Como Acabar Com A Guerra Das Drogas

[ArmarioFluorescente]

Growlera,

Matéria que saiu na The Economist (revista inglesa superconceituada) essa semana:

Mar 5th 2009

From The Economist print edition

Link para página original

Failed states and failed policies

How to stop the drug wars

Prohibition has failed; legalisation is the least bad solution

A HUNDRED years ago a group of foreign diplomats gathered in Shanghai for the first-ever international effort to ban trade in a narcotic drug. On February 26th 1909 they agreed to set up the International Opium Commission—just a few decades after Britain had fought a war with China to assert its right to peddle the stuff. Many other bans of mood-altering drugs have followed. In 1998 the UN General Assembly committed member countries to achieving a “drug-free world” and to “eliminating or significantly reducing” the production of opium, cocaine and cannabis by 2008.

That is the kind of promise politicians love to make. It assuages the sense of moral panic that has been the handmaiden of prohibition for a century. It is intended to reassure the parents of teenagers across the world. Yet it is a hugely irresponsible promise, because it cannot be fulfilled.

Next week ministers from around the world gather in Vienna to set international drug policy for the next decade. Like first-world-war generals, many will claim that all that is needed is more of the same. In fact the war on drugs has been a disaster, creating failed states in the developing world even as addiction has flourished in the rich world. By any sensible measure, this 100-year struggle has been illiberal, murderous and pointless. That is why The Economist continues to believe that the least bad policy is to legalise drugs. “Least bad” does not mean good. Legalisation, though clearly better for producer countries, would bring (different) risks to consumer countries. As we outline below, many vulnerable drug-takers would suffer. But in our view, more would gain.

The evidence of failure

Nowadays the UN Office on Drugs and Crime no longer talks about a drug-free world. Its boast is that the drug market has “stabilised”, meaning that more than 200m people, or almost 5% of the world’s adult population, still take illegal drugs—roughly the same proportion as a decade ago. (Like most purported drug facts, this one is just an educated guess: evidential rigour is another casualty of illegality.) The production of cocaine and opium is probably about the same as it was a decade ago; that of cannabis is higher. Consumption of cocaine has declined gradually in the United States from its peak in the early 1980s, but the path is uneven (it remains higher than in the mid-1990s), and it is rising in many places, including Europe.

This is not for want of effort. The United States alone spends some $40 billion each year on trying to eliminate the supply of drugs. It arrests 1.5m of its citizens each year for drug offences, locking up half a million of them; tougher drug laws are the main reason why one in five black American men spend some time behind bars. In the developing world blood is being shed at an astonishing rate. In Mexico more than 800 policemen and soldiers have been killed since December 2006 (and the annual overall death toll is running at over 6,000). This week yet another leader of a troubled drug-ridden country—Guinea Bissau—was assassinated.

Yet prohibition itself vitiates the efforts of the drug warriors. The price of an illegal substance is determined more by the cost of distribution than of production. Take cocaine: the mark-up between coca field and consumer is more than a hundredfold. Even if dumping weedkiller on the crops of peasant farmers quadruples the local price of coca leaves, this tends to have little impact on the street price, which is set mainly by the risk of getting cocaine into Europe or the United States.

Nowadays the drug warriors claim to seize close to half of all the cocaine that is produced. The street price in the United States does seem to have risen, and the purity seems to have fallen, over the past year. But it is not clear that drug demand drops when prices rise. On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence that the drug business quickly adapts to market disruption. At best, effective repression merely forces it to shift production sites. Thus opium has moved from Turkey and Thailand to Myanmar and southern Afghanistan, where it undermines the West’s efforts to defeat the Taliban.

Al Capone, but on a global scale

Indeed, far from reducing crime, prohibition has fostered gangsterism on a scale that the world has never seen before. According to the UN’s perhaps inflated estimate, the illegal drug industry is worth some $320 billion a year. In the West it makes criminals of otherwise law-abiding citizens (the current American president could easily have ended up in prison for his youthful experiments with “blow”). It also makes drugs more dangerous: addicts buy heavily adulterated cocaine and heroin; many use dirty needles to inject themselves, spreading HIV; the wretches who succumb to “crack” or “meth” are outside the law, with only their pushers to “treat” them. But it is countries in the emerging world that pay most of the price. Even a relatively developed democracy such as Mexico now finds itself in a life-or-death struggle against gangsters. American officials, including a former drug tsar, have publicly worried about having a “narco state” as their neighbour.

The failure of the drug war has led a few of its braver generals, especially from Europe and Latin America, to suggest shifting the focus from locking up people to public health and “harm reduction” (such as encouraging addicts to use clean needles). This approach would put more emphasis on public education and the treatment of addicts, and less on the harassment of peasants who grow coca and the punishment of consumers of “soft” drugs for personal use. That would be a step in the right direction. But it is unlikely to be adequately funded, and it does nothing to take organised crime out of the picture.

Legalisation would not only drive away the gangsters; it would transform drugs from a law-and-order problem into a public-health problem, which is how they ought to be treated. Governments would tax and regulate the drug trade, and use the funds raised (and the billions saved on law-enforcement) to educate the public about the risks of drug-taking and to treat addiction. The sale of drugs to minors should remain banned. Different drugs would command different levels of taxation and regulation. This system would be fiddly and imperfect, requiring constant monitoring and hard-to-measure trade-offs. Post-tax prices should be set at a level that would strike a balance between damping down use on the one hand, and discouraging a black market and the desperate acts of theft and prostitution to which addicts now resort to feed their habits.

Selling even this flawed system to people in producer countries, where organised crime is the central political issue, is fairly easy. The tough part comes in the consumer countries, where addiction is the main political battle. Plenty of American parents might accept that legalisation would be the right answer for the people of Latin America, Asia and Africa; they might even see its usefulness in the fight against terrorism. But their immediate fear would be for their own children.

That fear is based in large part on the presumption that more people would take drugs under a legal regime. That presumption may be wrong. There is no correlation between the harshness of drug laws and the incidence of drug-taking: citizens living under tough regimes (notably America but also Britain) take more drugs, not fewer. Embarrassed drug warriors blame this on alleged cultural differences, but even in fairly similar countries tough rules make little difference to the number of addicts: harsh Sweden and more liberal Norway have precisely the same addiction rates. Legalisation might reduce both supply (pushers by definition push) and demand (part of that dangerous thrill would go). Nobody knows for certain. But it is hard to argue that sales of any product that is made cheaper, safer and more widely available would fall. Any honest proponent of legalisation would be wise to assume that drug-taking as a whole would rise.

There are two main reasons for arguing that prohibition should be scrapped all the same. The first is one of liberal principle. Although some illegal drugs are extremely dangerous to some people, most are not especially harmful. (Tobacco is more addictive than virtually all of them.) Most consumers of illegal drugs, including cocaine and even heroin, take them only occasionally. They do so because they derive enjoyment from them (as they do from whisky or a Marlboro Light). It is not the state’s job to stop them from doing so.

What about addiction? That is partly covered by this first argument, as the harm involved is primarily visited upon the user. But addiction can also inflict misery on the families and especially the children of any addict, and involves wider social costs. That is why discouraging and treating addiction should be the priority for drug policy. Hence the second argument: legalisation offers the opportunity to deal with addiction properly.

By providing honest information about the health risks of different drugs, and pricing them accordingly, governments could steer consumers towards the least harmful ones. Prohibition has failed to prevent the proliferation of designer drugs, dreamed up in laboratories. Legalisation might encourage legitimate drug companies to try to improve the stuff that people take. The resources gained from tax and saved on repression would allow governments to guarantee treatment to addicts—a way of making legalisation more politically palatable. The success of developed countries in stopping people smoking tobacco, which is similarly subject to tax and regulation, provides grounds for hope.

A calculated gamble, or another century of failure?

This newspaper first argued for legalisation 20 years ago (see article). Reviewing the evidence again (see article), prohibition seems even more harmful, especially for the poor and weak of the world. Legalisation would not drive gangsters completely out of drugs; as with alcohol and cigarettes, there would be taxes to avoid and rules to subvert. Nor would it automatically cure failed states like Afghanistan. Our solution is a messy one; but a century of manifest failure argues for trying it.

[ArmarioFluorescente]

Growlera,

Matéria que saiu na The Economist (revista inglesa superconceituada) essa semana:

Mar 5th 2009

From The Economist print edition

Link para página original

Failed states and failed policies

How to stop the drug wars

Prohibition has failed; legalisation is the least bad solution

A HUNDRED years ago a group of foreign diplomats gathered in Shanghai for the first-ever international effort to ban trade in a narcotic drug. On February 26th 1909 they agreed to set up the International Opium Commission—just a few decades after Britain had fought a war with China to assert its right to peddle the stuff. Many other bans of mood-altering drugs have followed. In 1998 the UN General Assembly committed member countries to achieving a “drug-free world” and to “eliminating or significantly reducing” the production of opium, cocaine and cannabis by 2008.

That is the kind of promise politicians love to make. It assuages the sense of moral panic that has been the handmaiden of prohibition for a century. It is intended to reassure the parents of teenagers across the world. Yet it is a hugely irresponsible promise, because it cannot be fulfilled.

Next week ministers from around the world gather in Vienna to set international drug policy for the next decade. Like first-world-war generals, many will claim that all that is needed is more of the same. In fact the war on drugs has been a disaster, creating failed states in the developing world even as addiction has flourished in the rich world. By any sensible measure, this 100-year struggle has been illiberal, murderous and pointless. That is why The Economist continues to believe that the least bad policy is to legalise drugs. “Least bad” does not mean good. Legalisation, though clearly better for producer countries, would bring (different) risks to consumer countries. As we outline below, many vulnerable drug-takers would suffer. But in our view, more would gain.

The evidence of failure

Nowadays the UN Office on Drugs and Crime no longer talks about a drug-free world. Its boast is that the drug market has “stabilised”, meaning that more than 200m people, or almost 5% of the world’s adult population, still take illegal drugs—roughly the same proportion as a decade ago. (Like most purported drug facts, this one is just an educated guess: evidential rigour is another casualty of illegality.) The production of cocaine and opium is probably about the same as it was a decade ago; that of cannabis is higher. Consumption of cocaine has declined gradually in the United States from its peak in the early 1980s, but the path is uneven (it remains higher than in the mid-1990s), and it is rising in many places, including Europe.

This is not for want of effort. The United States alone spends some $40 billion each year on trying to eliminate the supply of drugs. It arrests 1.5m of its citizens each year for drug offences, locking up half a million of them; tougher drug laws are the main reason why one in five black American men spend some time behind bars. In the developing world blood is being shed at an astonishing rate. In Mexico more than 800 policemen and soldiers have been killed since December 2006 (and the annual overall death toll is running at over 6,000). This week yet another leader of a troubled drug-ridden country—Guinea Bissau—was assassinated.

Yet prohibition itself vitiates the efforts of the drug warriors. The price of an illegal substance is determined more by the cost of distribution than of production. Take cocaine: the mark-up between coca field and consumer is more than a hundredfold. Even if dumping weedkiller on the crops of peasant farmers quadruples the local price of coca leaves, this tends to have little impact on the street price, which is set mainly by the risk of getting cocaine into Europe or the United States.

Nowadays the drug warriors claim to seize close to half of all the cocaine that is produced. The street price in the United States does seem to have risen, and the purity seems to have fallen, over the past year. But it is not clear that drug demand drops when prices rise. On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence that the drug business quickly adapts to market disruption. At best, effective repression merely forces it to shift production sites. Thus opium has moved from Turkey and Thailand to Myanmar and southern Afghanistan, where it undermines the West’s efforts to defeat the Taliban.

Al Capone, but on a global scale

Indeed, far from reducing crime, prohibition has fostered gangsterism on a scale that the world has never seen before. According to the UN’s perhaps inflated estimate, the illegal drug industry is worth some $320 billion a year. In the West it makes criminals of otherwise law-abiding citizens (the current American president could easily have ended up in prison for his youthful experiments with “blow”). It also makes drugs more dangerous: addicts buy heavily adulterated cocaine and heroin; many use dirty needles to inject themselves, spreading HIV; the wretches who succumb to “crack” or “meth” are outside the law, with only their pushers to “treat” them. But it is countries in the emerging world that pay most of the price. Even a relatively developed democracy such as Mexico now finds itself in a life-or-death struggle against gangsters. American officials, including a former drug tsar, have publicly worried about having a “narco state” as their neighbour.

The failure of the drug war has led a few of its braver generals, especially from Europe and Latin America, to suggest shifting the focus from locking up people to public health and “harm reduction” (such as encouraging addicts to use clean needles). This approach would put more emphasis on public education and the treatment of addicts, and less on the harassment of peasants who grow coca and the punishment of consumers of “soft” drugs for personal use. That would be a step in the right direction. But it is unlikely to be adequately funded, and it does nothing to take organised crime out of the picture.

Legalisation would not only drive away the gangsters; it would transform drugs from a law-and-order problem into a public-health problem, which is how they ought to be treated. Governments would tax and regulate the drug trade, and use the funds raised (and the billions saved on law-enforcement) to educate the public about the risks of drug-taking and to treat addiction. The sale of drugs to minors should remain banned. Different drugs would command different levels of taxation and regulation. This system would be fiddly and imperfect, requiring constant monitoring and hard-to-measure trade-offs. Post-tax prices should be set at a level that would strike a balance between damping down use on the one hand, and discouraging a black market and the desperate acts of theft and prostitution to which addicts now resort to feed their habits.

Selling even this flawed system to people in producer countries, where organised crime is the central political issue, is fairly easy. The tough part comes in the consumer countries, where addiction is the main political battle. Plenty of American parents might accept that legalisation would be the right answer for the people of Latin America, Asia and Africa; they might even see its usefulness in the fight against terrorism. But their immediate fear would be for their own children.

That fear is based in large part on the presumption that more people would take drugs under a legal regime. That presumption may be wrong. There is no correlation between the harshness of drug laws and the incidence of drug-taking: citizens living under tough regimes (notably America but also Britain) take more drugs, not fewer. Embarrassed drug warriors blame this on alleged cultural differences, but even in fairly similar countries tough rules make little difference to the number of addicts: harsh Sweden and more liberal Norway have precisely the same addiction rates. Legalisation might reduce both supply (pushers by definition push) and demand (part of that dangerous thrill would go). Nobody knows for certain. But it is hard to argue that sales of any product that is made cheaper, safer and more widely available would fall. Any honest proponent of legalisation would be wise to assume that drug-taking as a whole would rise.

There are two main reasons for arguing that prohibition should be scrapped all the same. The first is one of liberal principle. Although some illegal drugs are extremely dangerous to some people, most are not especially harmful. (Tobacco is more addictive than virtually all of them.) Most consumers of illegal drugs, including cocaine and even heroin, take them only occasionally. They do so because they derive enjoyment from them (as they do from whisky or a Marlboro Light). It is not the state’s job to stop them from doing so.

What about addiction? That is partly covered by this first argument, as the harm involved is primarily visited upon the user. But addiction can also inflict misery on the families and especially the children of any addict, and involves wider social costs. That is why discouraging and treating addiction should be the priority for drug policy. Hence the second argument: legalisation offers the opportunity to deal with addiction properly.

By providing honest information about the health risks of different drugs, and pricing them accordingly, governments could steer consumers towards the least harmful ones. Prohibition has failed to prevent the proliferation of designer drugs, dreamed up in laboratories. Legalisation might encourage legitimate drug companies to try to improve the stuff that people take. The resources gained from tax and saved on repression would allow governments to guarantee treatment to addicts—a way of making legalisation more politically palatable. The success of developed countries in stopping people smoking tobacco, which is similarly subject to tax and regulation, provides grounds for hope.

A calculated gamble, or another century of failure?

This newspaper first argued for legalisation 20 years ago (see article). Reviewing the evidence again (see article), prohibition seems even more harmful, especially for the poor and weak of the world. Legalisation would not drive gangsters completely out of drugs; as with alcohol and cigarettes, there would be taxes to avoid and rules to subvert. Nor would it automatically cure failed states like Afghanistan. Our solution is a messy one; but a century of manifest failure argues for trying it.

________________________________________________________________________________

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Tradução livre (e por isso cheia de falhas)

Estados falhos, políticas falhasComo acabar com a guerra das drogas

A Proibição falhou; a legalização é a solução “menos ruim”

Cem anos atrás um grupo de diplomatas estrangeiros se reuniu em Shanghai para o primeiro esforço internacional para proibir comércio de uma droga narcótica. No dia 26 de fevereiro de 1909 eles concordaram em montar a Comissão Internacional do Ópio - somente poucas décadas depois que a Inglaterra tivesse entrado numa guerra com a China para afirmar seu direito de traficar o material. Muitos outros proclamas contra drogas causadoras de alterações no humor se seguiram. Em 1998 a ONU Assembléia Geral conclamou a seus países membros a alcançar um mundo livre de drogas " e para "eliminar ou reduzir" a produção de ópio, cocaína e maconha significativamente até 2008.

Esse é o tipo de promessa que os políticos amam fazer. Suaviza o senso de pânico moral que foi o resultado da proibição durante um século. Pretende ressegurar os pais de adolescentes pelo mundo. É, ainda, uma promessa imensamente irresponsável, porque não pode ser cumprida

Na próxima semana ministros de todo o mundo se reunirão em Viena para estabelecer a política de droga internacional durante a próxima década. Como os generais da primeira guerra mundial, muitos reivindicarão que tudo que precisam é mais. do mesmo. Na realidade a guerra as drogas foi um desastre, enquanto criou estados falidos nos países em desenvolvimento e o vício floresceu no mundo rico. Por qualquer medida sensata, esta luta de 100 anos foi proibicionista, assassina e insensata. É por isso que a The Economist continua acreditando que a política menos ruim” é legalizar as drogas. "Menos ruim" não significa boa. A legalização, entretanto, é claramente melhor para países produtores, traria (diferentes) riscos aos países de consumidor. Como nós esboçaremos abaixo, muitos compradores de droga vulneráveis sofreriam. Mas em nossa visão, mais levariam vantagem.

A evidência do fracasso

Hoje em dia o Escritório de ONU em Drogas e Crime já não fala sobre um mundo livre de drogas. Sua ostentação é que o mercado de droga estabilizou, mesmo significando que mais de 200 milhões de pessoas, ou quase 5% da população de adultos do mundo, continue consumindo drogas ilegais – quase a mesma proporção da década passada. (Como os demais fatos relacionados a droga, esta é mais uma suposição educada: o rigor das evidencias é outra vítima de ilegalidade.) A produção de cocaína e ópio provavelmente é igual a de uma década atrás; a de maconha é maior. O consumo de cocaína decaiu gradualmente nos Estados Unidos de seu apogeu nos anos iniciais da década de 80, mas o caminho é desigual (permanece mais alto que no meio dos anos 90) e está subindo em muitos lugares, inclusive na Europa.

Não era isso o pretendido por tamanhos esforços. Os Estados Unidos, sozinhos, gastam cercae de 40 bilhões de dólares, a cada ano, tentando aceso eliminar a provisão de drogas. Prende 1,5 milhão de seus cidadãos, a cada ano, por violações referentes à droga, trancando meio milhão de deles; leis sobre drogas mais duras são a razão principal por que um entre cinco homens americanos negros passam algum tempo atrás das grades. No mundo em desenvolvimento sangue está sendo derramado a uma taxa surpreendente. No México mais de 800 policiais e soldados foram mortos os desde dezembro de 2006 (e a conta de mortes globais anuais é superior a 6,000). Esta semana outro líder de um país atormentado pelas drogas - Guine Bissau – foi assassinado.

A proibição, em si mesma, vicia os esforços dos guerreiros contra as drogas. O preço de uma substância ilegal é determinado mais pelo custo de distribuição, do que pelo de produção. Pegue a cocaína com o exemplo: a diferença do valor entre o campo de coca e o consumidor é mais que um cêntuplo. Mesmo que a aplicação de herbicidas nas colheitas de camponeses leve ao quádruplo o preço local das folhas de coca, isto tende a ter pequeno impacto no preço de rua, que é principalmente fixado pelo risco de entrar com a cocaína na Europa ou nos Estados Unidos.

Hoje em dia os guerreiros da droga reivindicam conseguir apreender cerca de metade de toda a cocaína que é produzida. O preço de rua nos Estados Unidos parece ter subido e a pureza parece ter caído, durante o último ano. Mas não está claro que a demanda de droga diminua quando os preços sobem. Por outro lado, há bastante evidência que o negócio de droga se adapta rapidamente às crises de mercado. Na melhor das hipóteses, a repressão efetiva somente consegue forçar a troca dos locais de produção. Assim, o ópio se moveu da Turquia e Tailândia para Myanmar e o sul do Afeganistão, onde arruina os esforços ocidentais para derrotar o Taliban.

Al Capone, mas em uma escala global

Realmente, longe de reduzir crime, proibição nutriu o gangsterismo em uma escala que o mundo nunca tinha visto. De acordo com a estimativa, talvez inchada, da ONU, a indústria de droga ilegal vale uns $320 bilhões por ano. No Ocidente transforma em criminosos cidadãos obedientes à lei (o presidente americano atual poderia ter terminado facilmente na prisão por suas experiências na juventude com o "sopro"). Também faz a droga ser mais perigosa: viciados compram cocaína e heroína pesadamente adulteradas; muitos usam agulhas sujas para se injetar, transmitindo o HIV; os infeliz que sucumbem ao crack ou "meth" estão fora da lei, contando só com seus traficantes para os "tratar." Mas são os países no mundo emergente que pagam o maior preço. Até mesmo uma democracia relativamente desenvolvida como o México se acha agora em uma luta de vida-ou-morte contra gângsteres. Funcionários americanos, inclusive um czar de droga anterior, demonstram suas preocupações publicamente em ter um "narco estado " como vizinho

O fracasso da guerra das drogas levou alguns de seus generais mais valentes, especialmente da Europa e América Latina, a sugerir a troca de foco: em vez de trancar as pessoas tratá-las com saúde pública e estratégias de "redução de dano" (como apoiar os viciados a usar agulhas limpas). Esta aproximação poria mais ênfase em educação pública e no tratamento de viciados e menos no molestamento de camponeses que cultivam coca e no castigo de consumidores de drogas "leves" para uso pessoal. Isso seria um passo na direção certa. Mas é improvável ser fundamentado adequadamente e não faz nada para retirar crime organizado do quadro.

A Legalização não só afugentaria os gângsteres; transformaria as drogas de um problema de “lei-e-ordem” em um problema de saúde pública, que é como eles deveriam ser tratados. Os governos taxariam e regulariam o comércio de drogas e usaria os grandes fundos obtidos (e os bilhões que economizaram em de imposição da lei) para educar o público sobre os riscos do consumo de drogas e no tratamento do vício. A venda de drogas para menores deve permanecer proibida. Drogas diferentes exigiriam níveis diferentes de tributação e regulamento. Este sistema seria falho e imperfeito, enquanto requerendo constante monitoramento e intercâmbios de difícil mensuração. Devem ser estabelecidos preços com impostos a um nível visando um equilíbrio entre forçar uma diminuição do uso, por um lado, e desencorajando um mercado negro e os atos desesperados de roubo e prostituição, recurso que alguns viciados utilizam para alimentar seus vícios.

Vender esse sistema, embora falho, a pessoas em países produtores, onde o crime organizado é o assunto político central, é bastante fácil. A parte difícil estaria nos países consumidores, onde o vício é a batalha política principal. Inúmeros pais norte-americanos poderiam aceitar que a legalização seja a resposta certa para as pessoas da América Latina, Ásia e África; eles poderiam ver sua utilidade até mesmo na briga contra terrorismo. Mas o medo imediato deles seria com suas próprias crianças.

Esse medo é, em grande parte, baseado na presunção que mais pessoas usariam drogas sob um regime legal. Essa presunção pode estar errada. Não há nenhuma correlação entre a aspereza de leis de droga e a incidência de uso de drogas: cidadãos que vivem debaixo de regimes duros (notavelmente a América, mas também a Inglaterra) tomam mais drogas, não menos. Os guerreiros de droga envergonhados atribuem essa culpa a diferenças culturais, mas, até mesmo em países bastante semelhantes, regras duras fazem pequena diferença no número de viciados: a Suécia severa e Noruega mais liberal têm precisamente as mesmas taxas de vício. A Legalização poderia reduzir ambos, disponibilidade(traficantes, por definição “empurram” drogas nos usuários) e demanda (parte daquela emoção perigosa acabaria). Ninguém sabe com certeza. Mas é difícil discutir que a vendas de qualquer produto que seja feita mais barata, mais segura e mais amplamente disponível cairia. Qualquer proponente honesto da legalização deve ser sábio bastante para assumir que o uso de drogas, como um todo, subiria.

Há duas razões principais para discutir se a proibição deveria ser abolida para todos. O primeiro é um de princípio liberal. Embora algumas drogas ilegais sejam extremamente perigosas a algumas pessoas, a maioria não é especialmente prejudicial (O tabaco é mais viciante, virtualmente, que todas as outras). A maioria dos consumidores de drogas ilegais, inclusive a cocaína e até a heroína, só os usa ocasionalmente. Eles assim o fazem porque obtém prazer com eles (como obtém prazer do uísque ou uma Luz de Marlboro). Não é o trabalho do estado fazê-los parar de ser assim.

E o vício? Isso está em parte coberto por este primeiro argumento, como o dano envolvido está, principalmente, no usuário. Mas o vício também pode infligir miséria nas famílias e, especialmente, nos filhos de qualquer viciado e envolve custos sociais maiores. É por isso que desencorajar, e tratar o vício, deveriam ser a prioridade para a política de drogas. Conseqüentemente o segundo argumento: a legalização oferece a oportunidade para lidar corretamente com hábito.

Provendo informação honesta sobre os riscos à saúde, causados por diferentes drogas, e os estimando adequadamente, os governos poderiam guiar os consumidores para o menos prejudiciais. Proibição não tem prevenido a proliferação de drogas sintéticas, concebidas em laboratórios. A legalização poderia encorajar companhias legalizadas de drogas, para tentarem melhorar o material que as pessoas consomem. Os recursos advindos da cobrança de impostos, e da economia em repressão, permitiriam aos governos garantir o devido tratamento aos viciados – um modo de fazer a legalização mais politicamente palatável. O sucesso de países desenvolvidos em fazer parar o consumo de tabaco, que é semelhantemente sujeito a impostos e regulamentos, nos traz espaço para a esperança

Um empreendimento arriscado calculado, ou outro século de fracasso?

Este jornal discutiu a legalização pela primeira vez há 20 anos (veja artigo). Revisando a evidência novamente (veja artigo), a proibição parece mais prejudicial, especialmente para os pobres e fracos do mundo. A legalização não vai tirar os gângsteres completamente do mundo das drogas; como com o álcool e os cigarros, haveria impostos para evitar e regras para subverter. Nem seria uma cura automática para estados como o Afeganistão. Nossa solução é um pouco dessarumada; mas um século de fracasso manifesto nos é argumento bastante para nos fazer tentar isto.

[ ]s

[didimoco]

É um dos mais respeitados jornais no mundo.

Que o NY Times se foda!

Yankees Go Home

[Bas]

po, essa traducao ta muito ruim, com todo respeito

Não da pra por no Blog uma tradução assim

Alguem pra traduzir??

[bedrocan]

finalmente um artigo tratando da real questao - chega da politica fracassada dos proibicionistas!

obvio que o foco eh a grana, massss

[Canadense]

obvio que o foco eh a grana, massss

mas nada.. o foco tem que ta justamente aí...

senão num vai pra frente...

alias, nunca entendi essa aversão toda ao dinheiro... é a graxa do mundo

se a cannabis trará varios empregos e impostos... não vejo nada errado

PS daqui fui ao site do NORML canada e olha justamente o que ta na frontpage..

uma diretriz de como agir pro legalização

http://norml.ca/

1) Economic Development

The economy is our most unifying principle. Simply put, we can no longer afford cannabis prohibition and that cold, hard fact significantly impacts all of these pillars. The federal government currently spends close to 500 million dollars annually enforcing cannabis prohibition when estimates indicate lost tax opportunities on revenue in the tens of billions annually. This does not take into account other costs on municipal and provincial judicial systems, court time, legal fees in addition to lost revenues in the form of tax potential from the billions generated annually by Canada's cannabis industry.

"A economia é um dos principois que mais nos une. Nos simplesmente não conseguimos sustentar a prohibição da cannabis, e esse fato tem impactos significativos para esses pilares. O governo federal gasta perto de 500 milhões de dollares anuais fazendo comprir a lei de pohibição da cannabis quando as estimativas indicam opportunidade de renda estarem perto dos 10 BILHOES. Isso num leva em conta outros custos de sistemas judiciais, horas no tribunal nos niveis municipais e provinciais junto com ao mesmo tempo, dinheiro perdido em forma de impostos de renda gerado anualmente pela industria de cannabis do Canadá."