Social and Legal Limits of Drug Law Reform (USP)
The Trilemma of Prohibition and the Emergency Exit
1. Drug Prohibition is a Real Prohibition Maybe even "the" real Prohibition - because alcohol prohibition in the US was limited to one drug only and very soft on consumers.
2. Drug Prohibition is Much Worse than You Think It's not only about having to hide your marihuana and to deny use and transactions when talking with the outside world. It's not only about the anxiety to be discovered and entering the criminal justice system.
It is also about gangs of the black markets, about no access to law for dispute solution. It is also about weapons, bloody feuds, bloody encounters with law enforcement, and police corruption.
It is about militarisation and competing orders of violence challenging and permeating state powers.
It is also about massacres and the disintegration of institutions. Mexico. And Institutional Anomie Theory.
It is also about the hidden police state - and the hidden state revealing itself in slums in Rio. Drug policy serves as a pretext for continuing coronelismo, dictatorship, überflüssige werden diszipliniert. Ex-Slaveholder-Countries are worse off than others.
3. Drug Prohibition does not influence what it should influence (indifference, Werb 2013)
4. Drug Prohibition affects the very social life (it is supposed to protect): Philippines and Brazil as extremes for youth risk, USA too.
5. Drug Prohibition destroys the fabric of legality - failure does not lead to reform, but to more of the same: earlier intervention, precursors, follow-up phenomena, higher sentences etc.
6. At the Root of the Problem: the International Drug Conventions. They must be introduced and explained shortly and precisely. The incompetence of the governing bodies. The problem of lacking exits. What hinders countries to just leave by denouncing the treaties?
7. The legal options - why they do not work.
8. What about the Dutch Way?
9. What about the Portuguese Way?
10. What about California and other US states?
11. What about Uruguay?
12. Nothing makes sense if the drug problem is not solved.
Contents: Conventions, injustice and idiocy, how to get out: legal options and impediments, social options (Uruguay) and impediments (good people dirty work).