Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by azrael on Tuesday October 21 2014, @04:32AM   Printer-friendly
from the learning-lessons dept.

Christopher Ingraham writes in the Washington Post that many countries are taking a close look at what's happening in Colorado and Washington state to learn lessons that can be applied to their own situations and so far, the news coming out of Colorado and Washington is overwhelmingly positive. Dire consequences predicted by reform opponents have failed to materialize. If anything, societal and economic indicators are moving in a positive direction post-legalization. Colorado marijuana tax revenues for fiscal year 2014-2015 are on track to surpass projections.

Lisa Sanchez, a program manager at México Unido Contra la Delincuencia, a Mexican non-profit devoted to promoting "security, legality and justice", underscored how legalization efforts in the U.S. are having powerful ripple effects across the globe: events in Colorado and Washington have "created political space for Latin American countries to have a real debate [about drug policy]". She noted that motivations for reform in Latin America are somewhat different than U.S. motivations - one main driver is a need to address the epidemic of violence on those countries that is fuelled directly by prohibitionist drug war policies. Mexico's president has given signs he's open to changes in that country's marijuana laws to help combat cartel violence. Sandeep Chawla, former deputy director of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, notes that one of the main obstacles to meaningful reform is layers of entrenched drug control bureaucracies at the international and national levels - just in the U.S., think of the DEA, ONDCP and NIDA, among others - for whom a relaxation of drug control laws represents an undermining of their reason for existence: "if you create a bureaucracy to solve a particular problem, when the problem is solved that bureaucracy is out of a job".

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 21 2014, @11:00AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 21 2014, @11:00AM (#108175)

    Alcohol in the United States directly kills 88,000 people a year. In Europe that same number is 200,000. Alcohol kills between 3 and 8 times as many people in any given country as gun violence. I would call that a serious dispute to the claim "Alcohol Legalization Makes World a Better Place"

    Legalized alcohol (as in for drinking) makes the world a far, far darker place.

    Starting Score:    0  points
    Moderation   +1  
       Insightful=1, Total=1
    Extra 'Insightful' Modifier   0  

    Total Score:   1  
  • (Score: 2) by mcgrew on Tuesday October 21 2014, @02:13PM

    by mcgrew (701) <publish@mcgrewbooks.com> on Tuesday October 21 2014, @02:13PM (#108233) Homepage Journal

    Since you apparently know little about the history of the 1920s in the US, you might want to read this chapter [virginia.edu] from a book that was required reading in a history class I took at SIU in the late '70s.

    --
    mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
  • (Score: 2) by velex on Tuesday October 21 2014, @02:15PM

    by velex (2068) on Tuesday October 21 2014, @02:15PM (#108234) Journal

    Yes, but prohibition gets you speakeasies and organized crime. Implement that today and you'd probably see the date rape problem go through the roof. Oh, and the speakeasies won't waste time carding, so there goes any chance you had of keeping the stuff out of the hands of minors. Also, since it's illegal, good luck to alcoholics to get treatment.

    A world without alcohol might be a better place, but we live in a world where alcohol is easy to make, has a marked effected on behavior and even overall health, and is fairly addictive. The answer is treatment, not prohibition. The problem is the issue of legalization, not one of alcohol.

    Now what I wonder is what effect legalized recreational marijuana has on alcohol consumption. My personal experience with Spice (before it became crap when they were no longer able to use HU-210, which is very similar to THC iirc; this was years before Spice hit the news) leads me to believe that it would fall, especially alcohol-related incidents. I found I was able to stop daily and sometimes excessive use of alcohol.

    Allow me to digress in general.

    I also exercised more, improved my diet, and lost about 35–40-ish lbs. I don't think I'd ever been that thin and fit before. I wish I would have monitored my blood pressure as well. Well, then the DEA cracked down and that was that. I was good for a few months; I don't believe this was some kind of withdrawal. Then, gradually, everything got affectively worse, and I slid back into my old habits.

    Disclaimer: I'm not suggesting HU-210 should be legalized. Mother nature will provide, if only policies will stop being irrational. Not everybody who wants to use marijuana knows where to get it or is comfortable breaking the law and getting arrested due to lack of street smarts to get it.

  • (Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday October 21 2014, @05:54PM

    by DeathMonkey (1380) on Tuesday October 21 2014, @05:54PM (#108318) Journal

    Alcohol in the United States directly kills 88,000 people a year. In Europe that same number is 200,000. Alcohol kills between 3 and 8 times as many people in any given country as gun violence. I would call that a serious dispute to the claim "Alcohol Legalization Makes World a Better Place"

     
    You assume prohibition resulted in the reduction of alcohol consumption. It didn't.
     
      Although consumption of alcohol fell at the beginning of Prohibition, it subsequently increased. Alcohol became moredangerous to consume; crime increased and became "organized"; the court and prison systems were stretched to thebreaking point; and corruption of public officials was rampant. No measurable gains were made in productivity orreduced absenteeism. Prohibition removed a significant source of tax revenue and greatly increased governmentspending. It led many drinkers to switch to opium, marijuana, patent medicines, cocaine, and other dangeroussubstances that they would have been unlikely to encounter in the absence of Prohibition.
     
      Reference [cato.org]

  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday October 21 2014, @10:20PM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Tuesday October 21 2014, @10:20PM (#108446) Journal

    The little-told story of how the U.S. government poisoned alcohol during Prohibition with deadly consequences. [slate.com]

    Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.

    Although mostly forgotten today, the "chemist's war of Prohibition" remains one of the strangest and most deadly decisions in American law-enforcement history. As one of its most outspoken opponents, Charles Norris, the chief medical examiner of New York City during the 1920s, liked to say, it was "our national experiment in extermination." Poisonous alcohol still kills—16 people died just this month after drinking lethal booze in Indonesia, where bootleggers make their own brews to avoid steep taxes—but that's due to unscrupulous businessmen rather than government order.

    In addition to the organized crime and bribery associated with Prohibition, add deliberate mass poisoning. Bootleggers poisoned to stretch profits, and the government poisoned to stretch a failed technocratic experiment in moral manipulation to its ultimate conclusion.

    Check out the Ken Burns doc [pbs.org] to learn more.

    Marijuana criminalization has done even more harm. The drug war will be remembered by historians as one of the greatest policy mistakes of the 20th century.

    --
    [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]