such a dork!

Dealing with drugs

Time Magazine reported recently that Portugal, which in 2001 decriminalized drugs—all of them, apparently—is showing dramatic decreases in drug use and HIV infection from needles and dramatic increases in people seeking treatment for drug addiction.

It seems that Portugal once had the highest drug use rate in Europe. The country's government, against the urging of its own populace, decided to replace mandatory jail time with voluntary addiction counseling. Large-scale dealing appears to still be illegal, but personal possession and use carries no compulsory penalty.

After five years under this new system, marijuana use plummeted to just 10 percent (compare to just shy of 40 percent in the United States). HIV infections fell by 17 percent and heroin use was more than halved.

Well, cool, I guess...

Now, I've stated before that I support the legalization of drugs. This is born not out of any desire to ever try them myself—my uncle saw to that—but out of a simple belief that it's not the government's job to protect people from their own stupidity.

At the end of the day, the (ab)use of drugs is a personal choice; and a large part of the basis of our country is that people are allowed to make their own choices, even bad ones. Things like drugs become illegal not because they themselves are inherently wrong, but because they become associated with or are assumed to incite other activities. In short, drugs get criminalized as a preventive measure.

I'm all for preventing crime, and I'm all for decreasing the use of drugs in our country. However, I don't think the legal system is the way to do it. It's not what the system was designed to do and it's not what the system is good at. If you want to be successful at prevention, you have to take the much harder road of education, urban development, and community-building.

These are, however, not solutions that fit neatly into an elected term of office.

But wait a minute...

I haven't yet touched on the primary thrust of the Time article: that legalizing drugs lowers—or at least does not increase—the use of drugs. This implies that drug legalization could be an effective measure in combating the drug problem, in much the same way the repealing prohibition made the gangster obsolete.

I've neglected this because the article makes a poor case for it. The argument is built up entirely around one study without reference to its methods or reception in the scientific community. This could just as easily be junk science as it is a legitimate study. It spouts a lot of statistics about how drug use has fallen, but gives no clear picture of how those statistics were derived. All of this makes the source suspect.

Oh yeah: and the study was conducted by the Cato Institute, which the article describes as "a libertarian think tank." In other words, it was conducted by people who were specifically looking to justify the legalization of drugs.

In the article's defense, it does cite a few people unconnected to the study, some of whom even make points against it (one points out that Portugal is so different from the U.S. culturally and politically that they can't realistically be compared). But these are just quotes, rather than facts.

It's a potentially interesting situation, all in all. Drawing any real conclusions from it, however, would require more study from less biased sources.

Labels: crime, drugs, legalization, media bias, Portugal

posted by Smitty @ 9:33 PM