The U.S. Congress passed a sprawling spending bill over the weekend — a massive piece of legislation that will fund the federal government for the next nine months — that contained a number of social riders that have gone largely unnoticed in this holiday season of tax standoffs and shutdown threats. One in particular should trouble advocates of evidence-based policy: Congress has once again banned federal funding for sterile syringe exchange programs. Public health advocates consider such harm-reduction programs a crucial tactic in halting the spread of HIV/AIDS. Research suggests ... Read More
The Dutch Can Handle Their Pot
September 16, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Since the 1970s, the Dutch have been famous among backpacking tourists, public health officials and drug-use researchers for their unusual national stance toward marijuana. Technically, the drug is illegal in the Netherlands. But the country has an official policy of non-enforcement, and you can buy the stuff — no more than 5 grams at a time — in hundreds of cannabis coffee shops. This approach — somewhere in between all-out prohibition and free-market legalization — is like no other policy in Western Europe, or in the United States for that matter. But research reveals a surprising ... Read More
War on Drugs Remains at Stalemate After 40 Years
June 24, 2011 • By •
The headlines, commission reports and op-eds have been singing in chorus this month around the 40th anniversary of Richard Nixon’s declaration of a national war on drugs. “Panel Calls War on Drugs a Failure," reads the Wall Street Journal headline on a new high-profile report from the Global Commission on Drug Policy. “Law Enforcement Study: War on Drugs is a Failure,” announced the release of another analysis from Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. Next came “U.S. Mayors Call U.S. ‘War on Drugs’ a Failure.” And just to underscore the bipartisan nature of all this ... Read More
Fighting Drug War Creates Drug War
April 27, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
It's clear enough that the American appetite for weed, cocaine and meth — but mostly weed — has contributed to evil and lurid gang wars in Mexico. An appetite for heroin in Europe has helped fund the war in Afghanistan, too, and in that sense the old and new continents face the same important question: What might quell the violence? Over the last few weeks, this column has explored various drug policies in Europe and the United States. "War" still summarizes the American approach, in spite of changing rhetoric from the Obama administration. "Harm reduction" roughly summarizes the ... Read More
Is a Dip in Cocaine Use a War on Drugs Victory?
April 13, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
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
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
Found in Translation
March 9, 2010 • By • 3 Comments
Given the increasingly horrific toll that intensifying drug violence has taken, primarily in Mexico but also in the U.S., it's not altogether surprising that former Mexican President Vicente Fox would define drug trafficking as a problem shared by his own nation and its northern neighbor, the world's largest consumer of illegal narcotics. Although during a recent appearance in California he called his successor, Felipe Calderón, "courageous" for his crackdown on the drug cartels, Fox also declared, "It's time to debate legalizing drugs." In the U.S., one might expect calls for drug ... Read More
Can Drug Policy Prevent Reefer Madness?
February 7, 2010 • By • 6 Comments
Raise your hand if you've consumed an alcoholic beverage or smoked marijuana in the last month. Raise your hand if you abstained from using alcohol until you were of legal age. Now, raise your hand if you refrained from smoking pot in the last month because it's illegal. Anyone? Do strict alcohol and marijuana laws actually prevent their use? That's the question a team of researchers set out to answer in a recent paper published in the International Journal of Drug Policy. Their cross-national comparison of drinking and cannabis use among 10th-graders indicates that although strict alcohol ... Read More
