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aj123
smot poking
Registered: 09/08/08
Posts: 815
Loc: Easter island
Last seen: 6 years, 6 months
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Former Spanish Drug Czar Says Legalize Drugs
#13241221 - 09/24/10 03:19 PM (13 years, 6 months ago) |
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Former Spanish Drug Czar Says Legalize Drugs
In a blistering op-ed Wednesday in Spain's most important newspaper, El País, the country's former drug czar, Araceli Manjón-Cabeza, called for an end to drug prohibition. Manjon-Cabeza's call for legalization comes just a week after former Spanish Prime Minister Felipe González also called for drug legalization.
Manjón-Cabeza is the former director general of Spain's National Drug Plan, a former judge in the criminal chamber of the Audiencia Nacional, Spain's equivalent of the Supreme Court, and is currently professor of criminal law at Complutense University in Madrid.
"Prohibitionism, installed in the United States at the beginning of the 20th Century, and imposed by that country on the rest of the planet, has failed," Manjon-Cabeza wrote. "There are multiple law enforcement and public health reasons that recommend legalization."
Citing a list of pro-legalization luminaries ranging from economist Milton Friedman to novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, author Paulo Coehlo, and Latin American ex-presidents Henrique Cardoso, Ernesto Zedillo, and Cesar Gaviria, and the 17,000 people who have signed the Vienna Declaration calling for science- and evidence-based drug policies, Manjón-Cabeza argues that the bloodshed in Mexico as "the clearest proof" of the futility of drug prohibition.
"Mexico provides the clearest, but not the only, proof of the failure and unbearable costs of continuing [drug prohibition]," she wrote. "Since 2006, President Calderon's war on drugs has provoked two wars -- one unleashed among the drug traffickers and one by the state against organized crime -- and 30,000 dead (900 were minors under age 17)."
While drug use might go up temporarily under legalization, that must be weighed against other "beneficial effects," she wrote: "Quality control for the substances, which would prevent the ills associated with consumption of illegal poisons that exist today; reductions in price, which would drastically reduce the indices of drug-induced delinquency; delivering consumers from especially unhealthy and dangerous markets, in order to lead them to a legal and controlled market."
But there is more, Manjón-Cabeza wrote: "It would deprive organized crime of its favorite and most profitable activity, deprive it of part of its ability to corrupt public and private wills and infiltrate the licit economy, it would dispense with the legal exceptionality demanded by the persecution and repression of the drug trade, which, at times, brings us to the limit of what the state of law is able to support; it would make vanish the pretext of the United States that an effective struggle against the drug trade justifies its intervention in the affairs of other countries punished by that whip."
Many so-called "drug problems" are really the "children of prohibition," Manjón-Cabeza wrote. The US's prohibitionist crusade beginning a century ago was not inspired by public health concerns, but by "racist motives... economic motives... political motives," including "finding one of the pretexts -- others have been communism and Islamic terrorism -- to legitimize the intervention of a great power in the evolution of other countries."
She ends her op-ed thusly: "Launching whatever legalizing option inspires vertigo, overthrowing prohibition won't be easy, but maintaining global drug prohibition is madness."
One more voice in the growing anti-prohibitionist chorus. And a highly respected one at that.
http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/2010/sep/23/former_spanish_drug_czar_says_le
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SuperD
Cacti junky
Registered: 10/05/03
Posts: 6,648
Loc: The bridgesii bridge
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Re: Former Spanish Drug Czar Says Legalize Drugs [Re: aj123]
#13241407 - 09/24/10 04:12 PM (13 years, 6 months ago) |
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Quote:
Many so-called "drug problems" are really the "children of prohibition," Manjón-Cabeza wrote. The US's prohibitionist crusade beginning a century ago was not inspired by public health concerns, but by "racist motives... economic motives... political motives," including "finding one of the pretexts -- others have been communism and Islamic terrorism -- to legitimize the intervention of a great power in the evolution of other countries."
-------------------- D Manoa said: I need to stop spending all my money on plants and take up a cheaper hobby, like heroin. Looking for Rauhocereus riosaniensis seeds or live specimen(s), me if you have any for trade
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Smitington
Unidentified Flying Object
Registered: 08/10/09
Posts: 1,408
Loc: Mushroom Kingdom
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Re: Former Spanish Drug Czar Says Legalize Drugs [Re: SuperD]
#13242211 - 09/24/10 07:26 PM (13 years, 6 months ago) |
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It's always former this and former that who says we should legalize drugs, too bad CURRENT this and that-ers do not.
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Green_T
Registered: 10/02/08
Posts: 4,042
Loc: UK
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Re: Former Spanish Drug Czar Says Legalize Drugs [Re: Smitington]
#13242355 - 09/24/10 08:11 PM (13 years, 6 months ago) |
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^ QFT.
I have a feeling nothing is going to change until the CURRENT AMERICAN drug czar says to legalize. However, all the former people, in increasing positions of power, coming out in favor of legalization is never a bad thing.
-------------------- "I have sworn upon the altar of god eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man" - Thomas Jefferson Legalize Meth | Drug War Victims
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Rogerdodger91
Psychedelic Rocker
Registered: 09/04/10
Posts: 100
Loc: Oklahoma, USA
Last seen: 12 years, 10 months
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Re: Former Spanish Drug Czar Says Legalize Drugs [Re: Green_T]
#13242589 - 09/24/10 09:23 PM (13 years, 6 months ago) |
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The reason why its always former this people saying legalize drugs is for two reasons. They want to keep their positions, and they dont want to be assassinated by the CIA and the DEA aka random white trash person who thinks hes being a good god loving christian.
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