Recently many commentators have noted that Portugal has shown a way out of this mess. It has decriminalized the entire range of street drugs for personal use. Not surprisingly, criminality and violence have decline. But so to has drug use. Go figure.How much misery can a policy cause before it is acknowledged as a failure and reversed? The US “war on drugs” suggests there is no upper limit. The country’s implacable blend of prohibition and punitive criminal justice is wrong-headed in every way: immoral in principle, since it prosecutes victimless crimes, and in practice a disaster of remarkable proportions. Yet for a US politician to suggest wholesale reform of this brainless regime is still seen as an act of reckless self-harm.
Even a casual observer can see that much of the damage done in the US by illegal drugs is a result of the fact that they are illegal, not the fact that they are drugs. Vastly more lives are blighted by the brutality of prohibition, and by the enormous criminal networks it has created, than by the substances themselves. This is true of cocaine and heroin as well as of soft drugs such as marijuana. But the assault on consumption of marijuana sets the standard for the policy’s stupidity.
Nearly half of all Americans say they have tried marijuana. That makes them criminals in the eyes of the law. Luckily, not all of them have been found out – but when one is grateful that most law-breakers go undetected, there is something wrong with the law.
Canada has a role to play here. It is clear that the U.S. is too stuck on this "war" to ever change on its own. We, however, suffer disproportionately from spillovers from American policy. Though the hapless Harper government is behind the curve on this and so many other issues, it would be good to hear some encouraging words from the Liberal government in waiting.
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