[rubecube]

Hey, we haven't had a good legalization thread pop up in like a month, so I'm just going to leave this here.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/war-...says-1.2636263

The war on drugs must end and the battle to change international drug policies must begin, says a new report from the London School of Economics.
Five Nobel Prize-winning economists signed off on the 84-page report entitled Ending the Drug Wars: Report of the LSE Expert Group on the Economics of Drug Policy authored by leading drug policy experts and supported by political figures from around the world calling for drug law reform.


The authors offer compelling evidence that achieving a “drug-free world” based solely on a prohibitionist model is an expensive and wasted effort. According to John Collins, co-ordinator of LSE IDEAS International Drug Policy Project and editor of the report, the drug policy experts' recommendations show how the war on drugs is a failure requiring a "major rethink of international drug policies."


Based on rigorous economic and social analyses of primarily the U.S., Latin America, West Africa and Asia, the authors urge that global resources shift from prosecution and imprisonment to more “effective evidence-based polices” such as harm reduction, treatment and public health strategies. Similar recommendations are suggested for Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom.


Current policies have helped push the black market drug trade to as much as $300 billion, and the 40 per cent of the world’s nine million prison inmates are jailed for drug-related offences — a figure that jumps to 59 per cent in the U.S. Moreover, between 70 and 85 per cent of American inmates are in need of substance abuse treatment.



The report emphasizes that while prohibition holds some value in decreasing drug dependence, the harm to society is gravely outweighed due to violence, government corruption and collateral damage associated with the drug war, especially in drug producing countries like Mexico, Colombia and Guatemala.
Dr. Benedikt Fischer, the Applied Public Health Research Chair and professor in the Faculty of Health Sciences at Simon Fraser University in B.C. thinks prohibition is an outdated weapon to fight the modern war on drugs.

This really shouldn't come as news to anyone but I'm guessing our government and our neighbours to the South, particularly the Republicans will find some way to dismiss this.


This is the point that I always like to make:

Fischer also says the argument that decriminalization leads to more drug use is a fallacy, and he points to the world's most popular drug — marijuana — as an example.


“Everyone that wants to use cannabis is using cannabis today," he says. "[There's no] evidence that there are people who are waiting just for this to be regulated, then all of a sudden will decide that they will now start using.”

Fischer agrees that harm reduction is only part of the larger picture in minimizing drug dependence. “No one can pretend that these problems will entirely disappear, but the assumption of a fundamentally different public health-oriented approach is that a lot of these problems will be significantly reduced to the benefit of both users and society at large.