Scotland once again being the sensible bit if the UK:
This week the Scottish government has, in effect, decriminalised drug-taking. It hasn’t actually put it like that. Rather, it was presented as no more than just a bit of bureaucratic tinkering. The government’s Lord Advocate, who has powers to update guidance to the police, simply made a statement in which she said police officers were now going to be advised merely to issue ‘recorded police warnings’ to anyone using illicit drugs no matter whether the drugs were soft or hard. Members of the Scottish Parliament were not offered a chance to vote on the issue. Yet for decades drug policy has been one of the hottest of hot political controversies and it remains so in the United Kingdom as a whole. Politicians have tended to avoid it like the plague. But is it time to think again about drugs?
Writes John Humphreys for YouGov.
Given that decriminalisation is so obviously a better policy, but equally obviously political toxic, enacting it via non-political routes seems smart.
He goes on to contrast the failure of rUK policy with evidence of the benefits of decriminalisation:
In the light of this failure to achieve its prime purpose, critics of the 1971 Act have for years been campaigning for it to be reformed or repealed and a wholly different approach to be adopted. Their point is not just that the Act has failed in its own terms but that its approach to the problem has produced social ills just as toxic as the drug-taking itself. It has fostered a massive increase in organised and often violent crime; it has filled our prisons with people convicted of drug-related crime; it has ensnared young children into the drug gangs’ ‘county lines’ supply chains; it has left the quality of the drugs supplied unregulated, exposing punters to substances whose content they do not know and whose effects can be fatal; it has deterred drug-takers from seeking the medical help they need; and it has massively contributed to the problem of ‘sink estates’, places where people live for generations with no hope.
Although enforcement of the law has been modified over the years, notably in the police adopting a soft-touch approach to people who use the least harmful drugs such as cannabis, campaigners for reform say much more needs to be done. Their immediate aim is for drug-taking to be decriminalised. That’s to say, for the use or possession of illicit drugs no longer to be a criminal offence (while keeping the supplying of drugs illegal).
Those who advocate this tend to cite Portugal as a successful example of this approach. Portugal, which hitherto had had one of the worst records for drug-taking and drug-related deaths in Europe, decriminalised all drugs in 2001. Since then there has been a sharp drop in the number of deaths from overdoses, in HIV infection related to the use of needles, in drug-related crime and a drop in the size of the prison population. It is not, however, a total free-for-all. Portugal set up regional panels of social workers, medical professionals and drug experts with powers to force persistent drug-takers brought before them to undergo medical treatment and even pay fines or do community service.
At the centre of this approach is the idea that drug-taking should primarily be regarded as a medical issue not a criminal one. Drug-takers need help. Decriminalising drug-taking not only removes a barrier to their seeking help but it frees up resources to increase the provision of medical help: money saved by keeping drug-takers out of prison can be used helping them to fight their addiction.
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/ar ... ugs-policy
Decriminalisation does create some silliness around supply issues. Legislation and regulation should be the long-term goal - the benefits to Western society in the case of weed are pretty clear from the North American examples, with Europe lagging way behind.
We have the right to a clean, healthy, sustainable environment.