” Ian Seiderman, Law and Policy Director at ICJ, said in the press release. “We must acknowledge that these laws not only violate human rights, but the fundamental principles of criminal law themselves.”

While on the surface, it may seem relatively uncontroversial, the report calls for sex between adults and minors to be decriminalized, so long as the minors “consent”:

With respect to the enforcement of criminal law, any prescribed minimum age of consent to sex must be applied in a non-discriminatory manner. Enforcement may not be linked to the sex/gender of participants or age of consent to marriage. Moreover, sexual conduct involving persons below the domestically prescribed minimum age of consent to sex may be consensual, in fact, if not in law. In this context, the enforcement of criminal law should reflect the rights and capacity of persons under 18 years of age to make decisions about engaging in consensual sexual conduct and their right to be heard in matters concerning them.

Pursuant to their evolving capacities and progressive autonomy, persons under 18 years of age should participate in decisions affecting them, with due regard to their age, maturity and best interests, and with specific attention to non-discrimination guarantees.

Minors, of course, cannot truly consent to sex with an adult — something these so-called experts should know. 

Keep reading

Toronto wants to expand drug decriminalization to cover all ages and substances

Toronto updated its 14-month-old decriminalization request to the federal government Friday, clarifying it wants a Health Canada exemption to cover young people as well as adults, and all drugs for personal use.

The city’s submission, an update to its initial January 2022 request, indicates Toronto wants the federal agency to go further than the exemption it recently granted to British Columbia under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act.

It makes clear the city wants its exemption to apply to all drugs for personal use and shield young people from criminalization, a departure from the B.C. exemption, which only applies to adults and lists a select number of substances. 

Medical Officer of Health Dr. Eileen de Villa says the submission sent to Health Canada, co-signed by the city’s police chief and city manager, is a “made-in-Toronto” model reflective of a months-long consultation process. 

“We’re talking about a matter of health and a matter of human rights, not one that really is meant to be addressed or is best addressed with a criminal justice approach,” she said in an interview. “That’s why we’re pursuing this route.” 

B.C.’s three-year exemption under the Act was granted in June and came into force Jan. 31. While that exemption caps possession at 2.5 grams, the Toronto submission does not outline a specific threshold for what constitutes personal use.

Keep reading

Drug Legalization Leads to Significant Reduction in Foster System Admissions

Richard Nixon, in his effort to silence black people and antiwar activists, brought the War on Drugs into full force in 1973. He then signed Reorganization Plan No. 2, which established the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Over the course of five decades, this senseless war has waged on. At a cost of over $1 trillion — ruining and ending countless lives in the process — America’s drug war has created a drug problem that is worse now than ever before.

This is no coincidence.

For years, those of us who’ve been paying attention have seen who profits from this inhumane war — the police state and cartels. Since the 1980s and 90s, there has been a long-standing theory of the CIA’s connection to the crack epidemic.

If the CIA trafficking cocaine into the United States sounds like some tin foil conspiracy theory, think again. Their role in the drug trade was exposed in 1996 in a critical investigative series “Dark Alliance” by Gary Webb for the San Jose Mercury News. The investigation, headed up by Webb revealed ties between the CIA, Nicaraguan contras and the crack cocaine trade ravaging African-American communities.

The investigation provoked massive protests and congressional hearings, as well as overt backlash from the mainstream media to discredit Webb’s reporting. However, decades later, officials would come forward to back up Webb’s original investigation.

Then-senator John Kerry even released a detailed report claiming that not only was there “considerable evidence” linking the Contra effort to trafficking of drugs and weapons — but that the U.S. government knew about it.

Also, as the Free Thought Project previously reported, in a book years ago, Juan Pablo Escobar Henao, son of notorious Medellín cartel drug kingpin, Pablo Escobar, explains how his father “worked for the CIA.”

In the book, “Pablo Escobar In Fraganti,” Escobar, who lives under the pseudonym, Juan Sebastián Marroquín, explains his “father worked for the CIA selling cocaine to finance the fight against Communism in Central America.”

Going even further down the rabbit hole, a History Channel series also addressed how US involvement in Afghanistan turned the country into a virtual heroin factory and how the drug war empowers cartels.

The final chapter of the series examines how the attacks on September 11thintertwined the War on Drugs and the War on Terror, transforming Afghanistan into a narco-state teeming with corruption. It also explores how American intervention in Mexico helped give rise to El Chapo and the Super Cartels, bringing unprecedented levels of violence and sending even more drugs across America’s borders.

Both the crack and heroin epidemics had similar effects when it came to the communities most harmed by the drug war — Black people. There have been dozens of studies highlighting the effects of the CIA’s clandestine crack operations which targeted minority neighborhoods and all of them have the same underlying theme — the destruction of the family.

For decades, millions of Black men — whose only “crime” was possession or sale of crack — were torn from their home and incarcerated. This led to millions more children growing up in fatherless environments which, in turn, put these future families in major deficits from their difficult childhoods. The effects have spanned decades and have turned once thriving communities into high-crime areas in which violence is the only constant.

When we add marijuana prohibition into the equation, the damage done to the American family through the enforcement of the drug war could be considered a crime against humanity.

Drug laws are now evolving but not fast enough. Despite knowing the effects of mass incarceration for victimless crimes, the state still aggressively pursues people for non-violent drug possession.

Perhaps with the release of a new study out of Oxford, Mississippi published in the journal Economic Inquiry, this paradigm of destroying families over the war on drugs subsides more quickly.

In the study, titled, Recreational marijuana legalization and admission to the foster-care system, a pair of economists with the University of Mississippi assessed foster care admission trends in states pre and post-legalization. What they found was both encouraging and infuriating at the same time.

“Legalization may impact foster-care admissions directly by changing the welfare of children or indirectly by changing policies and attitudes towards marijuana use in the home. Direct effects may arise because marijuana use itself causes behaviors that affect child welfare, or because it changes the likelihood of using other drugs,” the authors wrote.

“We also find that placements due to physical abuse, parental neglect, and parental incarceration decrease after legalization, providing evidence that legalization reduces substantive threats to child welfare, although the precise mechanism behind these effects is unclear.”

Imagine that. When parents aren’t torn from the home over substances deemed illegal by the state, children suffer less… Significantly less.

Keep reading

Drug War Crumbles as 14 Cities Have Now Decriminalized Mushrooms, Other Psychedelics—Despite Prohibition

Despite the overwhelming evidence showing that kidnapping and caging people for possessing illegal substances does nothing to prevent use and only leads to more crime and suffering, government is still hell bent on enforcing the war on drugs. Like a crack addict who needs to find his next fix, the state is unable to resist the temptation to kick in doors, shake down brown people, and ruin lives to enforce the drug war.

Instead of realizing the horrific nature of the enforcement of prohibition, many cities across the country double down on the drug war instead of admitting failure. As we can see from watching it unfold, this only leads to more suffering and more crime. Luckily, there are cities, and now entire states in other parts of the country that are taking steps to stop this violent war and the implications for such measures are only beneficial to all human kind.

Eight years ago, Colorado citizens—tired of the war on drugs and wise to the near-limitless benefits of cannabis—made US history by voting to legalize recreational marijuana. Then, in 2019, this state once again placed themselves on the right side of history as they voted to decriminalize magic mushrooms. But this was just the beginning and their momentum is spreading—faster and stronger, toward decriminalizing all plant-based psychedelics. Then, last year, the state of Oregon decriminalized all drugs.

Now, another spark has erupted, and this time it is in Michigan. In March, Hazel Park City Council voted to decriminalize psilocybin and other naturally occurring psychedelics — following the lead of municipalities across the country.

Hazel Park is the third city in Michigan to pass a resolution to decriminalize psilocybin and the fourteenth in the nation.

Keep reading

Rep. Cori Bush Introduces Bill to Decriminalize Possession of All Drugs

Apair of House Democrats introduced legislation on Tuesday that would decriminalize possession of all drugs at the federal level for personal use and begin the process of prioritizing a public health approach to drug use over punishment and policing. These are the necessary first steps, advocates say, for ending the war on drugs 50 years after it was first declared by President Richard Nixon.

Representatives Cori Bush (D-Missouri) and Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-New Jersey) introduced the Drug Policy Reform Act, which would eliminate federal criminal penalties for possession of any drug for personal use, including marijuana, cocaine, opioids, various psychedelics and other drugs banned under the Controlled Substances Act. The bill aims to begin repairing some of the damage to communities and the lives of individuals caused by the drug war, which has contributed heavily to mass incarceration and other forms of state violence that have fallen hardest on low-income communities and people of color.

“The economic stability of our carceral state depends on this misguided and racist policy, and we are here to say, no more, it’s time that we end this destruction,” Bush told reporters on Tuesday, adding that, as a nurse in St. Louis, she saw how criminalization and stigma harms people who use drugs. “Imagine what we could do if we built systems of care that treated and supported people…that is the world we should build.”

Keep reading

Oregon Decriminalizes All Drugs, While D.C. Decriminalizes Psychedelics

While the 2020 presidential results remained unclear the morning after Election Day, one thing for certain is that voters overwhelmingly approved a series of measures aimed at the war on drugs, including the legalization of marijuana in New Jersey, Arizona, and Montana, the decriminalization of psychedelic mushrooms in Washington, D.C. and the decriminalization of all drugs in Oregon.

Voters in the state of Oregon also voted in favor of Measure 109, which allows for patients 21-and-over to buy, possess, and consume psychedelic drugs at “psilocybin service centers,” under the supervision of trained facilitators, while Measure 110 — which decriminalized personal possession of drugs like heroin, methamphetamine, LSD and MDMA — also overwhelmingly passed with 60 percent of votes in favor; Measure 110 also called for the establishment of a drug addiction treatment program funded by its marijuana tax revenue.

“Today’s victory is a landmark declaration that the time has come to stop criminalizing people for drug use,” Kassandra Frederique, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance that spearheaded the measure, said in a statement.

Keep reading