Greg Barnes against Prohibition

[auspamp]

http://www.news.com.au/mercury/story/0,228...5006550,00.html

 

 

Stoned stupidity

 

GREG BARNS

 

April 09, 2007 12:00am

Article from: The Mercury

 

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ANOTHER week, another series of headlines and stories about the impact of illicit drugs

in our community -- and, naturally, more calls from the law-and-order brigade to jail people

who take illicit drugs or traffic in them.

 

Of course, it won't work. The war against drugs, which most Western societies appear

addicted to, is simply a scandalous waste of money, resources and lives.

 

Politicians fulminate about the evils of drugs such as ice and heroin, and judges and

magistrates insist on jailing drug users and traffickers because they say we need to send

a message that dealing in illicit drugs, in any shape and form, will land you in hot water.

 

Then there are periodic media campaigns delivering similar messages.

All this frenetic activity and torrent of harsh words is simply futile and it's about time our

society got the message -- prohibition never works.

 

We need politicians, lawyers, policy makers and community leaders to recognise the war

on drugs for what it is: a farce.

 

Let's try a different approach. How about we decriminalise drugs? How about we focus

instead on ensuring drug use is not a health hazard? How about we ensure users are using

clean needles and that we help people kick drug addiction, as we do with smokers,

alcoholics or gamblers? How about we get some simple economic sense into our

collective heads and realise that if you want to take the super profits out of the drug trade

and substantially reduce the cost of drugs so users don't beg, borrow and steal to feed

their habit, then you make the product legal?

 

Think all this is a bit "too out there"? Well, think again. The thinkers among us know the

current policy framework is simply ridiculous. Among them are such eminent personages

as the now departed Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, former US secretary

of state George Schultz and a retired chief justice of the Supreme Court of North Carolina,

Burley Mitchell.

 

Burley Mitchell, in late 2005, showed rare courage in saying what many of his colleagues

must surely think. After years as a prosecutor and a judge, he'd been involved in

thousands of cases predicated on zero tolerance of illicit drugs. He shocked his audience

at a law enforcement forum by describing the war on drugs as a total failure.

 

"What if we decriminalised drugs?" he asked. "If you knock out all the profits, there would

be no more Colombian cartel. There would be no more Mexican cartel. They would be

broken."

 

Drug offences should be treated as a medical problem, according to Mitchell. As he rightly

pointed out: "God, what could we do with the money we spend on sending people to jail?"

 

He has allies in Gary Becker, another Nobel Prize-winning economist, and Judge Richard

Posner, a former leading University of Chicago economist who is one of the most insightful

intellectuals in the US. Posner and Becker, who write a blog that is actually worth reading,

are scathing about the sorts of anti-drug policies pursued in the US and Australia. In an

entry on March 20, 2005, Posner and Becker argued that drugs should be decriminalised

and taxed like cigarettes, gambling or alcohol.

 

They observe that if such a policy were adopted, "instead of drug cartels, there would be

legal companies involved in production and distribution of drugs of reliable quality, as

happened after the prohibition of alcohol ended. There would be no destruction of poor

neighbourhoods, no corruption of Afghani or Colombian governments, and no large-scale

imprisonment of African-American and other drug suppliers. The tax revenue to various

governments hopefully would substitute for other taxes or would be used for educating

young people about any dangerous effects of drugs".

 

In our own country, Justice Don Stewart, the man who headed the first Commonwealth

national crime agency, set up in the wake of the Costigan Royal Commission two decades

ago, and who has vast experience as a crime fighter, advocate and judge, has views

similar to Posner and Becker.

 

Stewart, quoted in The Australian on February 25, said: "The evidence I heard over these

five years indicated to me, beyond doubt, that there is a problem of gigantic proportions in

our community. We'll never stop it, I'm convinced of that.

 

"Prohibition of alcohol didn't work in America. Why should prohibition of other drugs that

people want work anywhere else?"

He says illicit drugs must be seen in a health context: "I am as convinced now that the

medical solution is the only way forward, as I was once convinced that the criminalisation

approach was the best approach."

 

It's time we heeded the word of the likes of Stewart, Mitchell, Posner and Becker. Let's

end the unwinnable war on drugs now.

 

 

 

 

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Well Put. It is abut time this dude wrote something usefull. He has the power to stire the public opinion, solets flood him with positive encouragement.

[Zaknefain]

Well put.