Drugs

John Rentoul’s column in the Independent on Sunday this week was uncharacteristically unpersuasive. His text was Mencken’s aphorism that “There is always a well-known solution to every human problem – neat, plausible, and wrong” and Mr Rentoul suggested the Cardoso Commission’s report on drug legalisation is an example of this approach. Well, perhaps. But I think “neat, plausible, and wrong” actually better characterises the Drug Warriors mania for prohibition. To which one might add “ineffective” too. Most advocates* of decriminalisation or legalisation (as Rentoul says, two different approaches) concede that these alternatives will not eradicate all of the problems associated with drug use but argue instead that they will make

It’s not that I disagree with this post by Blair Gibbs, nor that I don’t think he makes a number of reasonable points. There’s clearly a problem with drugs in prison even if it it’s not, one supposes, on anything like the same level as the Cousins’ difficulties in that area. Nevertheless, surely the most obvious point to make is that if we cannot keep illegal drugs out of prison at what point do even prohibitionists recognise that the War on Drugs can’t be won*? Ah, they say, sure, perhaps it can’t be, you know, won but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth fighting! Maybe. But at what point is

There’s good and bad news this month. The disappointing news is that the latest surveys suggest only one in five American high schoolers smokes tobacco even occasionally. The good news is that one in five smokes marijuana from time to time. According to this year’s official figures: For 12th-graders, declines in cigarette use accompanied by recent increases in marijuana use have put marijuana ahead of cigarette smoking by some measures. In 2010, 21.4 percent of high school seniors used marijuana in the past 30 days, while 19.2 percent smoked cigarettes. This is good news? Yes it is. For one thing it shows that teenage stoners have a better grasp of

Stephen Pollard argues that this piece by Antonio Maria Costa, formerly Executive Director at the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, “simply rips apart the dangerously sloppy thinking from those who argue for the legalisation of hard (and soft) drugs.” Well, that’s one way of looking at it. Alternatively, one can think it profoundly misleading and alarmist. Costa argues that any attempts to introduce sanity (that’s not how he describes it) to the drug conversation will inevitably produce a sharp rise in drug use, and consequently addiction. Leaving aside the philosophical debates about drug-use, this is an argument that while intuitively plausible isn’t necessarily endorsed by the evidence available.

Whatever you think of the rights and wrongs of our drug policies, I hope we may agree that they’re much less important than drug policy in the United States or the countries that produce narcotics. Nearly 30,000 people have been killed in Mexico since the “War on Drugs” was re-militarised in 2006. Now former President Vincente Fox is the latest Latin American statesman to suggest that the war is a pointless, murderous folly that weakens civil society while empowering the very people it’s supposed to be fighting: “Legalization does not mean that drugs are good … but we have to see (legalization of the production, sale and distribution of drugs)