Drug Policy

More people every day choose to plant their own cannabis in Brazil, instead of buying it in the streets. When arrested they are in a limbo, subject to a the law that neither sentences them to prison nor regulates the activity.  Self cultivation grows in Brazil, and with it, the controversy.

As growing consensus gathers momentum on the failure of drug proibition to eradicate illegal drugs, growing uncertainty mounts with respect to the world after the end of the war on drugs. Steve Rolles, from the  United Kingdom's Tranform Foundation, has a detailed proposal for what that new world would look like, a world in which drug use is not banned, but regulated.

Most people who are behind bars in various countries around the world are in jail because their offenses are associated with the drug trade, they are poor and they belong to ethnic minorities. Deborah Small, founder of Break the Chains, gave an exclusive interview to Comunidad Segura on the distortions of the war on drugs, urging for change.

A bill introduced in the past week in the US congress would end the sentencing disparity between crack and cocaine that sent hundreds of youths to prison. After crime rates have dropped and crack prices have fallen, is crack use still associated to violence? What kind of social harm is caused by cocaine derivative?

The second meeting of the Brazilian Commission on Drugs and Democracy scheduled for the last week of October, will focus on two deleterious aspects of the traffic in illegal drugs and the war on drugs policy: urban violence and institutional corruption.

Former Drugs Czar in the United Kingdom, and current director of the International Drug Policy Consortium, Mike Trace discusses the drop in drug related crime in the 90s and the current challenge that faces Britain, how to approach the nation's high drug use, especially of cannabis.

It took a long while to arrive in Rio de Janeiro, but in half a dozen years it has become an inescapable reality in the lives of the city’s most vulnerable residents: its homeless. A recent survey estimates that approximately 90% of the children and youths sleeping rough and living on Rio’s sidewalks use crack, the cocaine derivative that is easy to use, low cost and quick to act, having irrevocably replaced glue.

PRD Senator René Arce champions a group of bills to regularize and legalize the cultivation, production, commercialization and consumption of marijuana in Mexico.

The Argentinean judge Mónica Cuñarro, coordinator of the Scientific Committee on narcotics*, explains how the sentence dictated by the Argentinean Nation’s Higher Justice Court, which declares as unconstitutional the offense of narcotics possession for personal consumption, is a paradigm for Latin America. The sentence not only breaks away from a punitive norm, but it also imposes a barrier to the state’s punitive power, by relying on the principles of personal autonomy and dignity of man, among others, as this expert explains.

Latin American countries have been receiving anti-drug policy models with open arms, policies based on a “war” that has been raging for close to 40 years now, with deplorable results. Throughout this war and in the spirit of cowboy movies, we have witnessed the appearance of emergency laws, elite police commandos, special courts, maximum security prisons, working groups and anti-drug czars. What are the next steps?