Pubdate: Mon, 28 Jul 2014
Source: Guardian, The (UK)
Copyright: 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited
Contact:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardian/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/175
Page: 24

FUZZY LOGIC

As revolutions go, it is hardly an overnight Leninist coup. National 
statutes, UN protocols and who knows how many luckless souls bolted 
up in cells round the world affirm that the old prohibitionist order 
has not collapsed.

But the wheel on drug policy is slowly beginning to turn, both within 
the United States and further afield.

The war on drugs has been a losing fight for 40 years.

The response to unending failure has always been to demand more law 
enforcement and more prison cells.

It is unclear why the mood should be changing just now. It isn't that 
consumers have suddenly got too numerous to ignore: rates of cannabis 
use, which had, throughout the late 20th century, seemed to be on an 
interminable upward trajectory, are now stable or even declining.

As for recent scientific developments, these have only reinforced the 
medical dangers.

Since the 1990s a rare but real link with schizophrenia has emerged.

And whereas the lack of long-term evidence always used to allow 
hippies to insist that "nobody ever died from a spliff ", tracking 
studies exploring a connection with cancer are finally suggesting 
that cannabis smoke might, after all, have many of the disadvantages 
long associated with smoke of other sorts.

But then the long century of criminalisation never had any more to do 
with evidence, than America's disastrous interwar experiment with 
prohibiting the undoubtedly-dangerous demon drink.

Then, as now, the practicalities of harm-reduction and the principle 
of not persecuting citizens who harm no one but themselves, point to 
legalisation.

So it is be welcomed that the last year or so has seen Uruguay 
instigate a heavily regulated cannabis trade, while Colorado and 
Washington state have licensed all personal use, with the first 
stores officially permitted to peddle in the latter opening their 
doors this month.

Elsewhere in the US, the slow tide of tolerance for medical 
marijuana, which began in California in 1996, continues to spread. 
Still spreading, too, are other state schemes which forgo full 
criminal prosecution for pot possession, in favour of parking-style fines.

The Economist tots up half of America's 50 states as having 
liberalised somewhat; the New York Times, which has just come out 
against prohibition, factors in a few forthcoming changes, and gets 
to a total of 35 reformist states, which are home to around 
three-quarters of all Americans. Either way, the writ of the punitive 
letter of the federal drug laws  which classes cannabis along with 
heroin, as "schedule 1"  is not running as it once did.

The mismatch between Washington DC's unreformed rules and the law as 
it is actually observed casts a thick fug of confusion over the 
position. Barack Obama, who - like David Cameron - used drugs in his 
youth, surely knows that he would not have got where he is today if 
he had ever been caught, had the book thrown at him and had ended up 
in jail. He is on the record as saying the war on drugs has been "an 
utter failure", and has more recently made positive noises about 
allowing the Colorado and Washington experiments to run their course. 
His administration has undertaken not to bring federal enforcement to 
bear, so long as states give sensible reassurances about preventing 
dope from passing out of their own borders, falling into the hands of 
children, or polluting the bloodstreams of drivers to a dangerous 
extent. All this is welcome, but so long as both president and 
Congress continue to shrink  as they continue to do  from rewriting 
the federal statute, it will remain open to any less-liberal future 
occupant of the White House to turn back the clock.

Thickening the haze is the international position.

America led the world to sign up to successive UN protocols and 
conventions, which reforming countries like Uruguay now find 
themselves running up against. It seems absurd when states within the 
US itself are conducting similar legal experiments. Neither federal 
laws nor UN conventions of the old prohibitionist order can stand in 
logic any longer.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom