Just back from Boom Festival in Portugal, where personal drug use is decriminalized.
There was almost no police/security at the gates or inside the festival, although selling drugs was not tolerated (eg. people selling on the festival grounds were kindly asked to leave). There were 42.000 people from 152 countries and most of them used some kind of substance or plant there (marijuana being the most abundantly and openly used). As a consequence (or despite this?), this was one of the safest and warmest places I have ever seen.
Instead of police watching everyone, there were a number of premises: there was a drug info stand, were one could go and test their drugs. The queue was quite long there, people stood 2+ hours in the queue to test their substances.
Then there was the Kosmic Care, a place were 20+ psychologists, doctors and shamans would bring people having 'bad' trips back to earth. They had 70 'bad' trippers in the first night alone and they were expecting a lot more on the full moon night.
I've spoken to the psychologists there (out of curiosity, not because of a bad trip :) ) and they told me that that the majority of bad trips were caused by people taking 'fake' LSD. In fact, she said, 50% of the LSD people tested was not actually LSD but some designer substance with unknown consequences and effects.
Other reasons for bad trips - was people mixing substances or taknig too much (usually young, unexperienced people) and people having prior mental illness.
I asked a guy there, how can one prevent people from having a bad trip again and the answer was 'well, after such an experience, most people grow up pretty quickly and it's unlikely they would take these substances lightly the next time'.
In most countries, these young people would end up in a hospital and then get arrested and possibly spend time in jail.
The war on drugs has caused a lot of suffering and has done very little to reduce drug use or addiction, yet it costs billions every year.
Protugal's approach to drugs is a great example of how the negative effects of drug use can be handled with minimal costs and lead to positive outcomes in drug users.
All it takes is a bit of acceptance and common sense.
Portugal is certainly one step in the right direction. I lived and worked there for three months and it's all very relaxed. Cops don't really care about people rolling joints or even doing lines of coke in public if there's a party (and if you are in Portugal, there will be). Quietly puffing a joint while walking down the street in the middle of the day is cool as well. I actually never saw the cops interfere with anything while I was there, even though there are cops everywhere. There is one more thing about Portugal and drugs that needs to be said though: never, ever buy anything being offered to you. And you will be offered drugs ten times a day while just walking down the street. It's all fake, they're just out to scam you and steal your stuff, and they're pretty good at it. Just say no, thank you and go ask the cool kids hanging out in Martim Moniz instead. Good hash, coke and heroin is easily obtainable and cheap.
That's the problem with decriminalizing drugs, really. It's still very much a grey market, with no business backing, no brands, no quality control. Drugs have to be fully legalized. I think what some US states are doing (opening marijuana for businesses, enabling them to build a brand/reputation) is the way forward (but, of course, for all kinds of drugs instead).
>even though there are cops everywhere. ... you will be offered drugs ten times a day while just walking down the street. It's all fake, they're just out to scam you and steal your stuff, and they're pretty good at it.
That is a step in the right direction? What was it like before beaten by the cops and robbed 10 times a day?
In 1999, Portugal had the highest rate of HIV amongst IV drug users in the EU. There were 2,000 new cases a year - in a country of 10 million. Almost half of new cases were among IV drug users.
Gotta understand something about Portugal: 'til '74, it was a dictatorship. Then it was a military junta. It finally became a democracy in '76. Then, a little under a decade later, when cheap heroin flooded the world. The US saw it in the 80's too.
But it was much, much worse there.
> What was it like before[,] beaten by the cops and robbed 10 times a day?
Had nothing to do with that. It was about 'the population has an endemic drug problem leading to widespread ennui and HIV/AIDs, and even some of the harshest drug laws in Europe are doing absolutely nil to quell it.'
Yes ... But absolutely everything you say could apply to alcohol during say Prohibition. Look people taking the moonshine to be tested, people enjoying booze sensibly ...
We have a legalised and fairly sane alcohol policy in most countries, we can hardly hope to have a better policy and set up for any other drug, and yet alcohol is still a devastating blight on many lives.
Yes, stop this crazy war on drugs, but don't expect some nirvana to appear - people with a variety of mental and personality problems are not going to "grow up". They still need to be dealt with - and we are unforgiving of mental illness and have barely moved past the "cut it off and cauterise the wound" phase of treatment.
The war on drugs is mostly masking a war on mental health.
>We have a legalised and fairly sane alcohol policy in most countries, we can hardly hope to have a better policy and set up for any other drug, and yet alcohol is still a devastating blight on many lives
You don't just need to have a "sane policy".
You need to have a sane culture.
For one, a culture that doesn't treat alcohol as something necessary for having fun (e.g binge drinking on weekends, etc), but as something social you can have while eating with friends, etc.
Second, a culture (society) that doesn't cripple people, produce mass stress and depression, etc so that they take it to alcohol and drugs.
As long as you don't have those, there will always be people taking it to alcoholism. Heck, even with those you'll still have some people (but much less). But then again people can destroy themselves in 200 other ways too, if they are so inclined (from over- and under-eating to straight suicide).
Yes policy is not the right word, but we have many cultures around drinking alcohol, and sayin that some of them are the wrong culture and this the cause of trouble is either just labelling those of that culture as "troublemakers" which just leads downwards, or a more enlightened question is why are those cultures toxic - which tends to lead back to mental illness, depravation, lack of opportunity and lack of ... A culture that values more ...
Couldn't agree with this more. It seems that too often we look to policy to solve problems that really need to be addressed at a lower level. The problem with that is that changing the law is easy, when compared with changing the culture.
I thought I was the only one that knew about that study. I use it often when arguing that the word 'addiction' is biased and we should just use 'habit'. Addiction makes it seem it's the substance's fault, that it has something that makes people addicted to it, when in fact it is people that sometimes have a predisposition to forming habits when taking certain substances.
Crazy people can't buy guns, but guns aren't illegal for everyone. It should be the same for drugs, at least. If you have this predisposition to habit forming around drugs then you can't have them, but most of us don't.
"The war on drugs is mostly masking a war on mental health."
It's a war on people's right to enjoy and/or destroy themselves. All under the vague pretense of a social-good.
It's to keep control over a populace that could very quickly come to the realization that it is free to do as it pleases. Unfortunately, the more we suppress people like this, the worse off it will be when the milk and lies finally run out and they're stuck with nothing but their anger and dependance.
I would have to disagree with you on alcohol. Alcohol is a very addictive and destructive substance and can cause personality changes which lead to aggression and domination (ego enhancer) and is very harmful to health if abused.
A large chunk of problems in our society comes from alcohol abuse.
Some of the substances which are generically called 'illegal drugs', however, are much safer and self-limiting and many have virtually no harmful physical effects on the body (based on decades of clandestine use and research).
I'm refering to psychedelics and marijuana, drugs which I'm familiar with and have studied extensively through literature and some self experimentation.
Apart from being much safer, some of these drugs have major upsides, when used therapeutically and can cure illnesses that modern medicine is unable to cure.
And if used by brilliant people to start with, they have the power to transform society in unbelievable ways: the tech revolution was started by young, brilliant people who've been inspired by psychedelic trips or psychedelic music/art/culture, produced by the counterculture of the '60s.
Some drugs, like heroin or cocaine have both a big abuse potential and can be harmful to the body, although none are as destructive as alcohol. Rational and sensible recovery and detox programs, combined with unrestricted access to safer drugs (like marijuana) can reduce the risks associated with these 'hard drugs'.
Portugal decriminalized drug use due to the alarming rates of addiction to opiates among youth in 2001. As a consequence, the opiate addiction problem is pretty much under control there.
Nicotine is another extremely addictive substance, yet sensible policy and access to valid information has led a lot of people to quit using it due to health concerns in developed countries, although developing countries have seen a rise in nicotine use.
On the other extreme - countries which ban all kinds of drugs (including alcohol) are seeing strong religious domination, which leads to extremism and terrorism, so total prohibition of altered states of consciousness is also bad.
There is a great book, called 'Animals and Psychedelics' in which it is reported that most animals, including insects are using various plants to intoxicate themselves, even though those plants are not suitable as food. They just like to get stoned or high or drunk and go to great lengths to find their intoxicants.
We should accept once and for all that human beings seek and require altered states of consciousness and not treat drug use as a 'societal cancer', but rather try to understand - why do we do it ? Why do animals do it ? Is there a evolutionary benefit in it ? Are there good parts in getting high, besides having fun ?
> drugs which I'm familiar with and have studied extensively through literature and some self experimentation.
Sorry, a sample size of one does not make a drug "safe". The fact is, there's no such thing as a safe drug, as everyone's body reacts differently to each one.
> although none are as destructive as alcohol.
Really? Are you really saying that heroin, which is one of the most addictive drugs in the world, is not as destructive as alcohol? While there are more alcoholics than horse heads, that's because there's more people that drink alcohol as a whole. Are there any studies for the ratio of abusers/users for heroin and alcohol?
> Nicotine is another extremely addictive substance.
The difference being, nicotine's psychoactive effects are minor compared to hard drugs. People don't die from a nicotine overdose.
>> Are you really saying that heroin, which is one of the
>> most addictive drugs in the world, is not as destructive
>> as alcohol?
In terms of the chemicals themselves, this is generally considered to be true.
The risks of heroin are in unsanitary IV injections, OD from impure/variable product and the lifestyle of a street addict. Aside from addiction, similar pharmaceutical preparations of opiates (codeine, morphine etc.) is widespread.
However with alcohol, we have the short-term effect of injury and 100s of longer term conditions including cirrhosis and alcoholic dementia. It may be less addictive but the irreversible physical damage of the substance itself is much higher. AFAIK there is no medical benefit to high levels of blood-alcohol and only harm.
In terms of societal harms, we get extensive petty theft of heroin addicts but UK A&E and jail cells are dominated by the violence and injury fuelled by alcohol use.
>> People don't die from a nicotine overdose.
The number of smoking related deaths is truly shocking so I wouldn't trivialise it. Recovered heroin addicts often report breaking smoking addiction to be even harder.
> Really? Are you really saying that heroin, which is one of the most addictive drugs in the world, is not as destructive as alcohol? While there are more alcoholics than horse heads, that's because there's more people that drink alcohol as a whole. Are there any studies for the ratio of abusers/users for heroin and alcohol?
Your parent poster is right here. Heroin (and opiates in general) are pretty safe substances in pure form. That's one of the reasons that opiates are still among the preferred potent pain killers in hospitals: Little side effects, extremely potent, a very big window between effective dose and overdose. If you're in really bad pain, at least in germany, you'll get a morphine drip.
The "drug" effects you see in documentaries about drug often are no effects of the drug itself, rather than the stuff that the dealers mix the drug with, the use of unclean needles (infections and stuff) and the conditions that the addicts live in. Overdoses are typically either on purpose or most of the time the result of extreme variations in the potency of the drug. There was (or still is) a medical trial that gave clean, controlled heroin to hard addicts in Hamburg, Germany and from what I read that trial was very successful: The people in the trial were basically able to function in a normal day live with a regular job. Obviously no driving, no handling heavy machinery, but otherwise a major step up from living on the street.
But all those side effects are the direct result of using morphine, right? Splitting hairs to say 'so morphine is safe'. It like 'this knife is safe; its just the cuts that hurt you'.
Still, alcohol is more destructive overall since so many more people abuse it.
No, those are side effects of using morphine (heroin) that you got from a shady drug dealer network, instead of something more pure from a regulated corner store.
"The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned in report released today that the number of phone calls to U.S. poison control centers related to e-cigarette use has increased from just one call per month on average in 2010 to nearly 200 calls per month in early 2014."
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/health/2014/04/03/e-cigarette-po...
Nicotine overdose would be more common if people injected it. Smoking heroin isn't actually that dangerous (though admittedly, more dangerous short term than smoking tobacco). Why don't people smoke it then? Because the illegality makes it really expensive, and injecting is more effective.
On the other extreme - countries which ban all kinds of drugs (including alcohol) are seeing strong religious domination, which leads to extremism and terrorism, so total prohibition of altered states of consciousness is also bad.
And here I thought the causality went the other way; that is that religions like to ban alternative (ie, non-religious) means of altering your state.
Running a a drug friendly "festival" and a state (as in the United States) are two completely different realities. I'm welcome your anecdotal evidence but don't find it at all relevant to the topic of how a state should handle the legal and health consequences of heroin abuse. A bunch of party-goers doing recreational drugs couldn't be farther from the realities of heroin addiction in a rural population.
Your comment is slightly off-the-mark as his comment wasn't merely about a festival, but also about his opinion on Portugals drug policy.
As your comment implies that you aren't familiar with said policy, you may wish to recap Portugals efforts in drug decriminalization:
While it is apparently hard to say how effective these efforts were, it is quite easy to see that the neo-prohibitionists worst nightsmares have yet to happene in Portugal.
You do realize that a great deal of the problems associated with heroin addiction come from the very fact that it is illegal? The crime, the marginalization from society, the lack of access to health care or rehabilitation clinics, these things all make the addiction far, far worse than if we treated this whole thing a little saner and more compassionately.
>>> The crime, the marginalization from society, the lack of access to health care or rehabilitation clinics
Where do you live?
There's a myriad of state and federally funded programs here in the US that help people get treatment for a nominal fee or in many cases for free. Not sure how much more compassionate you can be when you're giving people a free alternative to get clean.
Also, if you've never had an addict for a friend or a relative, then you'll never know it doesn't matter how compassionate you are to them, if they want to use and continue to throw their life away - they will. They have to be willing to help themselves first. No amount of free clinics, health care or compassion will combat that.
> if they want to use and continue to throw their life away
This is exactly the marginalization he was talking about.
Some of the smartest people I know love hard drugs and are very successful, are they throwing their life away because they use on a regular basis?
Maybe you are only talking about the outright stoners that just get high every day, but are they really any different to the other lazy people that don't work?
Not doing anything ever is generally what I would consider to be throwing your life away.
I don't think drug use has much to do with throwing your life away, apart from the depression that comes from being marginalized.
People that wish to throw their life away will do so with or without drugs.
The marginalization comes from the fact that you can't participate in society if you are a drug user/abuser. Even if you are healthy enough to be a productive, upstanding member in every other way, the system is designed to tear you down at any moment, based on nothing but the fact that you use an illegal substance.
Some people use regularly, but can still maintain and even excel in a job, and keep a healthy social life without anyone even being aware of the drug use or addiction. But they have to live with the knowledge that they are one drug screening away from being out of a job, regardless of performance, and that they can always be arrested the next time they have to purchase their vice, which would likely also lead to loss of a job and social ramifications.
If we treated addicts the same way we treated someone with any other mental or physical ailment, it would make it so much easier for them to actually function in society without "getting clean". Which might actually help a few of the ones who want to get clean, because from what I understand, it is much easier to kick a habit when you have more going for you, like a career and social life.
Just my two cents, from anecdotal evidence knowing drug users in a few different circumstances. Never been a user myself.
I might not like it, but I don't consider it my place to judge how others deal (or fail to deal) with their problems, how they lead their lives. What's entirely unfair, and not helping anyone, is criminalization of drugs.
>Running a a drug friendly "festival" and a state (as in the United States) are two completely different realities
Right. I mean, a hippy-esque musical festival is going to draw in all sorts of non-violent potheads. How about the south side of Chicago? Do you think Kosmic Care is going to handle gangbangers on meth?
Heck, here in Chicago during Lollapalooza, a man bit two people and injured them. It is reported that he was on drugs:
“In describing it to the police later, they said ‘We never see cases like that where the attacker isn’t on PCP, or bath salts, or something like that,” Lenet said. “There’s no way a normal person could have sustained that much punishment, and just walked away.”
The problem with the pro-legalization crowd is that we don't have any consistency. Some of us just want pot legalized but most of the movement seems to have this pie-in-the-sky view of legalizing just about everything. I'm afraid that we have two extremists groups: "no drugs" vs "all drugs" and per usual sane moderate voices are drowned out.
I just don't believe a "one size fits all" mentality will work here. I just don't think we should legalize drugs that are physically addictive like heroin, PCP, meth, etc.
How does making the stuff illegal handle gangbangers on meth, exactly?
The anti-legalization crowd seems to hold it as an article of faith that criminalizing drug use results in less drug use. The arguments always come down to some variation on, "Freedom is good, but drugs are bad, so sometimes it's worth making them illegal."
I think you need to show that criminalizing physically addictive drugs like heroin, PCP, meth, etc. actually reduces their use. The evidence available so far from places like Portugal seems to indicate the opposite, although the data is far from clear.
I mean, your PCP example is from a place where all of this stuff is already highly illegal. How is that not an argument against criminalization?
C'mon, don't know you know that making something illegal automatically makes everyone in the world stop doing it? /s
No, but seriously - and I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir - we desperately need reforms in both the Mental Health and Drug sectors in the US. Vermont's initiative seems to be a step in the right direction. It reminds me a bit of the Canadian Insite[1], which is a place where addicts can go to be in a sterile environment and be under medical supervision while they use.
Decriminalization would have a disproportionately good impact on the south side of Chicago. Remember, black kids are less likely to use drugs than white kids, but then have roughly equal arrest rates (not per drug use, per person) and then ridiculously disproportionate incarceration rates.
Some interesting books on the topic include "High Price" by neuroscientist Carl Hart, which I enjoyed because it touched personally on the gangbanging aspect, and "The New Jim Crow" by Michelle Alexander, which instead takes a structural/legal point of view. "High Price" also discusses our psychological reactions to drugs like nicotine, marijuana, and LSD -- the author talks about interactions between environment, personal psychology, and chemical and how different behaviors can result.
You can explore drug use rates at http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/quicktables/quickconfig.do?34481-... and notice that for a few drugs use is similar across black/white racial lines (crack, heroin) and for most other drugs skews very white. Look at cocaine, for instance.
> Heck, here in Chicago during Lollapalooza, a man bit two people and injured them. It is reported that he was on drugs:
If you attack people, it doesn't matter how drug friendly your country is... you'll still be arrested just the same as if you attacked someone while sober.
I think the point was the few lines after that about the punishment the attacker withstood, presumably due to the drugs. Subduing someone on PCP can be much more difficult than someone who is drunk or high from other substances
As others have pointed out, alcohol very much is physically addictive.
As for heroin, the rates of addiction to heroin amongst heroin users is similar to that of alcohol - most heroin users are casual users, just like most users of alcohol. You just don't see the casual heroin users as easily, because they don't exactly advertise what they do. Nor do you see the large proportion of heroin addicts that manage to lead relatively normal lives.
It's not like heroin is a good thing, and that heroin addiction is something we should brush under the carpet, but for existing heroin addicts, lack of safe access to consistent doses is a far greater hazard than heroin itself.
Meanwhile nicotine on its own is not particularly addictive, nor particularly harmful - it needs to be mixed with other substances to become much of a problem.
Ok naieve non-user here, no idea what heroin use is like except what I see in the media.
But it takes some kind of nerves to inject a drug, unlike say drinking from a glass or lighting up. I have to believe heroin is the resort of fairly desperate people. Some emotional or physical compulsion must exist to overcome the natural inclination to not jab yourself with a needle. So I have to believe the risk of heroin use escalating is accelerated by that compulsion.
I'd love to see your statistics on the demographics of 'casual heroin users'. And how long they remain that way without some crisis.
Because IV is the only way to do heroin. Lots of "casual drug users" are into pills/narcotics, which end up being too expensive, so they get into heroin and wreck themselves.
To be fair I only know a couple people who say they "occasionally do heroin" and I'm not sure if I believe them, but I would say a huge proportion of heroin users do not initially IV(you can smoke or snort, same with crystal, people tend to progress to IV when they feel they are no longer getting "high enough").
IV isn't the only way to do heroin. It is however the most "effective" way to do heroin, both in terms of cost and high, and cost is often one of the things that drives people from prescription opiates to heroin.
I've never used anything stronger than caffeine and alcohol myself, so this is all from reading and some limited experiences with people who have used drugs.
For starters, injection is not the only way to take heroin. It's also smoked, snorted and sniffed. But you are right - heroin is rarely the first drug of choice for anyone. It's not glamorous, and it has a "bad image". Thankfully that reduces recruitment. However once people have tried it, the "natural inclination to not jab yourself with a needle" is quickly overcome with habituation.
A substantial gateway to heroin usage is abuse of other opoids such as prescription painkillers. Ironically many of the people who make the switch does so because they find heroin is cheaper and more easily accessible than commonly prescribed opoids that are often safer (not least because they're of predictable strength), available in pill form etc.
I haven't looked up any significant studies at source, but here's an article from the National Institute on Drug Abuse that claims that 23% of heroin users become dependent [1], and an article [2] that covers some work on the subject of heroin addiction and casual use, though, that includes the following quote:
"In the early 1970s, researcher Lee N. Robins led a study commissioned by the Department of Defense that followed tens of thousands of Vietnam War veterans as they returned to the U.S. Use of narcotics and heroin was rampant among soldiers stationed in Southeast Asia, with as many 20% showing signs of addiction. Yet during the first year back, “only 5% of those who had been addicted in Vietnam were addicted in the U.S.” and “at three years, only 12% of those addicted in Vietnam had been addicted at any time in the three years since return, and for those readdicted, the addiction had usually been very brief.” It wasn’t for lack of access to junk, either: half of the returning addicts said they’d tried heroin at least once since arriving back home.
As my Reason colleague Jacob Sullum has documented, such take-it-or-leave-it findings are common in drug research. In his 2004 book Saying Yes and other places, he’s detailed work in which researchers find a surprising range among heroin users, including a study that concluded, “It seems possible for young people from a number of different backgrounds, family patterns and educational abilities to use heroin occasionally without becoming addicted.”
The 23% number above is the highest estimate of percentage of addicts amongst heroin users I've ever seen, and as far as I understand it reflects the lifetime risk of becoming addicted at some time. As noted in the quote from the Time article, many addicts go on to stay free of abuse for years at a time subsequent to becoming addicted.
But to be clear, whether at 23% or 10% or 2%, heroin addiction is not something to take lightly. It's a nasty drug. However, it's not nearly as nasty as it is generally portrayed, and many of the biggest problems for heroin users, and addicts, are a result of it's status as an illegal drug rather than due to the drug itself. Secondly, as noted above, many of them come to heroin due to lack of access to other, safer, drugs - a typical cascading problems with drug abuse.
My "closest encounter" with heroin for my own part was working with an addict - a well functioning one for most of the time I knew him. As for many heroin addicts, he first ran into problems when prices spiked overnight due to supply problems: Suddenly it was hard for him to feed his habit from his normal income, and he started spending a disproportionate amount of time on the phone, seemed jittery and nervous, and eventually a couple of k disappeared from the till at the store he co-owned, and he disappeared for a couple of days before checking himself into rehab.
That's the first we knew of his addiction.
As long as he had a steady supply, he was a nice, hard-working family man with a loving wife and son that knew little to nothing about his addiction. That's not to say that the heroin was not a problem for him - he was certainly an addict, and it certainly would affect his health over time. But he was far from the typical image of heroin addicts you get from anti-drug propaganda. He opened my eyes to considering that the addicts you see sleeping rough etc. are not the full set of heroin addicts, or even most.
As with alcohol use, heroin addicts also manage to function in many or most cases, and as with alcohol use, most users are not addicts - not even according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse with their 23% number. The biggest challenge to keeping things together for the guy in question was finding a safe and stable supply for whenever he felt unable to stay clean. The biggest threat for him, then, was government drug enforcement supposedly there to keep us safe from drugs, that prevented him from getting a guaranteed clean supply at a cost that could let him focus on fixing his life and keeping his job and family, and that would have substantially reduced his health risks.
I used to be against all legalisation, but I've come to see almost all anti-drug legislation as downright immoral. Even when it comes to heroin. It doesn't mean I think it ought to be available at the grocery store next to the milk, but I do think trying to prevent access has a vastly higher human cost than allowing carefully regulated sale would.
I would call 23% a terrible number! From your account, these folks are hemorrhaging money, stealing from the till and totally dependent on their supply. Those don't describe a well-functioning adult.
> nicotine on its own is not particularly addictive
No drug is addictive. This word "addictive" is a rhetorical strategy to shift the blame from people's genetic and psychological predispositions onto a substance that by itself is harmless.
I drink alcohol about once every two months. I'm not addicted to it. Therefore, alcohol is not "addictive". It only takes one counter-example to disprove that assertion.
I've also tried cigarettes in the past. Never got addicted. So it can't be that nicotine is "addictive".
Nothing is "addictive". People are either more prone to forming habits around certain substances and behaviors, or they aren't.
This is important because thinking that substances are to blame is what got them banned in the first place, and that is the wrong approach to the problem of treating people with strong habits around unhealthy substances. This point of view only harms those that need the most help. They cannot help that they have certain genes or that their brains are wired in a certain way.
You can die from an alcohol dependency if you're not treated properly when going sober. For about 10% of the population that is pre-disposed to alcoholism it is extremely addictive.
I fail to see how ruining peoples' lives with criminal convictions, records, and incarceration helps anyone in any case. Addiction is a psychological and medical problem.
The real insult is that alcohol is legal. Heavy alcohol use results in severe addiction and physical harm comparable to chronic heroin and amphetamine abuse. Yet we treat alcoholism as a psychological and a medical problem (which it is), and do not further ruin the addict's life and worsen their problems with incarceration and persecution.
I think they had a drug testing booth in Barcelona when I was there last summer for Sónar, and there was a massive line up of people.
Not sure what Spain's outlook on drug use is, but it was rather refreshing to see that level of education and emphasis on safety compared to what I've seen in festivals in Toronto and NYC.
From my experience in Granada it's pretty relaxed. I recall going to a Granada football game(they're in the top division), with a policeman standing on the steps next to my seat there was some guys smoking some joints right in front of us. They may as well have been drinking a beer for all the attention he was giving them.
Portugal positive approach on drug problem was just the natural reaction to the collapse we had in late 80's and early-mid 90's. Politics claim it was a result of their policies. That is BS. In the end, government policies had very low impact. The only successful policy (on AIDS control, not on drugs) was the free syringe exchange at pharmacies.
The real problem was solved based on the lazy approach of "laissez-faire" (with consumption decriminalization) like a lot of stuff here (for the good and ill), "letting the market solve it": During the 90's the drug problem was huge! As an example, in my home town, that generation doesn't exist (people born during 70's). Almost all men (and some women) from that generation were involved on hard drugs (heroine). A large percentage of them went to prison and didn't come back, another large percentage of them died drugs related. Kids from that time (including myself) saw the dark side of being on drugs seated in first row: it was their neighbors and older brothers, not a stupid tale on TV.
Being on drugs since that moment was not cool anymore. Slowly, young people mentalities improved to "being on hard drugs is not cool". Nowadays, the sentiment is more mixed, hard drugs are not anymore seen as a boogeyman: some forgot what happened, others didn't see it with their eyes. Anyway, I don't think we will come back to 90's again. We were coming from a dictatorship, young generations wanted freedom and there were no visible bad examples of drug addiction. Times are different now, drugs are also cheaper, lesser need to be a petty criminal and involve all society like before.
Switzerland (not in the UE) was one of the first countries where some drugs were permitted (like weed). Although (IIRC around 2000) they stopped.
Another country Nederland is well know in Europe for being very freedom with drugs. In Nederland in the latest few years they had several calls to put drugs on ban.
I visited Switzerland hundreds of times (it's like 15 miles where was my house) I have been in Amsterdam 4 times.
What I can say is that "citizens" were kinda sick and seems is not a thing anymore. Although is still a big big business economy for "tourists".
I think this thing of legalizing light drugs in america is like tobacco in 60-80', it was cool, trendy out of the scheme, but suddenly... things changed so much that I bet there are less tobacco smokers in California than the smallest town of Portugal.
"War on drugs" is a terrible world affliction. Prohibition neither works nor is conducive to a better society. Governments should just tax and sell the drugs to the general public. Alcohol is considered to be the most harmful drug but is legal because it can be taxed, controlled, and makes money. (http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2010/11/drugs_caus...)
Governments should also support people that want drugs to come off those drugs and while we're at it, release all prisoners who are specifically in for possession/dealing/trafficking.
We really need to give up on this idea of a drug free world.
I don't see it quite so cynically. Alcohol is legal because there would be outrage or civil unrest if it was banned.
Most people that I've met (who may not be considered alcoholics) certainly have some level of alcohol dependency. And, I'm being loose here with the word 'dependency', but in the last year, I've never seen one of my friends or acquaintances refuse alcohol at a bar or restaurant, while others were drinking.
However, that does bring up the issue of money and alcohol. Restaurants seem to push the stuff pretty heavily, at least in the US. There should at least be some restrictions on the amount of profit that bars / restaurants can make off of it.
> Alcohol is legal because there would be outrage or civil unrest if it was banned.
There is outrage and 'civil unrest' in some sort surrounding other drugs; the difference is the communities in which it manifests.
The war on drugs very disproportionately affects people along lines of race and socioeconomic status[0]. These communities certainly are outraged at how their families and communities are being destroyed (literally) by the prohibition of these drugs and the societal ramifications that go along with the prohibition. The difference is that they're not in a position to voice that outrage as loudly.
Remember why prohibition of alcohol was repealed - wealthy taxpayers were mad that their tax bills went up after the passage of the 18th amendment (the government could no longer make revenue off of alcohol taxes). This is exactly why initiatives to legalize marijuana in Colorado (Amendment 64), Washington, and California (Prop 19) have used the language 'tax and regulate'. It's not some crazy new idea - it's literally the same tactic that succeeded in passing the 21st amendment!
There is such a thing as responsible, low-level alcohol consumption that doesn't turn into a spiral of addiction and self-destruction. Same with LSD. Not so much with heroin.
> There is such a thing as responsible, low-level alcohol consumption
That responsible low-level use tends to need strong laws to enforce it.
Minimum unit pricing (which only affects the very cheap, poor quality end of the market); tight alcohol and drivng limits; time restrictions on serving alcohol.
See eg the measures that France brought in (less dead people from cirrhosis; less dead and injured from traffic accidents; more profitable drinks industry) to England, which has seen a five fold increase in cirrhosis over the same time.
Alcohol has enormous costs which are mostly hidden because people don't want to accept the truth.
Many of those costs are directly related to suburban car culture. When you take the subway anyway, risks are much lower.
I would argue that people drinking enough to incur liver damage are doing so not because alcohol is addictive but because they have other psychological issues for which alcohol is the only effective relief. In which case, if it weren't for alcohol, they'd do something else. You can't make the whole world a padded cell.
How can you ignore the existing outrage and civil unrest around today's prohibition? It is just like the early 1900s. We have black markets, cultural adaptations of the criminality, and all the same corruption patterns.
No, actually not. Alcohol is a potent poison and kills cells - hence the use as desinfectant. The physical damage caused by alcohol abuse rival and surpass most illegal substances.
Alcohol is also one of a very small number of drugs where the physical symptoms of withdrawal can be fatal. That doesn't mean being an alcoholic is worse than being addicted to some other drug (salt withdrawal is invariably fatal, but nobody's out there saying "salt ruins lives"), but it's potentially an argument for alcohol being especially nasty to the body.
oh sure, this is about moderate drinkers, not about people abusing alcohol as a drug. The side effects of moderate use of pretty much every controlled substance are pretty much insignificant as long as you use a pure, unadultered drug (let's forget about croc or battery acid etc). But once you get into heavy use, alcohol starts looking pretty bad: destroys liver and brain among other things, compared to e.g. opium where the worst side effect is constipation. Overdoses obviously kill in both cases, so let's keep that out of the picture here.
>But once you get into heavy use, alcohol starts looking pretty bad
Well, you can die with heavy dose of water too. Actually not even that heavy, people have died drinking like 7-10 liters.
>The side effects of moderate use of pretty much every controlled substance are pretty much insignificant
Yeah, but the research shows moderate use of alcohol not only doesn't have bad effects (even if insignificant) but it even has significant (measurable) beneficial effects.
> Yeah, but the research shows moderate use of alcohol not only doesn't have bad effects (even if insignificant) but it even has significant (measurable) beneficial effects.
Citation? Also, what's 'moderate' use for you? A 'standard drink' equals about 10 grams alcohol, the German institute for addiction (DHS) says* that the threshold dose for risk free consumption is at 20 grams per day, with two days break per week. Above you are risking a plethora of health risks, from mouth cancer, to liver deseases, breast cancer and what have you. There are some benficial health effects, but none of them are 'significant'.
And it get's worse. Because your not really tripping but rather fighting poisoning, it effectively cuts the connection to the better part of who you are. If it wasn't for alcohol, a lot of the trouble we see in society simply wouldn't exist.
Some would say the puke part is part of the cleansing, more spiritual than physical. Comparing shrooms to alcohol is very unfair. One is a spiritual plant, one is poison.
Pish. Once in a while, a drink is just the right elixer for a conversation or a mood change with a new friend. It doesn't deserve top billing, and the other drugs don't deserve to be so screwed, but it does have a deserved place in the human experience. Calling it mere 'poison' misses the mark for me.
The demographics of Vermont makes me curious. Many people say that the war on drugs is racially motivated in that more blacks and hispanics are prosecuted than whites. Vermont is 95% Caucasian. I wonder if this fact influenced the new policy in any way.
I think you're getting at something. The easier availability of prescription opiates (e.g., Dad's Vicodin for his bad back) has produced an addiction surge in middle-class communities. This is not just Vermont, but across the U.S.; I'm well aware that Vermont has a unique political culture that also factors in to how this played out.
In some places, this has turned out to result in significant high school heroin overdoses among well-off white folks, and significant heroin addiction among their parents.
If it's your kid or your neighbor, the "harm reduction" path starts to look a lot better than criminalization, and you start to see political viability for something that was radioactive before.
It hurts to admit it, but when you see political demagoguery in the U.S. (i.e., War on Drugs), looking for the racial angle is a good first strategy.
I would say that it's just Vermont being independent as usual. Vermont has always gone against the grain, in good ways and bad (there's a secessionist movement there now[0]). I've long advocated for treating drug abuse as a disease and making it a health problem.
I'm against complete legalization of most drugs, though. I say make personal use legal and continue prosecuting dealers and pushers.
And for anyone who disagrees, that's fine. This is just my personal opinion.
Nope just Vermont being ... Vermont. Caring for your neighbor, and not being afraid of them (racially or socioeconomically) is one key to having a view like this. When one group is afraid of another you get insane sentencing laws and all sorts of discrimination.
Vermont is very independent, and doesn't have much of a "big city" influence, or cultural divide seen in even other New England states.
>“This is an experiment,” Shumlin says. “And we’re not going to really know the results for a while.”
Good stuff. I really wish those in power would more often try a scientific/engineering approach to see what works rather than politicians shouting about war on whatever.
This is a fantastic argument for strong states' rights and less-overbearing / centralized policy from Washington.
Let the states be compared against one another and measure the results: if heroin abuse skyrockets in Vermont, then other states could avoid their policy mistakes. If something works incredibly well in a couple states, then it would be appropriate to implement broad, federal rules codifying the success in those states for the whole union.
As it stands, the federal government piles an increasing amount of legislation and regulation down on the states, leaving less room for this type of innovation and experimentation.
You are detailing a consequence of an international crisis, not so much some novel concept in the US.
This problem is also starting to show up in the EU, since there is pressure to adopt monolithic policies across member states.
But the concept is not complicated - you should give people mobility, so that they can go wherever there are policies they most agree with. That is it.
The problem is that international mobility is crippled by bureaucratic immigration policies in addition to the classic cultural and language barriers. Thus, postulating that states should be more independent in their policies is right, but it needs to acknowledge that fundamentally it does not matter if it is states in a country or individual countries or something like city states or homesteading, all that is required is the ability for individuals to migrate where their ideologies and the states match.
And the modern world is often simultaneously the best and worst time for such mobility. In terms of real physical barriers, there are pretty much none - flight has advanced sufficiently it is not prohibitive in cost for many people in the world to realistically save up enough to fly anywhere else. Simultaneously, in the past it was much easier to just "cross boarders", where the bureaucracy and monitoring of citizenship was much reduced.
Hopefully we progress to minimize or remove the latter, because it is the best outcome for everyone except those who want to prevent mobility to hold power over groups of people who would not stay if they had a choice.
Not in every case. In some cases [0] states' rights means a willingness to accept less centralized authority and more autonomy. A 1932 Supreme Court decision contained the phrase "laboratories of democracy" to describe how a "state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country."
Treating heroin addiction as a medical problem is why I've been clean for two years, after being an addict for 6. Australia is surprisingly okay on this front all things considered. If I was afraid of being arrested for seeking help, then I can guarantee I wouldn't be here today. An acquaintance overdosed once, and we called an ambulance straight away -- if I had lived in a place where a drug overdose means a police car following the ambulance, he would be dead. The fact it was illegal stopped exactly nobody...
Anyway, I'm glad I got help. Life's too good to throw it away :)
What a wonderful world it will be when we help our sick instead of imprison them. I am looking forward to the rest of the world following suit. I'd also like to add this is a great time for US democracy to shine, as it is through statehood that things like this can be tested on a small scale, before rolling out to 'prod'.
I'm not an American but I'm equally as happy to hear this as one.
I'd like to argue as a Brit that we did treat these people as sick until Nixon's "war on drugs" made UN policies that the rest of the world had to treat them as criminals.
That's about the stupidest thing I've heard in a while, so stupid I have to assume it's sarcasm. Of course the great state experiment is how we got here in the first place. Reagan, as governor, defunded mental health care and just said fuckit, throw all the addicts in prison. Then he took his ideas "to prod" by doubling down on Nixon's "war", with the helpful (to his party) side-effect of throwing millions of black people in prisons.
As personally attacking as this post is (though the anger is perfectly understandable), it's probably closest to my view, mentioning "the helpful (to his party) side-effect of throwing millions of black people in prisons."
Except I don't consider it a side-effect, nor do I think it's limited to Republicans. For example, prison was one way to control the newly freed slave population. (http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/199804--.htm) Being the world's biggest jailer isn't exactly an "oops" thing.
John Ehrlichman, Counsel and Assistant to President Nixon:
"You want to know what this was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar Left, and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black. But by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."
Interviewed in 1992 by journalist Dan Baum, author of Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure, full quote in "Truth, Lies, and Audiotape" by Dan Baum (2012).
I find it very telling that prisoners are specifically excepted from the 13th Amendment of the US Constitution.
"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."
Sweden is fucked up as well, and I'd expect Norway to be the same or worse. Sweden jumped on the war on drugs-train head-first and tried to do it better than the US. And I don't think they got the other memo about the whole approach being a complete failure. It doesn't help that the famous German bitch we insist on keeping with "food" and "shelter" is running her own No Drugs-campaign with religious overtones. Or that the politicians in charge believe that overdosing on Cannabis is like overdosing on Heroin.
As a resident of Denmark who occasionally hears about neighbouring Scandinavian countries, I get the impression that religion (with a puritanical bend) has a stronger influence in Norway and Sweden.
I wonder why the government needs to force everyone to hit a collective rock bottom before considering a new strategy. Throwing everyone involved in jail was a bad idea from day 1.
What they need to do is manufacture and sell the drugs at cost to registered addicts. This way you destroy the business of the drug cartels and you insure your citizens are at least using pure drugs.
Regardless of the legality of the use of the drug it is a health issue that the drugs your citizens consume are pure. The safety of your people should come first and a government that has taken this long to realize something that basic is simply incompetent.
Prioritizing law enforcement before public safety is a revealing and meaningful sign of incompetence or even corruption.
Why does the government need to manufacture and sell the drugs at no cost? Why can't we just repeat what we do with alcohol and have it be produced by for profit businesses and then regulated and taxed etc to offset the health and educational costs of said activities?
>I wonder why the government needs to force everyone to hit a collective rock bottom before considering a new strategy. Throwing everyone involved in jail was a bad idea from day 1.
Population control. For blacks, it's the modern day equivalent of Jim Crow laws, but for keeping a huge majority in prison.
> Prioritizing law enforcement before public safety is a revealing and meaningful sign of incompetence or even corruption.
Government is fundamentally better at policing and enforcing than it is at nurturing. It is not a sign of corruption, but merely a trait inherent to all government.
Most of my life we've had an outsized problem with heroin and other opiates in Vermont. Recently this has developed into an odd symbiotic relationship with New York State, where Heroin is exchanged for guns across the border.
I recently left the state, but only a year ago I was living in Saint Albans when a warrant sweep rounded up dozens of my neighbors, including one who had been moving thousands of grams of heroin monthly.
Throughout 2013 there were ongoing sweeps in 3 major counties, all focused on narcotics only. Dozens were arrested each time. We're a small state with a terrible economy. As glad as I am that Shumlin is taking this step (and he's made it clear for a while now that he's happy to ignore the political consequences of this action) this has been a very long time coming. I remember first hearing about the heroin problem in my state 20 years ago, when I was in middle school and there was a report of someone overdosing in a park adjacent to a summit on combating opiate addiction.
> Addicts, including some prisoners, will have greater access to synthetic heroin substitutes to help them reduce their dependency on illegal narcotics or kick the habit.
I really wish it wasn't called "War on drugs". One of the things I dislike about America, as an outsider, is their tendency to call everything "War on X", which essentially makes everything us vs them.
I agree about disliking the terminology, although (as far as I know) the phrasing dates back to Lyndon Johnson's "War on Poverty" initiative in 1964. The aspiration that was being reflected there was that the US government could apply the same fervor, resources, and ingenuity to uplifting the poor that it had applied to WW1, WW2, and was then still applying to the Cold War. Because of that, I always felt like the phrase was a swords-into-plowshares type of saying rather than a militant one.
Of course, that was 50 years ago- as the phrase has gotten recycled for initiatives like the War on Drugs, it has lost that nuance and context, and sounds more like some zero-tolerance, overly militant government program (which parts of it were). Many or most Americans would agree with you that "War on X" needs to go, including me.
It has a lot of baggage. "War on drugs" was I believe first uttered in public by Nixon and I don't think anyone used the phrase after Bush (the Elder).
The term is harsh, and I've heard numerous complaints over "War on X" phrases, as you say, but I think this one is justified/beneficial. It indicates that drugs are the "them", and "us" encompasses legislators, regular people, and users the like.
Except that it is not how it turned out. It turned out that "us" was law enforcement and "them" essentially anyone else.
Mostly any kid smoking small amount of marijuana. Being free of drugs wont necessary help you, because law enforcement so much power, that they can take away your property even if you have done nothing wrong. And you can still get stopped and searched for drugs for no reason.
As a resident and commnications director/volunteer for a couple of campaigns, I've learned a Republican in Vermont is almost always like a Democrat in any other state.
When it comes to whipping votes (getting the party members to vote along party lines) only he and Angus King have the ability to claim no affiliation to the Democrat ticket, but Maine is a much more centrist state than Vermont. The house does not currently have any third party members.
Since voting is what matters (not privately held views), i'd say that he is indeed the only socialist in washington. If you insist on nitpicking about personal views, i'd say that perhaps you could include some representatives from the bay area, portland oregon, vermont (particularly the college towns), but that's about it. Many people always assume that the politicians hold secret views (shockingly similar to the those of the people who tend to believe it), but i honestly see no reason why people assume this. If someone has the forum to spread views the truly believe in, i don't seem much reason why they wouldn't.
I was thinking less along the lines of secret views, and instead, on how many people hold socialist-like beliefs without associating themselves (internally, not outwardly) with the word "socialist".
In the modern U.S., "socialist" and "communist" have become derogatory terms more than anything else, and their colloquial meanings are rarely consistent with any formal definition. Because of this stigma, it's easy for one to possess socialist beliefs while simultaneously dismissing all things "socialist", as they are universally negative.
No, I doubt it. The political left in the US is really pretty much extinct. What we have here are conservatives (Democrats) and reactionaries (Republicans). Both are corporate-friendly.
In Burlington (the smallest biggest city in any state), our local elections are between Democrats and Progressives. Republicans don't even make the ballot.
Probably like a liberal in Europe, as opposed to most Democrats that are more conservative than most European liberals. As a single example, Vermont is going down the road of actually enacting a single payer healthcare system at the state level, which is politically impossible nationally.
I was told by a German, who had lived in the States for a few years in the past, that American Democrats resembled German conservatives. If that's the case it's hard to imagine what the German/European counterpart to a Republican would be.
Their economics are close to liberals (not the american definition). I don't think there is an equivalent for the religious right. At least not in Germany
> June 19, 1986: College basketball player Len Bias dies of a cocaine overdose, which highly politicized the drug debate during a mid-term election year, as Frontline explains. In 1999, Eric Sterling, a former lawyer for the House Judiciary Committee would go on to explain to This American Life how Democrats, in an effort to recover from their soft on crime reputation, pushed through a drug bill that introduced mandatory minimum sentences.
There was almost no police/security at the gates or inside the festival, although selling drugs was not tolerated (eg. people selling on the festival grounds were kindly asked to leave). There were 42.000 people from 152 countries and most of them used some kind of substance or plant there (marijuana being the most abundantly and openly used). As a consequence (or despite this?), this was one of the safest and warmest places I have ever seen.
Instead of police watching everyone, there were a number of premises: there was a drug info stand, were one could go and test their drugs. The queue was quite long there, people stood 2+ hours in the queue to test their substances.
Then there was the Kosmic Care, a place were 20+ psychologists, doctors and shamans would bring people having 'bad' trips back to earth. They had 70 'bad' trippers in the first night alone and they were expecting a lot more on the full moon night. I've spoken to the psychologists there (out of curiosity, not because of a bad trip :) ) and they told me that that the majority of bad trips were caused by people taking 'fake' LSD. In fact, she said, 50% of the LSD people tested was not actually LSD but some designer substance with unknown consequences and effects. Other reasons for bad trips - was people mixing substances or taknig too much (usually young, unexperienced people) and people having prior mental illness.
I asked a guy there, how can one prevent people from having a bad trip again and the answer was 'well, after such an experience, most people grow up pretty quickly and it's unlikely they would take these substances lightly the next time'.
In most countries, these young people would end up in a hospital and then get arrested and possibly spend time in jail.
The war on drugs has caused a lot of suffering and has done very little to reduce drug use or addiction, yet it costs billions every year.
Protugal's approach to drugs is a great example of how the negative effects of drug use can be handled with minimal costs and lead to positive outcomes in drug users. All it takes is a bit of acceptance and common sense.