In the early 1930s, the federal government cracked down on California's legal drug programs, leading to numerous arrests. Above, a California jail in 1930, occupying the third floor of Ventura City Hall. In the early 1930s, the federal government cracked down on California's legal drug programs, leading to numerous arrests. Above, a California jail in 1930, occupying the third floor of Ventura City Hall. (Los Angeles Times) For one bright and flickering moment last year, it looked like the global war on drugs was about to die. California -- the sixth largest economy in the world -- voted to fully legalize cannabis, while a smorgasbord of countries including Uruguay, Canada and Jamaica were also moving toward more sensible policies. But like Freddie Krueger after the nubile teenagers believe he is finally slain, the drug war is suddenly back with even sharper claws. Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions is reviving the worst of the old policies that led to mass incarceration, while President Trump has said that the Philippines is doing "a great job" on the drug war under a President, Rodriguo Duterte, who publicly boasts: "There's 3 million drug addicts. There are. I'd be happy to slaughter them." [continues 966 words]
Once a decade, the United Nations organizes a meeting where every country in the world comes together to figure out what to do about drugs - and up to now, they've always pledged to wage a relentless war, to fight until the planet is "drug-free." They've consistently affirmed U.N. treaties written in the 1960s and 1970s, mainly by the United States, which require every country to arrest and imprison their way out of drug-related problems. But at this year's meeting in New York City later this month, several countries are going to declare: This approach has been a disaster. We can't do this anymore. Enough. [continues 549 words]
The Decades-Old Consensus Built on Punishment Is Crumbling. Once a decade, the United Nations organizes a meeting where every country in the world comes together to figure out what to do about drugs - and up to now, they've always pledged to wage a relentless war, to fight until the planet is "drug-free." They've consistently affirmed U.N. treaties written in the 1960s and 1970s, mainly by the United States, which require every country to arrest and imprison their way out of drug-related problems. [continues 1127 words]
Taboos about drugs are lying shattered across the U.S., like broken debris after a party. But even as some states have begun to decriminalize or legalize marijuana, there is an argument that is making some Americans hesitate. They ask: Aren't many drugs, even pot, much more potent today than they were in the 1960s when the boomers formed their views on drug use? Hasn't cannabis morphed into super skunk? Aren't people who used legal painkillers like OxyContin and Percocet sliding into heroin addiction, suggesting that legally accessible drugs are a slippery slope toward the abuse of harder drugs? [continues 609 words]
Look Back to Alcohol Prohibition for Understanding of Why Taboos about drugs are lying shattered across the U.S., like broken debris after a party. But even as some states have begun to decriminalize or legalize marijuana, there is an argument that is making some Americans hesitate. They ask: Aren't many drugs, even pot, much more potent today than they were in the 1960s, when the boomers formed their views on drug use? Hasn't cannabis morphed into super skunk? Aren't people who used legal painkillers like OxyContin and Percocet sliding into heroin addiction - suggesting that legally accessible drugs are a slippery slope toward the abuse of harder drugs? [continues 608 words]
Taboos about drugs are lying shattered across the U.S., like broken debris after a party. But even as some states have begun to decriminalize or legalize marijuana, there is an argument that is making some Americans hesitate. They ask: Aren't many drugs, even pot, much more potent today than they were in the 1960s, when the boomers formed their views on drug use? Hasn't cannabis morphed into super skunk? Aren't people who used legal painkillers like OxyContin and Percocet sliding into heroin addiction - suggesting that legally accessible drugs are a slippery slope toward the abuse of harder drugs? [continues 610 words]
Taboos about drugs are lying shattered across the U.S., like broken debris after a party. But even as some states have begun to decriminalize or legalize marijuana, there is an argument that is making some Americans hesitate. They ask: Aren't many drugs, even pot, much more potent today than they were in the 1960s, when the boomers formed their views on drug use? Hasn't cannabis morphed into super skunk? Aren't people who used legal painkillers like OxyContin and Percocet sliding into heroin addiction - suggesting that legally accessible drugs are a slippery slope toward the abuse of harder drugs? [continues 611 words]
Taboos about drugs are lying shattered across the U.S ., like broken debris after a party. But even as some states have begun to decriminalize or legalize marijuana, there is an argument that is making some Americans hesitate. They ask: Aren't many drugs, even pot, much more potent today than they were in the 1960s, when the boomers formed their views on drug use? Hasn't cannabis morphed into super skunk? Aren't people who used legal painkillers like OxyContin and Percocet sliding into heroin addiction - suggesting that legally accessible drugs are a slippery slope toward the abuse of harder drugs? [continues 610 words]
To many people, the "war on drugs" sounds like a metaphor, like the "war on poverty." It is not. It is being fought with tanks and sub machine guns and hand grenades, funded in part by your taxes, and it has killed 28,000 people under the current Mexican President alone. The death-toll in Tijuana -- one of the front-lines of this war -- is now higher than in Baghdad. Yesterday, another pile of seventy mutilated corpses was found near San Fernando -- an event that no longer shocks the country. [continues 930 words]
A Chief Of The Mafia Cruenza, One Of The Biggest Drug Gangs In The 1980s, Was Recorded Expressing His Gratitude For The War On Drugs As 'good For Business' To many people, the "war on drugs" sounds like a metaphor, like the "war on poverty". It is not. It is being fought with tanks and sub-machine guns and hand grenades, funded in part by your taxes, and it has killed 28,000 people under the current Mexican President alone. The death toll in Tijuana - one of the front lines of this war - is now higher than in Baghdad. Yesterday, another pile of 72 mutilated corpses was found near San Fernando - an event that no longer shocks the country. [continues 918 words]
America's Prohibition Laws Were Meant to Cut Crime and Boost Morality -- They Failed on Both Fronts. So How Can the 'War on Drugs' Ever Succeed? It Can't. Since we first prowled the savannahs of Africa, human beings have displayed a few overpowering and ineradicable impulses-for food, for sex, and for drugs. Every human society has hunted for its short cuts to an altered state: The hunger for a chemical high, low, or pleasingly new shuffle sideways is universal. Peer back through history, and it's everywhere. Ovid said drug-induced ecstasy was a divine gift. The Chinese were brewing alcohol in prehistory and cultivating opium by 700 A.D. Cocaine was found in clay-pipe fragments from William Shakespeare's house. George Washington insisted American soldiers be given whiskey every day as part of their rations. Human history is filled with chemicals, come-downs, and hangovers. [continues 3095 words]
We Are Handing One of Our Biggest Industries Over to Armed, Criminal Gangs The proponents of the "war on drugs" are well-intentioned people who believe they are saving people from the nightmare of drug addiction and making the world safer. But this self-image has turned into a faith - and like all faiths, it can only be maintained by cultivating a deliberate blindness to the evidence. The recent furore about the British government's decision to fire its chief scientific advisor on drugs, Professor David Nutt, missed the point. Yes, it is shocking that he was ditched for pointing out the mathematical truth that taking ecstasy is less dangerous than horse-riding, and that smoking cannabis is less harmful than drinking alcohol. But this is how the war on drugs has to be fought. The unofficial slogan of the prohibitionists for decades has been: The facts will only undermine the war, so invent some that show how successful we are, fast. [continues 1371 words]
Duncan Smith Believes That Spliff-Smoking Is Such a Catastrophe That Cannabis Needs Reclassifying The Quiet Man is turning up the volume once more - and this time, he wants to drown out the demon dealers of the demon weed. Iain Duncan Smith (remember him?) is back with a fat report into how to end poverty in Britain. The sections demanding the financial punishment of single mothers have already been pored over and torn up for their sociological illiteracy. But there is a yet-to-be-noticed section of the new Tory plans that would have an even more bracingly reactionary effect - and send your own odds of being a victim of crime sky-rocketing. [continues 1037 words]
Guns Are Not Inherent to the Sale of Drugs, Only to the Sale of Drugs Under Prohibition In our week-long national shriek about south London slowly morphing into South Central, one key word has been missing: prohibition. We have stared at the soft no-need-to-shave face of Billy Cox, the 15-year-old weed-dealer shot in his bedroom in the shadow of the City of London. We have half-sniggered at the Ali G names of the gangs he was up against: the Brick Lane Massive, the Paki Panthers, the Ghetto Boys of Peckham. We have learned you can buy handguns for UKP200 and a machine gun for UKP4,000 on the street. But we have failed to see that the events of the past week are simply following the inexorable logic of drug prohibition. [continues 741 words]
Jamilla Niazi is a 40-year-old woman with a freckly face and high cheekbones. When she arrives in a refugee camp in Helmand province in southern Afghanistan to speak to me via Internet camera phone, her features are hidden behind the blue burqa she is forced to wear in the scorching summer heat. She peels back the gauze and smiles. She doesn't do this much anymore -- not since the death threats began to come every night, pledging to burn her in acid. To jihadis, Niazi has committed an intolerable offense: She is the head teacher of a school for girls. "The Taliban have come back," says the aid worker with Niazi. "They control this area now." The night before our conversation, they burned down a school in nearby Nabili, and Taliban fighters planted a landmine in the playground of another girls school. [continues 605 words]
Jamilla Niazi is a 40-year-old woman with a freckly face and high cheekbones. When she arrives in a refugee camp in Helmand province in southern Afghanistan to speak to me via Internet camera phone, her features are hidden behind the blue burqa she is forced to wear in the scorching summer heat. She peels back the gauze and smiles. She doesn't do this much anymore - not since the death threats began to come every night, pledging to burn her in acid. To jihadis, Niazi has committed an intolerable offense: She is the head teacher of a school for girls. [continues 649 words]
More Afghan Farmers Will Turn to the Taliban If the U.S. Doesn't Stop Eradicating the Country's Poppy Crop. JAMILLA NIAZI is a 40-year-old woman with a freckly face and high cheekbones. When she arrives in a refugee camp in Helmand province in southern Afghanistan to speak to me via Internet camera phone, her features are hidden behind the blue burka she is forced to wear in the scorching summer heat. She peels back the gauze and smiles. She doesn't do this much anymore -- not since the death threats began to come every night, pledging to burn her in acid. To jihadis, Niazi has committed an intolerable offense: She is the head teacher of a school for girls. [continues 647 words]
While Serving As Tony Blair's Deputy Drugs Tsar, His Enlightened Policies Were Copied Around the World. So Why Was Mike Trace Hounded From His Job, and Vilified As a Dangerous Extremist? He Tells His Extraordinary Story for the First Time to Johann Hari The story of Mike Trace's rise and fall is a parable of how drugs policy is formulated. He is one of the most widely respected narcotics experts in the world today. He has worked both at the Ground Zero of drug prohibition, with homeless addicts on the streets of London, and at the very top of the system, as Britain's deputy drugs tsar and as head of demand reduction at the United Nations. [continues 2076 words]
Wherever There Is A 3,000 Per Cent Profit Margin, People Will Be Prepared To Take Extraordinary Risks. The United Nations International Narcotic Control Board (INCB) has attacked one of the few progressive drugs reforms introduced by any British government since the disastrous tide of prohibition began to roll across the world in the 1960s. The downgrading of cannabis - a drug which more than half of all British citizens under the age of 30 have tried - from Class B to Class C, earmarked for this Easter, was the barest minimum that could be done in a country where even The Daily Telegraph, Peter Lilley and The Economist support legalisation. Yet the INCB has condemned it as a move made by a government "intimidated by a vocal minority that wants to legalise illicit drug use". This "vocal minority" includes, according to a 2001 ICM poll, more than half of all British people when it comes to cannabis. [continues 743 words]
Author, Playwright, Cambridge Graduate And Regular Clubber Johann Hari Says The Home Secretary Is Wrong Not To Legalise This Class-A Drug I do not smoke. I never drink. But recently, together with a high-flying advertising exec, a leading social worker and a doctor - all model citizens, all of us with firsts from Cambridge University - I was out taking pills. Which has made reading the newspapers over the past few days a strange experience. There is, out there, a drug called ecstasy. According to David Blunkett, this 'can, and does, kill unpredictably, and there is no such thing as a safe dose'. The Home Secretary believes that people who use or sell this evil drug should face years in prison. This is odd, because I - along with about 500,000 people around my age (I'm 23) - use a drug with the same name each weekend. But the ecstasy I know and love has never 'killed unpredictably'. It is true that a tiny handful of people have died. Each of these deaths is, of course, a horrific tragedy for the family involved, but we need some perspective here. Fewer people die because of ecstasy than perfectly legal alcohol. That's fairly widely known, despite our hysterically anti-ecstasy press. But did you know that more people, in fact, die working out on an exercise bike or because of allergic reactions to nectarines each year than because of ecstasy? [continues 736 words]
