In the face of a growing number of deaths and cases of HIV linked to drug abuse, the Portuguese government in 2001 tried a new tack to get a handle on the problem—it decriminalized the use and possession of heroin, cocaine, marijuana, LSD and other illicit street drugs. The theory: focusing on treatment and prevention instead of jailing users would decrease the number of deaths and infections.
Five years later, the number of deaths from street drug overdoses dropped from around 400 to 290 annually, and the number of new HIV cases caused by using dirty needles to inject heroin, cocaine and other illegal substances plummeted from nearly 1,400 in 2000 to about 400 in 2006, according to a report released recently by the Cato Institute, a Washington, D.C, libertarian think tank.
Hey U.S. Government… check this out.
Found by ECA on Cage Match.
30 Hugh.
Your liberty is my kid’s death. Society chooses between liberties all the time.
Line up the bodies of the dead moms, dads, aunts and children killed by drunk drivers and, absolutely, I would ban alcohol as not being worth the trade-off. Unfortunately you would also have an automatic revolution on your hands. So it is simply a matter of being pragmatic. It’s easier to keep an object at rest (drug decriminalization) than it is to try to stop an object in motion (the alcohol industry). Besides, there are no drug-impaired tests the cops can do analogous to the breathalyzer.
You don’t expect an answer because most folks asking for drug decriminalization haven’t actually thought the issue through beyond their next buzz.
31 ECA. The reason there are so many folks are in jail over drugs, is because the penalties have never been severe enough to the point where they actually are a deterrent. I mean aside from their mis-belief that people get to pick and choose the laws they can follow.
RBG