{"id":1002,"date":"2012-03-19T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2012-03-19T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2012\/03\/human-rights-and-war-on-drugs-incompatible-leap.html"},"modified":"2012-03-19T08:00:00","modified_gmt":"2012-03-19T12:00:00","slug":"human-rights-and-war-on-drugs-incompatible-leap","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2012\/03\/human-rights-and-war-on-drugs-incompatible-leap.html","title":{"rendered":"Human rights and war on drugs incompatible —LEAP"},"content":{"rendered":"While the \nlocal CCA private prison contract expired<\/a> (yay!),\nthe U.S. still has\n\n<\/a>\n\n5% of the world’s population and 25% of the world’s prisoners<\/a>,\nwhich is\n\nseven times our incarceration rate of 40 years ago,<\/a>\nwhile the crime rate is about the same,\nand Georgia has\n\n1 in 13 adults<\/a> in the prison system (jail, prison, probation, or parole.\nWe can’t afford that.\nThe money we waste locking people up could be sending people to college\nor paying teachers.\nAnd the root cause is still the\n\nfailed war on drugs,<\/a>\nwhich is also one of the biggest problems with human rights around the world.\n

\nLEAP wrote 16 March 2012,\n\nHuman Rights is a Foreign Concept in the UN’s “War on\nDrugs”<\/a>\n

\n\n<\/a>\n“Fundamentally, the three UN prohibitionist treaties are\nincompatible to human rights. We can have human rights or drug war,\nbut not both,” said Maria Lucia Karam, a retired judge from\nBrazil and a board member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition\n(LEAP).\n

\nRichard Van Wickler, currently a jail superintendent in New\nHampshire, adds, “I suppose it’s not shocking that within the\ncontext of a century-long bloody \u2018war on drugs’ the idea of human\nrights is a foreign concept. Our global drug prohibition regime puts\nhandcuffs on millions of people every year while even the harshest\nof prohibitionist countries say that drug abuse is a health issue.\nWhat other medical problems do we try to solve with imprisonment and\nan abandonment of human rights?”\n<\/blockquote>\n\n<\/a>\nGood point.\n

\nWe don’t lock up people for drinking.\nWe only lock them up for endangering other people while drinking.\nAnd we tax alcohol sales and generate revenue for the state.\nLet’s do the same with drugs:\nlegalize, regulate, and tax.\nThat’s what we did with\n\nalcohol in 1933<\/a>,\nand it’s time to do the same with other drugs.\n

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