Someone said to me the yesterday in a conversation about the war on drugs, “Europe legalized a lot of drugs, and as a result drug use has increased substantially to a point where its a problem. They are now scrambling to scale back legalization.” Is this true?
I was under the impression, for example, that Portugal had legalized all drugs and the increases have not caused them to rethink the policy.
It seems to me that at some point, Switzerland rethought its policy due to public outrage about apparent widespread use of hard drugs in public areas. Just an anecdote proving nothing, though.
I don’t know the answer to your question, but I wanted to mention that not all of Europe has adopted liberal drug laws. Smoking pot is still illegal here, for instance (The theoretical sentence is one year in jail, even though the actual sentence is normally a stern warning by the police officer. It has been this way for as long as I’ve been aware drugs exist, something like 25 years, so there hasn’t been any change in policies).
ETA : I noticed your nickname on review, and you probably already knew that, since you used to live here.
I did know that, but thanks for the answer anyway.
As to your point about some countries not having adopted liberal drug policies. I think the general point is, essentially, in many cases European countries already had liberal drug policies. In the US, we have hundreds of people locked up for offenses that wouldn’t be considered serious offenses in Europe.
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Crime rates do tend to drop when you legalise everything.
Not really. Britain downclassed cannabis, saw usage fall, and then upgraded it again for no clear reason at all (cite. In the Netherlands, there have been some closure of coffee shops close to schools and international borders. Additionally they are curbing large “rave” type festivals.
None of this is because there has been any trouble endemic to Dutch society, but rather because people from other countries are coming to Amsterdam and making hazards of themselves with substances that they can’t normally get.
You are right, though this thread is not about legalizing “everything.” It’s mighty expensive to arrest, convict, and punish people for simple possession of drugs. You can pay a starting teacher or engineer for what it costs to keep somebody in a concrete box for a year. (I’m estimating $30,000. Somebody will surely scurry around to dispute my numbers, but can they show that warehousing drug possessors is not expensive?)
How do European countries with liberal attitudes towards such drugs as marijuana or even heroin regard cocaine and meth? If heroin were legal and cheap, I doubt it would be a problem for society other than the personal tragedy of it’s users. But unlike other drugs, things like coke, meth or PCP do meet the cliche of the pyscho dope fiend.
I don’t see how any society could legalize them, short of enacting an almost eugenically draconian set of laws for their misuse; something like a no-appeals, ‘hang em before the sun sets’ sentence for conviction of a felony while high.
I don’t think this is correct. Everything I’ve read suggests that these drugs are widely used. If what you say were to be true, a staggering proportion of the worldwide population would be psycho fiends at any given time.
Why do you say this?
It’s a bit hard to say precisely what precise behaviours are involved in acting like a “psycho fiend”, but I think it’s a fair bet that they are going to be behaviours that are already criminalised in which case there are already laws to deal with them. If they are not it’s probably because they are harmless.
Well, we already have a legal drug in this part of Europe that has caused, and continues to cause, enormous societal problems with its users abusing it and as a consequence engaging in all manner of violent and other types of destructive behaviour, that’s led to an untold number of deaths and ruined lives.
I don’t like the drugs you mention, but I seriously doubt that making any of them legal would cause even a small proportion of the damage alcohol has done.
This is an important question and I have not seen a real answer with data. One thing you have to be careful of is confusing correlation with causation. Does the Netherlands have a low usage rate because it is not illegal or is it not illegal because the usage rate is so low? I believe the former, but I would like to see the before/after stats. Another confounding point is that international tourists might flock there because it is legal.
If the only people who suffered were the people who used drugs, nobody would care about criminalizing them… wouldn’t be an issue at all.
Please elaborate. I have no idea what that sentence means.
This is an area where the answers will always be bedevilled by inconclusivity, much like debates about gun laws and so on. There are too many unmeasurable variables (such as background cultural attitudes and so on) that confound the issue, and too much advocacy “research”.
Even doing a before-and-after study in any particular culture isn’t the answer because cultural attitudes change with time during the course of the study, and the change of laws involved itself changes attitudes. Doing a controlled comparison between cultures won’t work because no two cultures are relevantly identical. And there is the problem that the early countries to legalise will have their numbers skewed by being swamped by drug tourists.
One of the American presidents (I think it was Truman) said that most people think making a decision is about getting all the facts, reviewing them, and then making the decision. If that was so, then decision making would be easy - once you have all the facts, the decisions make themselves. In truth, he explained, you have to make decisions without the luxury of all the material, and that is the hard bit.
This is the dilemma that politicians of all stripes confront when dealing with drug policy. Generally, they decide on the basis of their general default settings - liberal v conservative - using their best judgment. I don’t envy them having to make these decisions, whichever way they make them.
It’s a flawed approach, to be sure, but it has the advantage of being democratic.