Social and Legal Limits of Drug Law Reform (USP)
Drug Policy: Prohibitionism and Alternatives
1. Why is drug policy a topic - or better: why should it be? (Here comes this Scheerer guy, always talking about drugs and drug policy, as if he can't get enough of it. Maybe he is a user. Maybe he is an addict. Maybe he is addicted to talking about drugs like other people are addicted to the substances themselves.) Drug policy has been one of the most significant driving forces of incarceration in the whole world. It has been the driving force in the retantion and in the re-introduction of the death penalty in the world. It has been a driving force in the infringement of human rights - from procedural guarantees to extrajudicial killings - over the last few decades. It has been instrumental in the US influencing domestic policy in Latin America and other areas of the world, and it has been a leading factor in the destroying communities through the militarization of crime control and in in the process that we are witnessing right now and that I would like to call the process of de-civilization or even the re-barbarization of the world. What do I mean by that? I mean the spread of torture and extrajudicial killings, of government-condoned cruelty.
Does drug policy work? Is it effective? Is it efficient?
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. Stifling reform (Jamaica). 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).