Consequences of Prohibition
Drug War Issues
Politics & Advocacy
Peruvian President Alan GarcÃa said Monday he is absolutely opposed to drug legalization and warned that legalizing marijuana will take society down the path toward euthanizing the elderly. He vowed a constant fight "on all fronts" against drug use and the drug trade.
Alan
Peru is now the world's leading producer of coca, from which cocaine is made. In recent weeks, GarcÃa has angled for a larger share of US drug-fighting dollars. The stimulating herb has been used as an energy booster and hunger suppressor since time immemorial in the Andean region.GarcÃa said Monday that his anti-drug efforts will focus on eradication and alternative crops, as well as interdiction and money-laundering. A reinvigorated eradication campaign has already led to renewed strife in the countryside, where tens of thousands of peasant families make a living from coca. Two weeks ago, hundreds of coca growers seized a hydroelectric plant in Ucayali province and blocked highways in the region to protest eradication efforts. Police later regained control of the plant, but the region remains restive.
"The Peruvian government has a firm position: I am absolutely against the drug legalization," GarcÃa said after opening the 20th meeting of the Heads of National Drug Law Enforcement Agencies (HONLEA) of Latin America and the Caribbean. Human beings "cannot kneel before their own powerlessness," he said.
"I think this (drug legalization) is like opening the way for the degradation of human beings, because if we legalize marijuana as a soft drug then we will legalize cocaine as hard drugs, and finally we will also legalize the elimination of the elderly, as in the old societies, because they can no longer contribute to the production," he said.
GarcÃa added that his government's position is firm and will not change before he leaves office next July "even though those who raise the flag of the drug legalization are very intelligent and well-known and noisy." He said he will always oppose advocates of ending drug prohibition because "they represent, without knowing it, the backward step of the human being in his path to freedom, which is basically the way of his conscience, i.e. to use his skills without escapes through drugs."
Not only will drug legalization lead to killing grandma, GarcÃa said, it will lead mankind down a death spiral to "fascist barbarism" and genocide.
GarcÃa's sentiments put him out of step with a region that is increasingly amenable to ending the decades long war on drugs. Former heads of state from Columbia, Brazil, and Mexico have called for an end to the drug war, while Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico have depenalized simple drug possession.
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Comments
my next trip to Peru
Guess who I won't be looking up on my next visit there.
grandma
Hey this is a serious issue! I have had many friends over the years kill their Grandmother after smoking pot.
They always cover it up , but I know what they are doing with Grandmas body. I hope the world stands up before this tragic menace becomes worse, because more pot smokers equals more dead Grandmas!!!!
cactus
So it's not the euthanasia, it who's euthanized?
Who can not worry about the youth and innocents being "euthanized" at a rate that definitely exceeds the number of euthanized grandmas?
Also he's quite the cynic to want to continue the war on drugs because it provides good employment for the elderly. How else is this to be understood: "finally we will also legalize the elimination of the elderly, as in the old societies, because they can no longer contribute to the production"? Bit of a Freudian Slip, eh? LOL
And what a pathetic leader for being unable to deal with a little bit of change in market conditions and instead mindlessly "be forced" to go for some sort of genocide against the elderly. Typical Socialist thinking ...
Here are some facts concerning the situation in Holland:
Please save a copy and use it as a reference when debating prohibitionists who claim the exact opposite concerning the facts as presented here below:
”Cannabis coffee shops" are not only restricted to the Capital of Holland, Amsterdam. They can be found in more than 50 cities and towns across the country. At present, only the retail sale of five grams is tolerated, so production remains criminalized. The mayors of a majority of the cities with coffeeshops have long urged the national government to also decriminalize the supply side.
A poll taken earlier this year indicated that some 50% of the Dutch population thinks cannabis should be fully legalized while only 25% wanted a complete ban. Even though 62% of the voters said they had never taken cannabis. An earlier poll also indicated 80% opposing coffee shop closures.
http://www.dutchnews.nl/news/archives/2010/02/public_split_on_cannabis_legal.php
It is true that the number of coffee shops has fallen from its peak of around 2,500 throughout the country to around 700 now. The problems, if any, concern mostly “drug tourists” and are largely confined to cities and small towns near the borders with Germany and Belgium. These problems, mostly involve traffic jams, and are the result of cannabis prohibition in neighboring countries. “Public nuisance problems” with the coffee shops are minimal when compared with bars, as is demonstrated by the rarity of calls for the police for problems at coffee shops.
While it is true that lifetime and “past-month” use rates did increase back in the seventies and eighties, the critics shamefully fail to report that there were comparable and larger increases in cannabis use in most, if not all, neighboring countries which continued complete prohibition.
According to the World Health Organization only 19.8 percent of the Dutch have used marijuana, less than half the U.S. figure.
In Holland 9.7% of young adults (aged 15–24) consume soft drugs once a month, comparable to the level in Italy (10.9%) and Germany (9.9%) and less than in the UK (15.8%) and Spain (16.4%). Few transcend to becoming problem drug users (0.44%), well below the average (0.52%) of the compared countries.
The WHO survey of 17 countries finds that the United States has the highest usage rates for nearly all illegal substances.
In the U.S. 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. The results for cocaine use were similar, with the U.S. again leading the world by a large margin.
Even more striking is what the researchers found when they asked young adults when they had started using marijuana. Again, the U.S. led the world, with 20.2 percent trying marijuana by age 15. No other country was even close, and in Holland, just 7 percent used marijuana by 15 -- roughly one-third of the U.S. figure.
thttp://www.alternet.org/drugs/90295/
In 1998, the US Drug Czar General Barry McCaffrey claimed that the U.S. had less than half the murder rate of the Netherlands. “That’s drugs,” he explained. The Dutch Central Bureau for Statistics immediately issued a special press release explaining that the actual Dutch murder rate is 1.8 per 100,000 people, or less than one-quarter the U.S. murder rate.
Here’s a very recent article by a psychiatrist from Amsterdam, exposing "Drug Czar misinformation"
http://tinyurl.com/247a8mp
Now let's look at a comparative analysis of the levels of cannabis use in two cities: Amsterdam and San Francisco, which was published in the American Journal of Public Health May 2004,
The San Francisco prevalence survey showed that 39.2% of the population had used cannabis. This is 3 times the prevalence found in the Amsterdam sample
Source: Craig Reinarman, Peter D.A. Cohen and Hendrien L. Kaal, "The Limited Relevance of Drug Policy"
http://www.mapinc.org/lib/limited.pdf
Moreover, 51% of people who had smoked cannabis in San Francisco reported that they were offered heroin, cocaine or amphetamine the last time they purchased cannabis. In contrast, only 15% of Amsterdam residents who had ingested marijuana reported the same conditions. Prohibition is the ‘Gateway Policy’ that forces cannabis seekers to buy from criminals who gladly expose them to harder drugs.
The indicators of death, disease and corruption are even much better in the Netherlands than in Sweden for instance, a country praised by UNODC for its “successful” drug policy."
Here's Antonio Maria Costa doing his level best to avoid discussing the success of Dutch drug policy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lExNjEhdSkY&feature=related
The Netherlands also provides heroin on prescription under tight regulation to about 1500 long-term heroin addicts for whom methadone maintenance treatment has failed.
http://www.rnw.nl/english/article/free-heroin-brings-everyone-a-bit-peace
The Dutch justice ministry announced, last year, the closure of eight prisons and cut 1,200 jobs in the prison system. A decline in crime has left many cells empty. There's simply not enough criminals
http://www.nrc.nl/international/article2246821.ece/Netherlands_to_close_prisons_for_lack_of_criminals
For further information, kindly check out this very informative FAQ provided by Radio Netherlands: http://www.rnw.nl/english/article/faq-soft-drugs-netherlands
or go to this page: http://www.rnw.nl/english/dossier/Soft-drugs
Peruvian President Alan Garcia Promotes the Drug Cartels
For someone who sounds as if he’s taken a big bundle of cash from the drug cartels to keep the drug war going, Peruvian President Alan Garcia is a horrible actor.
At the very least, El Presidente Garcia could come up with some original comparisons to keep his favorite drug cartels alive instead of stealing excuses from opponents of universal health care in the U.S. The ‘Kill Granny’ attack was used by Palin in her ‘death panel’ spiel.
Garcia’s claim of drug use being ‘the backward step of the human being in his path to freedom’ has to be one of the most moronic statements ever made on the subject of drugs. The freedom to take drugs is what’s at stake. Prohibition, and the closing of the human mind to the extraordinary, consciousness raising attributes of mind altering chemicals, is the real attack on humanity’s freedom.
Of course, Garcia is speaking to the Heads of National Drug Law Enforcement Agencies (HONLEA) of Latin America and the Caribbean, which must be very much like addressing a religious cult. In this case, he’s telling both HONLEA and the drug cartels exactly what they want to hear.
Giordano
money
and how much does this politician skim off what the USA sends his country to fight against the drug trade????? any intelligent person or one with up close knowledge knows that taking the profit out of the equation is the only way people who get high will ALWAYS find a way. Are prisons drug free??
No Not Peru!
Oh Gak! Now we have to watch Peru circle down the toilet bowl of another Prohibition War. Isn't there a lower ring of hell established especially for drug warriors, and those orcs who make the big bucks manufacturing the necessary helicopters, guns, ordinance and infrared imaging equipment?
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