Ethan Nadelmann

Executive Director, Drug Policy Alliance FROM Ethan Nadelmann

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)

Washington, DC: Seventy-four percent of Americans believe that the federal government should cease interfering in states that have legalized the limited use of marijuana as a medicine, according to a nationwide Mason-Dixon poll of 1,000 likely voters.

According to the poll, 74 percent of respondents - including 67 percent of self-identified Republicans - believe that the Obama administration should "respect the medical marijuana laws" in those states that have legalized its use, cultivation, and distribution. Only 15 percent of those polled said they supported the federal government's ongoing use of "federal resources to arrest and prosecute individuals who are acting in compliance" with the medicinal cannabis laws of their state.

In recent months, the Obama administration has taken various actions to interfere in the enactment of statewide medical marijuana laws. These efforts have included threatening state employees with federal prosecution and targeting the landlords of state-licensed cannabis dispensaries. The actions contradict a pledge Obama made in March 2008, as a Presidential candidate, when he promised to cease utilizing "Justice Department resources to try and circumvent state laws" regarding medical cannabis.

The survey of 1,000 likely voters was conducted between May 10 and May 14 by Mason-Dixon Polling & Research. The margin for error is ±3 percent.

Last week, members of the United States House of Representatives voted 262 to 163 to defeat a federal budget amendment that sought to prevent the federal government from spending taxpayers' dollars to target medical marijuana-related activities that are compliant with state law. One hundred and thirty-five Democrats and 28 Republicans voted in support of the amendment.

Read the full poll here: http://www.mpp.org/assets/pdfs/download-materials/MPP-M-D-Poll-5-12.pdf.

>Subject: ALEKSANDER KWASNIEWSKI, ³Saying No to Costly Drug Laws,² The New York Times, May 10, 2012 #drugpolicy

ALEKSANDER KWASNIEWSKI, “Saying No to Costly Drug Laws,” The New York Times, May 10, 2012

WARSAW — In the year 2000, as the president of Poland, I signed one of Europe’s most conservative laws on drug possession. Any amount of illicit substances a person possessed meant they were eligible for up to three years in prison. Our hope was that this would help to liberate Poland, and especially its youths, from drugs that not only have a potential to ruin the lives of the people who abuse them but also have been propelling the spread of H.I.V. among people who inject them.

We assumed that giving the criminal justice system the power to arrest, prosecute and jail people caught with even minuscule amounts of drugs, including marijuana, would improve police effectiveness in bringing to justice persons responsible for supplying illicit drugs. We also expected that the prospect of being put behind bars would deter people from abusing illegal drugs, and thus dampen demand.

We were mistaken on both of our assumptions. Jail sentences for the possession of illicit drugs — in any amount and for any purpose — did not lead to the jailing of drug traffickers. Nor did it prove to be a deterrent to drug abuse.

What the law did do, however, was enable the police to increase their arrest numbers by hauling in droves of young people caught with small amounts of marijuana. More than a half of all arrests under the law were of people aged 24 and younger. Criminalization of drug users resulted in a dramatic increase in the number of identified cases of drug possession: from 2,815 in 2000 to 30,548 in 2008.

The vast majority of those individuals were not drug dealers. Some of them, however, were adolescents whose prospects for careers as lawyers, public officials or teachers were suddenly blighted.

The law also proved to be very expensive for taxpayers. A cost-benefit analysis by a Polish think tank, the Institute of Public Affairs, showed that the statute cost about €20 million a year, with no positive effect.

Significant numbers of professionals working in the criminal justice system, including prosecutors and judges, when asked whether they believed the law worked as it was supposed to, concluded that it was not an effective tool in combating drug trafficking.

It is my hope that political and community leaders in other countries, especially in Eastern Europe, will learn from Poland’s experience in criminalizing drug possession, a move that clearly fell short of its goals. Such a policy failure should not be repeated anywhere else in the world.

For this reason, I decided to join the Global Commission on Drug Policy, an effort by former heads of state — including César Gaviria of Colombia, Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil, Ruth Dreifuss of Switzerland and Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico — to advocate for reform of ineffective drug laws. I feel honored to have become the first former president of a country from Eastern Europe to join this body. I very much encourage political leaders from other regions of the world to sign on and show their support for policies that actually protect citizens.

The Global Commission offers a set of policy recommendations that should be the cornerstones of drug laws around the world. One of the main approaches that the commission supports is the decriminalization of drug use and possession of drugs for personal use.

I was one of the supporters of the effort in Poland to revise the drug possession law of 2000. It now protects users from prosecution for having small amounts of drugs for personal use and allows prosecutors to discontinue legal proceedings against drug users.

I then began to champion the idea that drug dependence ought to be treated as a disease rather than a criminal justice problem. Poland can and should improve its treatment programs for people dependent on opiates. At present, substitution treatment — with methadone — is available to only about 8 percent of Polish patients.

Despite the recommendations of the World Health Organization, and largely as a result of mistaken assumptions, methadone and other opiate substitution treatments are illegal in Russia and overregulated in Ukraine. In Poland, Russia and Ukraine, needle exchange programs are still small-scale and do not reach all those needing help. But such programs are one of the most effective and inexpensive ways to prevent infection among people who inject drugs.

East European leaders should press for a halt to incarcerating people for possessing small amounts of drugs for personal use and should start treating drug addiction as a public health issue. Taking more effective action to end the H.I.V. epidemic driven by the abuse of injected drugs is vital. The spread of H.I.V. among people who inject drugs in Russia and Ukraine is a grave concern even beyond their borders, and it is also my responsibility to advocate for these much-needed policy shifts.

Political leaders these days have ample evidence as to which approaches to drug policy actually help societies function better, and rigorous scientific investigation should always form the basis of policy making. Our role as politicians is to protect our communities and improve the functioning of our states. This may mean that we have to admit to having made mistakes. Fortunately now we know how to correct them.
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Aleksander Kwasniewski was president of Poland from 1995 to 2005.