Against the War on Drugs and the Prison-Industrial Complex

Alternet

...it is only three and a half months left until the mid-term elections on November 2, 2010 when California voters will decide whether to end the senseless marijuana prohibition and the destructive war that the United States government wages against its own people, the infamous and tragic “drug war”. While Cannabis freedom activists and their supporters lead this new Civil Rights struggle, while the DEA and its prohibitionist allies do everything they can, often resorting to the unimaginable theatrics, to prevent the sick people from gaining access to medicinal Cannabis in State after State, while politicians engage in their usual long-winded grandstanding aimed at showing that it is “I and not the next person” who is the “toughest” on drugs, it is certainly interesting to see where exactly does scientific community stand on all these issues and how it envisions moving forward from this artificially created “dead-end”.

...in the words of Dr. Barry Zevin of Waddell Health Center in San Francisco, ... “If something does not work and we keep doing it, what can we expect” ...clearly referring to the old, rigid “abstinence-based”, disciplinarian approaches to drug treatment that were prevalent in addiction treatment until recently, and are still advocated by some authorities, but which proved ineffective in reducing drug use, despite being quite congenial to the “well-being” of what the Conference participants exposed as the “prison-industrial complex” in the United States.

...Fatima Trigueiros, Senior Adviser to the Executive Board of the Institute on Drugs and Drug Addiction in Portugal...told the participants that the proposal to decriminalize drug possession for “personal use” was being discussed in Portugal since 1976 and, as usual, the right-wing parties in Parliament were against it, while more left-leaning politicians were for it, until the personal possession of “illegal substances” in the amounts of up to ten days supply was finally decriminalized in 2001. Just like in the United States, the “right-wingers” in Portugal had predicted an “Armageddon” of an exploding drug use that would follow the decriminalization of drug possessions for “personal use”. However, as Mrs. Trigueiros pointed out, since the decriminalization of such “possessions” the drug use in Portugal actually DROPPED by 10%, and the new legislation proved so successful as to presently command the support of all political parties in Parliament, a situation “quite rare for any European Parliament”.