{"id":1952,"date":"2011-06-03T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2011-06-03T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2011\/06\/drug-laws-rip-it-up-and-start-again-the-guardian.html"},"modified":"2011-06-03T08:00:00","modified_gmt":"2011-06-03T12:00:00","slug":"drug-laws-rip-it-up-and-start-again-the-guardian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2011\/06\/drug-laws-rip-it-up-and-start-again-the-guardian.html","title":{"rendered":"Drug laws: rip it up and start again —The Guardian"},"content":{"rendered":"The War on Drugs has failed in the U.K., too.\n

\nThe Guardian editorialized 15 May 2011,\n\nDrug laws: 40 years on, only a complete change of approach will do:\nThe Misuse of Drugs Act has failed utterly and there is no political\nconsensus about the idea of trying anything new<\/a>\n

\nIt is 40 years since Parliament passed the Misuse of Drugs Act,\nestablishing the framework that, with periodic tweaks, is used for\ncontrolling substance abuse today. Actual drug use has been going on\na lot longer, so it is hardly surprising that one legal instrument has\nfailed to kill the habit.\n

\nIt is remarkable, however, how utterly the system has failed. Drugs are\navailable to<\/blockquote>\n\n\n

\nanyone who really wants them. The classification system of\nsubstances into degrees of harmfulness \u2013 A for the worst, C for the\nleast bad \u2013 is ignored by users and dismissed by many scientists. Its\nonly practical use seems to be in determining prison sentences and\nfilling our jails with drug users has had no deterrent effect on use.\n

\nMeanwhile, the volume of new products coming to the market is growing\nat an alarming rate. Laboratories in the far east churn out synthetic\nvariants of natural narcotics or make minor molecular adjustments to old\ndrugs, turning them, from a legal point of view, into new ones. According\nto a report by the UK Drug Policy Commission, revealed in today’s\nObserver, 40 new substances appeared on the streets last year.\n

\nThese “legal highs” are ignored by the law until their use attracts\nsufficient media attention. Then they are classified, proscribed and sold,\nin a more toxic form, on the black market instead of over the counter. In\nthe 40 years since this process began, patterns of actual drug use have\nbeen driven as much by fashion as policy. Heroin in the 80s, ecstasy in\nthe 90s, cocaine today. Cannabis is a staple; levels of use vary a bit,\nbut not in correlation to its pointless, politicised journey between\nclasses B and C.\n

\nIt is hard to think of a legal approach to any other problem that has\nfailed so thoroughly without political consensus emerging around the idea\nof trying something else. The 40-year regime introduced by the Misuse\nof Drugs Act has been characterised by a nonstop boom in the misuse of\ndrugs. Surely it is time to rip it up and start again.\n<\/blockquote>\nDitto with the U.S. War on Drugs.\n

\nWe need to stop locking up so many people.\nWe don’t need a private prison in Lowndes County, Georgia.\nSpend that money on education instead.\n

\n-jsq\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The War on Drugs has failed in the U.K., too. The Guardian editorialized 15 May 2011, Drug laws: 40 years on, only a complete change of approach will do: The Misuse of Drugs Act has failed utterly and there is no political consensus about the idea of trying anything new It is 40 years since […]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[97,1113,72,178],"tags":[8817,77,8705,8701,4458,8730,4456,7,4459,4457,1297,82],"class_list":["post-1952","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-activism","category-cca","category-incarceration","category-vlcia","tag-cca","tag-drugs","tag-education","tag-georgia","tag-guardian","tag-incarceration","tag-legal-highs","tag-lowndes-county","tag-misuse-of-drugs-act","tag-observer","tag-private-prison","tag-war-on-drugs"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p585fK-vu","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1952","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1952"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1952\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1952"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1952"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1952"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}