. . . at least from an activist point of view.

Great lecture and public vs private security guard at California raves where attendees use drugs:

http://mises.org/media/6484/Prohibition-vs-Private-Solutions-at-the-Electric-Daisy-Carnival

Military man and drug warrior Joseph Califano and former drug czar William Bennett recently teamed up to write a Wall Street Journal editorial entitled “Do We Really Want a ‘Needle Park’ on American Soil?” The editorial is an attack on the recent report by the Global Commission on Drug Policy, which declares that the US War on Drugs has failed and is ruining civilization around the globe. The commission consists of 19 prominent people with credentials equal to or better than Califano and Bennett’s. It calls for the substitution of legalization and harm-reduction policies for the hopeless war on drugs.

. . . .

Prohibition also brings increased violence and property crime. Legalization would bring commercially produced products that are reasonably priced. Consumers would be able to afford the products and could consume them in the privacy of their own homes. Violence and property crime would decline. Sellers would be required to provide sufficient safety information and would be liable if they sold an inherently deadly product.

I have no doubt that if Califano and Bennett were in charge, they would invoke Rockefeller-style laws or even worse (Bennett once suggested that beheading drug dealers was “morally plausible”). The reality is that limited legalization has been shown to work, and that full legalization is the policy we should be working toward. (Read more from mises.org)

The Department of Justice sent out a memo Wednesday instructing the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration and leading officials in the U.S. Attorneys Office to treat medical marijuana shops as top priorities for prosecutors and drug investigators.

“Persons who are in the business of cultivating, selling or distributing marijuana, and those who knowingly facilitate such activities, are in violation of the Controlled Substances Act, regardless of state law,” the memo reads. “Consistent with resource constraints and the discretion you may exercise in your district, such persons are subject to federal enforcement action, including potential prosecution. State laws or local ordinances are not a defense to civil or criminal enforcement of federal law with respect to such conduct, including enforcement of the CSA.”

The memo, authored by Deputy Attorney General James M. Cole, “clarifies” a memo released in 2009 that declared medical marijuana sales in states that have legalized it to be a low priority for law enforcement and prosecutors. The so-called “Ogden memo” first appeared to drug law reformers as evidence that President Obama was dialing back the war on drugs. The DEA and U.S. Attorneys office continued to raid and prosecute state-legal grow operations and marijuana shops after the memo was first circulated, leading reformers to conclude that Obama was lying when he said that his administration would not be doing those things.

The memo written by Cole and addressed to DEA Administrator Michele M. Leonhart and several members of the U.S. Attorney’s office is a severe amendment to the Ogden memo. (Read more from reason.com)

See also:

Fantastic!!

Q: Which repressive country puts the most people in jail for violating government laws?

A. Iran
B. Saudi Arabia
C. Libya
D. Egypt
E. United States of America

(Read more from mjperry.blogspot.com)

Full list of national incarceration rates here.

Police ended up leaving Simpson’s home that day in 2008 with “a 52” flat screen TV, a DVD player, two computers, a camera and a bunch of DVDs,” reporter Scott Lewis wrote.

Now, two of the officers involved — Lt. Luke Davis and Lt. Emmanuel Riopelle — are facing “dozens” of charges. Both have been accused in a long-running scheme [2] to steal from drug suspects and profit from sales of their property.

In spite of the incident, drug task forces across the nation continue to operate with secret budgets [3] and the backing of laws that permit wanton seizure of property if drugs are discovered. (Read more from michiganmedicalmarijuana.org)

VIA Kevin Drum, Keith O’Brien reports in the Boston Globe on a new study showing positive results from Portugal’s nine-year-old experiment in drug decriminalisation. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, rates of hard- and soft-drug usage in Portugal were soaring, along with hepatitis and HIV rates.

Faced with both a public health crisis and a public relations disaster, Portugal’s elected officials took a bold step. They decided to decriminalize the possession of all illicit drugs—from marijuana to heroin—but continue to impose criminal sanctions on distribution and trafficking. The goal: easing the burden on the nation’s criminal justice system and improving the people’s overall health by treating addiction as an illness, not a crime.

But nearly a decade later, there’s evidence that Portugal’s great drug experiment not only didn’t blow up in its face; it may have actually worked. More addicts are in treatment. Drug use among youths has declined in recent years. Life in Casal Ventoso, Lisbon’s troubled neighborhood, has improved. And new research, published in the British Journal of Criminology, documents just how much things have changed in Portugal. Coauthors Caitlin Elizabeth Hughes and Alex Stevens report a 63 percent increase in the number of Portuguese drug users in treatment and, shortly after the reforms took hold, a 499 percent increase in the amount of drugs seized—indications, the authors argue, that police officers, freed up from focusing on small-time possession, have been able to target big-time traffickers while drug addicts, no longer in danger of going to prison, have been able to get the help they need.

Some researchers caution that Portugal’s results may be due not so much to tolerance for drug possession as to making more treatment available. But of course these two always go hand in hand, in any harm-reduction strategy for drug use: it’s only by decriminalising possession that you get problem users to come in for treatment.

Portugal is far from the only country that’s embraced such harm-reduction strategies, and the verdicts everywhere seem to be similar: they may lead to greater usage of soft drugs, they don’t seem to lead to significant increases in hard-drug usage, and they significantly reduce the costs of drug addiction to society. That doesn’t mean that drug policy disappears from the political agenda in countries that move towards harm reduction. The newspapers in the Netherlands reported today on a very American-seeming scandal: a website set up by an association of heroin users in Amsterdam, intended to provide addicts with advice on health and safe non-infectious usage, could be read as effectively providing how-to advice on how to shoot up, accessible to web surfers of any age. A conservative-leaning Dutch youth expert wants the site to be somehow restricted to those over the age of 12. But it’s instructive to read the reaction of a council member from the right-wing, laissez-faire VVD party, which currently leads the Dutch governing coalition:

On the one hand, we must ensure that the lowest possible number of people use that stuff. On the other hand, if they do, they should use clean needles, not borrow them from each other. And they should try to limit the health risks. That’s the perspective from which I look at the site.

This is a perfectly rational conservative perspective. And the fact is that Amsterdam’s heroin-addict population has been stable or falling for two decades. That’s even though, since 2002, the Dutch authorities have been doing something even more radical than Portugal’s for heroin users: they’ve been giving them free heroin, as long as they show up to inject at government-run “safe injection points”, under the eyes of police and health staff. Dutch drug researchers now say that the youth population “doesn’t relate to hard drugs at all”, and that there’s no danger that Dutch kids reading the advice site will find heroin use attractive. They’re more likely to find it pathetic.

Drug abuse is driven to a significant extent by fashion. If there’s one thing government has going for it, it’s the ability to make anything unfashionable. (Read more from economist.com)

Bolivia has embarked on an international mission to try to end the ban on chewing coca leaves. But the United States plans on getting in its way.

Coca has been used in the Andes for thousands of years as a mild stimulant and herbal medicine, but it is also a raw ingredient in the drug cocaine.

Bolivia, which argues that chewing coca leaves is part of indigenous culture, hopes to take coca leaves off a UN treaty on banned drugs, BBC News reports.

President Evo Morales, a former leader of a coca growers’ union, argues that it is discriminatory to classify coca as an illicit drug and launched a global campaign after his election in 2005 to legalize it.

. . .

Spain has already given its support to Bolivia’s campaign.

. . .

The United States plans on formally objecting to Bolivia’s proposal on Wednesday, AP reports. It argues that changing the convention would pave the way for other nations to challenge the inclusion of certain narcotics based on parochial reasons. (Read more from globalpost.com)

Ten years ago, the Lisbon neighborhood was a hellhole, a “drug supermarket” where some 5,000 users lined up every day to buy heroin and sneaked into a hillside honeycomb of derelict housing to shoot up. In dark, stinking corners, addicts – some with maggots squirming under track marks – staggered between the occasional corpse, scavenging used, bloody needles.

At that time, Portugal, like the junkies of Casal Ventoso, had hit rock bottom: An estimated 100,000 people – an astonishing 1 percent of the population – were addicted to illegal drugs. So, like anyone with little to lose, the Portuguese took a risky leap: They decriminalized the use of all drugs in a groundbreaking law in 2000.

. . . .

Drugs in Portugal are still illegal. But here’s what Portugal did: It changed the law so that users are sent to counseling and sometimes treatment instead of criminal courts and prison. The switch from drugs as a criminal issue to a public health one was aimed at preventing users from going underground.

Other European countries treat drugs as a public health problem, too, but Portugal stands out as the only one that has written that approach into law. The result: More people tried drugs, but fewer ended up addicted.

Here’s what happened between 2000 and 2008:

- There were small increases in illicit drug use among adults, but decreases for adolescents and problem users, such as drug addicts and prisoners.

- Drug-related court cases dropped 66 percent.

- Drug-related HIV cases dropped 75 percent. In 2002, 49 percent of people with AIDS were addicts; by 2008 that number fell to 28 percent.

- The number of regular users held steady at less than 3 percent of the population for marijuana and less than 0.3 percent for heroin and cocaine – figures which show decriminalization brought no surge in drug use.

- The number of people treated for drug addiction rose 20 percent from 2001 to 2008.

Portuguese Prime Minister Jose Socrates, one of the chief architects of Portugal’s new drug strategy, says he was inspired partly by his own experience of helping his brother beat addiction.

“It was a very hard change to make at the time because the drug issue involves lots of prejudices,” he said. “You just need to rid yourselves of prejudice and take an intelligent approach.”

Officials have not yet worked out the cost of the program, but they expect no increase in spending, since most of the money was diverted from the justice system to the public health service. (Read more from washingtonpost.com)

ANTWERP, Belgium—When the housing market crashed in 2008, David Llewellyn’s construction business went with it. Casting around for a new gig, he decided to commercialize something he’d long done as a hobby: making drugs.

But the 49-year-old Scotsman didn’t go into the illegal drug trade. Instead, he entered the so-called “legal high” business—a burgeoning industry producing new psychoactive powders and pills that are marketed as “not for human consumption.”

Mr. Llewellyn, a self-described former crack addict, started out making mephedrone, a stimulant also known as Meow Meow that was already popular with the European clubbing set. Once governments began banning it earlier this year, Mr. Llewellyn and a chemistry-savvy partner started selling something they dubbed Nopaine—a stimulant they concocted by tweaking the molecular structure of the attention-deficit drug Ritalin. (Read more from online.wsj.com)

According to my friend, esoteridactyl, this wouldn’t fly in the U.S. because substances are banned based on their effect, instead of on their chemical composition.