When The New York Times ran a review last summer of a book about legalizing coke, Tom Feiling's Cocaine Nation, the head of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy wrote an old-fashioned letter to the editor. The review "correctly states that the Obama administration has moved beyond 'war on drugs' rhetoric to a comprehensive public health and public safety approach ... to reduce drug use and its consequences," Gil Kerlikowske wrote. "What is not mentioned is the fact that since 2007, cocaine use has decreased sharply in the United States, while in Europe it has ... Read More
Legalizing Pot: Will It End the Mexican Drug Cartels?
April 6, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Willie Nelson's Texas prosecutor — a 78-year-old fan, who plans to let the country singer off on a marijuana charge as long as he performs a song in court (and pays a fine) — wants to decriminalize pot. Hudspeth County Attorney C.R. "Kit" Bramblett favors a bill before the Texas Legislature that would end jail sentences for minor marijuana possession. "That makes sense to me," he told the Raw Story website last week. Bramblett is otherwise a fairly conservative guy who wouldn't want to legalize heroin or cocaine. But his experience as a prosecutor has convinced him not to seek jail ... Read More
Is U.S.A. Drug Tourism Likely After States Drug Legalization?
March 30, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
The attempt in California last year to legalize pot conjured wild images of stoned bus drivers, a balanced state budget, and Amsterdam-style coffeehouses from the Oregon to the Mexican border. All three images are exaggerated, but the Amsterdam coffeehouses in particular are a cliché. They're not quite the models for the legalization movement in the U.S., because in the Netherlands, drugs aren't legal. They're tolerated. The Dutch divide recreational drugs into categories, "soft" and "hard," and since 1976 police have not bothered to prosecute soft-drug offenses. Decades of trial ... Read More
A Smarter Way to Deal With Drug Offenders
March 23, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Asa Hutchinson, a staunch Republican who once ran the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, went to Canada early in March to do a peculiar thing. He tried to talk the Conservative Party out of some new tough-on-drugs legislation that lawmakers may pass in Ottawa. “We have made some mistakes, and I hope you can learn from those mistakes,” he told a legislative committee, offering a mea culpa for some of America’s drug-war policies. The main mistake, he said, was jailing nonviolent drug offenders. He argued that a low-profile but fruitful move toward “drug courts” in the U.S., which aim ... Read More
Don’t Legalize Drugs, Decriminalize ’em
March 16, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
When Portugal took a leap into the unknown in 2000 and decriminalized drugs, people howled. Abuse would soar, they said, and the little nation on Europe’s Iberian coast — already a summer dumping ground for drunken Germans and Brits — would become a haven for drug tourism. “I am against liberalization of drugs,” one conservative opposition leader in Portugal told a documentary maker at the time. “Why?” “Because I am against,” he repeated. “I don’t want the state giving signs of weakness [on] drug policy.” But in 2000, the Casal Ventoso slum in Lisbon — ... Read More