The World Health Organization Documents Failure of U.S. Drug Policies
Tuesday, July 8th, 2008 / By Bruce Mirken
Tuesday, July 8th, 2008 / By Bruce Mirken
The United States has some of the world’s most punitive drug policies and has led the cheering section for tough “war on drugs” policies worldwide, but a new international study suggests that those policies have been a crashing failure. A World Health Organization survey of 17 countries, conducted by some of the world’s leading substance abuse researchers, found that we have the highest rates of marijuana and cocaine use.
The numbers are startling. In the United States, 42.4 percent admitted having used marijuana. The only other nation that came close was New Zealand, another bastion of get-tough policies, at 41.9 percent. No one else was even close. (more)
So? Whats new about this unremarkable fact? Could it be that the “MethCon’s” and “Kiwi Party” think we can incarcerate our way to a drug free society.
Perhaps the media might have liked to print the following attributed to Degenhardt’s research team (as published by Reuters )
“Globally, drug use is not distributed evenly and is not simply related to drug policy, since countries with stringent user-level illegal drug policies did not have lower levels of use than countries with liberal ones,”
Blair Anderson ‹(•¿•)›
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