Belief Listing Project: Drug Decriminalization

July 25th, 2011
current_beliefs, drugs
The war on drugs has been a failure. Drug use is still common, we've put huge numbers of people (disproportionately black men) in prison, tied up our courts with minor offenses, and made drug production and distribution highly profitable. We should try something else.

In 2001 portugal decriminalized all drugs. Since then, not only have various drug related death rates (overdoses, aids from needle sharing) halved, but the decriminalization law has become even more popular among people there as they've had time to experience its effects (details here).

Massachusetts decriminalized marijuana use in 2008. It seems to be going well. The united states should follow portugal's example, decriminalize, and end the war on drugs.

Comment via: google plus, facebook

Recent posts on blogs I like:

Development RCTs Are Good Actually

In defense of trying things out

via Thing of Things March 25, 2024

Clarendon Postmortem

I posted a postmortem of a community I worked to help build, Clarendon, in Cambridge MA, over at Supernuclear.

via Home March 19, 2024

How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

In 2017, we looked at how web bloat affects users with slow connections. Even in the U.S., many users didn't have broadband speeds, making much of the web difficult to use. It's still the case that many users don't have broadband speeds, both …

via Posts on March 16, 2024

more     (via openring)