That’s the direction the World Health Organization is headed:
The Economist has flagged a report on prevention and treatment for HIV in groups most likely to contract the disease. In the report, the WHO quietly recommends decriminalizing drugs — specifically, injectable drugs that spread HIV. According to a recommendation made in the report, “Countries should work toward developing policies and laws that decriminalize injection and other use of drugs and, thereby, reduce incarceration.” Buried several pages into the 113-page report, it’s not the most explicit announcement, but it is a rebuttal to the UN’s official stance: prohibition, with criminal penalties for offenders.
Paul Best mentions how this strategy worked in Portugal:
Portugal decriminalized drugs in 2001 in response to the declining health of drug users in the country. George Murkin, the policy and communications officer for Transform Drugs, published a report last month detailing some of the benefits that have come from Portugal’s decriminalization. He reported that drug use among the group most likely to use drugs, 15- to 24-year-olds, declined; average rates of use in the general population have decreased; drug use is below the European average; and most importantly, the number of people injecting drugs decreased from 2000-2005, which is the time period with the most recent available data. The WHO’s solution to the spread of HIV appears to have worked in Portugal, because over the past decade the number of newly diagnosed HIV cases has dropped at an astounding rate for people who inject drugs, falling from 1,016 in 2001 to 56 in 2012.
Earlier this week, German Lopez made the case for decriminalizing all drugs:
The failure to significantly raise drug prices or reduce drug use are why drug policy experts in general agree the war on drugs — and criminal enforcement against drugs in particular — isn’t working.
As a result, experts argue the criminalization of drugs comes with substantial costs — mass incarceration, an illicit drug market that finances violent criminal organizations, and a disproportionate effect on minorities — with no substantial benefit. It might be better, then, to look at decriminalizing these substances and going after drug abuse outside the criminal justice system.
Even [Mark] Kleiman, the most cautious of the three experts interviewed for this story, supports decriminalization. Kleiman once opposed the idea, but he says he warmed up to it after looking at the evidence.
“What I’ve learned since then,” he says, “is nobody’s got any empirical evidence that shows criminalization reduces consumption noticeably.”
The Dish 