Colombia's Constitutional Court Friday approved the government's proposal to decriminalize the possession of small amounts of cocaine and marijuana for personal use. Anyone caught with less than 20 grams of marijuana or one gram of cocaine for personal use may receive physical or psychological treatment depending on their state of consumption, but may not be prosecuted or detained, the court ruled.
Colombia's move is part of a growing trend in Latin America. After decades of being brutalized by the U.S. government's failed prohibitionist drug policies, Latin American leaders are saying "enough is enough."
Last week, the government of Uruguay announced that it will submit a proposal to legalize marijuana under government-controlled regulation and sale, making it the first country in the world where the state would sell marijuana directly to its citizens. The proposal was drafted by Uruguayan President José Mujica and his staff and requires parliamentary approval before being enacted.
Friday's judicial ruling in Colombia represents yet another important step in the growing political and judicial movement in Latin America and Europe to stop treating people who consume drugs as criminals worthy of incarceration. It is consistent with prior rulings by Colombian courts before former president Álvaro Uribe sought to undermine them, and also with rulings by the Supreme Court of Argentina in 2009 and other courts in the region. The Colombian Constitutional Court's decision is obviously most important in Colombia, where it represents both a powerful repudiation of former president Uribe's push to criminalize people who use drugs and a victory for President Juan Manuel Santos' call for a new direction in drug policy.
Most decriminalization initiatives in Latin America, however, are being proposed and enacted not by courts but by presidents and national legislatures. In addition to President Santos, Guatemala's new president, Otto Pérez Molina, is an advocate of decriminalization as are - in various ways and to different degrees - the presidents of Costa Rica, Uruguay, Ecuador and Argentina. Some Latin American countries, it should be pointed out, never criminalized drug possession in the first place. This trend follows in the footsteps of European reforms since the 1990s. Portugal, which decriminalized drug possession in 2001, stands out as a model.
Decriminalizing drug possession appears to have little impact on levels of illicit drug use. Its principal impacts are reducing arrests of drug users, especially those who are young and/or members of minority groups; reducing opportunities for low level police corruption; allowing police to focus on more serious crimes; reducing criminal justice system costs; and better enabling individuals, families, communities and local governments to deal with addiction as a health rather than criminal issue.
The United States clearly lags far behind Europe and Latin America in ending the criminalization of drug possession. Momentum for reform is growing with respect to decriminalization of marijuana possession, with Massachusetts reducing penalties in 2008, California in 2010, Connecticut in 2011 and Rhode Island earlier this year. All states, however, treat possession of other illegal drugs as a crime. Thirteen states, the District of Columbia, and the federal government currently treat possession of drugs for personal use as a misdemeanor, with penalties of up to a year in jail. The remaining thirty-seven states treat possession of cocaine, heroin and other drugs as a felony, with penalties than can include many years in prison.
While decriminalization certainly represents an important step in the right direction, it does not address many of the greater harms of prohibition, including high levels of crime, corruption and violence, empowerment of criminal organizations, massive black markets and the harmful health consequences of drugs produced in the absence of regulatory oversight. Decriminalization of drug possession is a necessary but not sufficient step toward a more comprehensive reform of the global drug prohibition regime.
Ethan Nadelmann is the executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance (www.drugpolicy.org)
Follow Ethan Nadelmann on Twitter: www.twitter.com/EthanNadelmann
Washington...are you listening??? How much longer will it take our nation to catch up?
http://bigbudsmag.com/grow/article/marijuana-vaporizers-bong-smoke-lungs-thc-bubblehash
Drug use criminalization is an attempt to reduce the demand for drugs but it fails miserably. Drug dealing criminality is an attempt to reduce the supply of drugs but that fails also. Instead of using criminalization, replace it with civil liability statutes that make it easy for a drug user to be awarded monetary damages owed to them by drug dealers and the retail market for drugs will be suppressed. Such product liability remedies have successfully suppressed markets for inherently harmful products like asbestos. With sufficient support from the government to bring and collect on civil awards, specially designed product liability statutes for harmful drugs should work to help suppress the markets in those products.
Lessons they should have remembered.
Currently, it is virtually impossible AND unlikely for someone to successful sue a drug dealer for two reasons: (a) the civil law requirements to prove the appropriate level of damages due to the plaintiff for economic and/or pain and suffering damages are too onerous, and (b) drug criminality would mostly discourage users from bringing such suits in a court of law. The latter can be addressed with decriminalization, but the latter would require new civil law statutes to make it easy for the damage levels to be determined and accepted in a court of law.
A drug user who actually wants the drug won't sue their dealer unless they are desperate for the money that could be collected from such a suit. If the statutory civil rewards are high enough, enterprising lawyers could recruit desperate drug users and or straw purchasers to participate in class action lawsuits. While all drug sales will not be eliminated, the fear of having ANYONE they sell drugs to essentially turning on them for some money would cause dealers to be more cautious to who they sell to. The key to such a civil law remedy is that it would have to be MUCH easier for such suits to be brought and awards collected from drug dealers and/or their financial enablers than is currently enabled by the law.
Incarceration statistics in the US and worldwide prove the fact that this fascist approach to control drug taking is an expensive and cruel failure.
The continuous-war military indoctrination of millions of young people to 'kill the bad guys' has permeated American agencies such as the DEA, where steroid and speed tweaked goons go off on harmless marijuana users. The college student in California who was tortured by the DEA for five days is one example of this evil force in our midst, which is promoted by the power elite, who profit from private prisons and gain leverage over every soul who was caught with cannabis and drugs.
This security state is a huge parasite on the government and it knows how to feed.
It's why the greatest resistance to legalizing Pot can be found among the political Right, the South, and older Americans. They're the ones with the deepest grudge over the Sixties.
It was back in the Eighties (the awful old Eighties) that I can remember starting to hear the term “the bad guys” being used by people to talk about other people, instead of about movie characters. Back around when 'Cops' was a new show (I didn't watch it, but sometimes I couldn't help but end up seeing it), that was when you started hearing actual grownups talking about getting “the bad guys.” I remember thinking how simple-minded it was, that TV audiences wouldn't buy it. Not much later on, I saw it for what it was – a generic villain idea to get people whipped up against, to prepare people to be willing to go after others. Like you said, “indoctrination.”
One of the more depressing things of the past quarter-century has been seeing that crap actually work.