Arguments for and against drug prohibition

Many countries have the drug problem they deserve.One of the prominent early critics of prohibition in the United States was August Vollmer, founder of the School of Criminology at University of California, Irvine and former president of the International Association of Chiefs of Police.

Repression has driven this vice underground and produced the narcotic smugglers and supply agents, who have grown wealthy out of this evil practice and who, by devious methods, have stimulated traffic in drugs.

[18] Moreover, a growing body of evidence and opinion suggests that contemporary drug policy, as pursued in recent decades, may be counterproductive and even harmful to the society whose public safety it seeks to protect.

Meanwhile, the effect of present policy serves to stigmatize and marginalize drug users, thereby inhibiting and undermining the efforts of many such individuals to remain or become productive, gainfully employed members of society.

They noted that unlike most of Europe, Sweden did not have widespread and lingering youth unemployment until the early 1990s financial crisis, suggesting that unattractive future prospects may contribute to the increase in drug use among the young.

[40] British Crime Survey statistics indicated that the proportion of 16- to 24-year-olds using cannabis decreased from 28% a decade ago to 21%, with its declining popularity accelerating after the decision to downgrade the drug to class C was announced in January 2004.

[46] In the American Journal of Public Health, Andrew Golub and Bruce Johnson of the National Development and Research Institute in New York wrote that young people who smoked marijuana in the generations before and after the baby boomers did not appear to be likely to move on to harder drugs.

[73][74] Studies on the effects of prescribing heroin to addicts as practiced in many European countries have shown better rates of success than any other available treatment in terms of assisting long-term users establish stable, crime-free lives.

An article in the Journal of the American Medical Association gave the number deaths caused by alcohol in year 2000 as 85,000 – over four and a half times greater than the DEA's preferred figure.

In natural plant drugs like opium, coca, cannabis, mescaline, and psilocybin, the medical history usually dates back thousands of years and through a variety of cultures.

[95] MDMA (Ecstasy) has been used for cognitive enhancement in people with Parkinson's disease,[96] and has shown potential in treating posttraumatic stress disorder,[97] social anxiety,[98] and alcohol addiction.

[104] Billionaire US financier, George Soros said in his autobiography, "I would establish a strictly controlled distribution network through which I would make most drugs, excluding the most dangerous ones like crack, legally available.

So, they are going to produce every conceivable thing out of hemp.In a Huffington Post interview, Mark Kleiman, the "Pot Czar" of Washington state, said he was concerned that the National Cannabis Industry Association would favor profits over public health.

Only major retailers that can handle massive shipments, have their own small fleet of aircraft, troops to defend the caravans and other sophisticated methods of eluding the police (such as lawyers), can survive by this regulation of the free market by the government ... it is because it's prohibited.

Rural farmers in the poor regions in which coca has historically been cultivated often find themselves at the difficult and potentially violent intersection of government-sponsored eradication efforts, illegal cocaine producers & traffickers seeking coca supplies, anti-government paramilitary forces trafficking in cocaine as a source of revolutionary funding, and the historical hardships of rural subsistence farming (or its typical alternative – abandoning their land and fleeing to an urban slum).

Without even realizing the plant had been outlawed several months prior, Popular Mechanics magazine published an article in 1938 entitled "The New Billion-Dollar Crop" anticipating the explosion of the hemp industry with the invention of machines to help process it.

[citation needed] Drug legalization has the potential to create a vast array of jobs, in sectors such as: sales, distribution, transportation, growing, cultivation, production, quality assurance, regulatory bodies, advertising, scientific research and lab analysis.

[142][143][144][145] On 2 July 2010, former Interpol President Jackie Selebi was found guilty of corruption by the South African High Court in Johannesburg for accepting bribes worth US$156,000 from a drug trafficker.

[149] Janet Crist of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy mentioned that the anti-drug efforts have had "no direct effect on either the price or the availability of cocaine on our streets".

[154] The 2005 Youth Risk Behavior Survey by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that nationwide 25.4% of students had been offered, sold, or given an illegal drug by someone on school property.

Out of fear of eradication, cultivators are incentivized to accelerate production cycles in order to obtain the highest yield in the shortest period of time; the pace and methods used by growers neglect measures to promote sustainability, exacerbating the environmental impact.

Traffickers use slash and burn practices to convert forest into arable land for cash crop production for the purposes of money laundering as well as the construction of clandestine roads and airstrips.

[1] Sweden's centre-right alliance government Moderate Party advocates "Zero tolerance for crime", arguing: Few things restrict people's freedom as much as the consequences of violence, drugs and criminality in society.

There is thus a moral imperative to use drugs in terms of human progress, teleological development, or just increased artistic creativity; such ideas are central to Cognitive Liberty, Stoned Ape Hypothesis and Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception.

[185] In 2007, Richard Brunstrom, the Chief Constable of North Wales, one of Britain's most senior police officers, said "If policy on drugs is in future to be pragmatic not moralistic, driven by ethics not dogma, then the current prohibitionist stance will have to be swept away as both unworkable and immoral, to be replaced with an evidence-based unified system (specifically including tobacco and alcohol) aimed at minimisation of harms to society.

"[186] The author and physician Andrew Weil has commented on the peculiar attitude and emotional bias of some people who think "drug taking is bad", but who nevertheless consume alcohol, and formulate the unhelpful conception "We drink.

[192] The deaths of two teenage boys in the United Kingdom in March 2010 sparked a nationwide controversy over the amphetamine drug mephedrone, which had gained popularity as a legal high.

"[193] Professor David Nutt, the former chairman of the ACMD, said: "the previous government's rush to ban mephedrone never had any serious scientific credibility – it looks much more like a decision based on a short-term electoral calculation.

An ICM poll of 1008 UK adults (aged 16+) for The Guardian in 2008 found that 38% would support a scheme, similar to that established in Portugal and Spain, whereby it is not a criminal offence to possess and use drugs privately.

[206] David Simon, creator of the television series The Wire, in 2011 told U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder that he'd "give him another season of the HBO show for an end to the war on drugs."