As many of you may know I favour legalization of drugs.
As a general line, I've long thought that all drugs should be legalized.
However, I watched Meth in Montana on Youtube yesterday.
It seems that Meth is actually as bad as the government has always claimed drugs are.
Meth is thankfully rare in Europe, so I didn't know much about it.
It doesn't seem to destroy just a small percentage of users that cannot handle it, but rather all users.
Addiction comes fast, even after the first time.
The substance causes great physical deterioration, though this might be the result of impurities as the ingredients are isolated from battery acid and Drano.
Meth is a vicious drug, definitely one of the worst ones out there.
So what I'm pondering is this:
Should we ever stop the war on drugs, should we legalize all drugs or keep the worst of them illegal?
Would there still be a market for them? Would a person who could buy legal cocaine still buy illegal meth?
Would keeping some substances illegal still provide a significant marketplace for criminals? Or would the availabilities of legal, superior substances kill that market (almost) entirely?
There are two workable approaches:
1)
Safe injecting rooms provide a safe space for injecting heroin and other drugs. People are provided with clean needles, and supervised by a professional staff, they can respond almost instantaneously to overdose. In Sidney, Australia, a supervised injecting room has been in operation for 9 years, with 3400 potential overdoses, and not one death.
The wiki article above suggests that these rooms neither increase nor decrease drug use. However, they have a visible effect on public safety and crime reduction: safe injecting rooms reduce needle sharing, prevent used needles from being disposed in parks or lakes, prevents addicts from overdosing in an alley or behind a school, reduces drug-related loitering.
Vancouver's safe injecting room reduced transmission of HIV and Hep C. Since Canada has public health care, treating these illnesses has a public cost, reducing infections save money on treatment. HIV reduction alone saves around
$6M per year.
2) Decriminalize all drugs. Portugal did exactly that
and it worked, for the most part. The article cites the Liberatarian think tank Cato Institute for numbers indicating that drug use decreased, I think the numbers are skewed by a political bias.
This article has some detailed findings:
In the Portuguese case, the statistical indicators and key informant interviews that we
have reviewed suggest that since decriminalization in July 2001, the following changes
have occurred:
- small increases in reported illicit drug use amongst adults;
- reduced illicit drug use among problematic drug users and adolescents, at least since 2003;
- reduced burden of drug offenders on the criminal justice system;
- increased uptake of drug treatment;
- reduction in opiate-related deaths and infectious diseases;
- increases in the amounts of drugs seized by the authorities;
- reductions in the retail prices of drugs. [...]
Decriminalization of illicit drug use and possession does not
appear to lead automatically to an increase in drug-related harms. Nor does it eliminate all drug-related problems. But it may offer a model for other nations that wish to provide less punitive, more integrated and effective responses to drug use.
I think everyone agrees prohibition doesn't work, the aim should be harm reduction. With regard to meth use, I think safe injecting rooms promote that end more effectively decriminalization.
Incidentally, I think legalizing some drugs for sale, particularly cannabis, reduces demand for meth and crack. Its not drugs, but drug
dealers, which are a gateway to harmful substances. If you get your cannabis from a dealer, you're more likely to be offered mdma, crank, heroin, or meth than you'd be getting your cannabis from the mom and pop store by the Starbucks.
