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Legalize it! ("and dontcha criticize it")
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"Legalize it - don't criticize it
Legalize it and i will advertise it

Legalize it, yeah, yeah
That's the best thing you can do
Doctors smoke it
Nurses smoke it
Judges smoke it
Even the lawyers too" - Peter Tosh, 1975


Friends of Cannabis all over the world are assembling in the next two
weekends to put together events to promote our demands for Legalizing
Cannabis and to bring an end to the Drug Wars.

From tiny Cyprus to Budapest and Amsterdam, and from New York City to
revolutionary Venezuela spanning all the way to Cape Town, Tokyo and
back to Jerusalem, our global annual mobilization is named the Global
Marijuana March - also known as the Worldwide Marijuana March - and now
has more than 260 cities enrolled for this year.

The 2009 global events will take place over the next two weekends of May
2nd and 9th, to coincide with the Mayday mobilizations that are also
taking place all over the world.

Please see the participating city entries and local contact information
here,
http://globalmarijuanamarch.com/
and here
worldwidemarijuanamarch.org

The movement to Legalize consists of many different branches, themes and
campaigns including Decriminalization; Medical Marijuana campaigns; Hemp
Industries; and efforts by some to legalize *all* substances in
conjunction with public education and social reform aimed at enabling
the people in our communities to know and enjoy the difference between
appropriate use, wrong use and abuse.

In this context, the bold and broad Decriminalization enacted by
Portugal in 2001 is a beacon for all of us, both as a model to strive
for and also as repository of scientific and personal experiences,
skills, case studies and data useful for any country's legislators and
reform campaign activists. The numbers don't lie; Decriminalization
saves lives, reduces harm, reduces abuse, broadens Freedom and improves
social and personal self-regulation.

Please see the article below just published in Time magazine that
conveys some of the experiences and facts assembled over the past few
years in Portugal. It shows that social and personal benefits for all
can be achieved easily, cheaply and safely, whereas all other approaches
so far that are based on Prohibition have without doubt added to more
deaths, more cruelty and endless War.

For an end to all Wars - Free the Herb!
Petros Evdokas, petros@...
Cyprus IndyMedia, Universal Life Church

* Many thanks to Panayiotis Eye. who alerted me to this article.

"Legalize it", Peter Tosh, 1975
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Legalize_It&oldid=286437086

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Drugs in Portugal: Did Decriminalization Work?
By Maia Szalavitz Sunday, Apr. 26, 2009
From:
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1893946,00.html?imw=Y


Pop quiz: Which European country has the most liberal drug laws? (Hint:
It's not the Netherlands.)

Although its capital is notorious among stoners and college kids for
marijuana haze–filled "coffee shops," Holland has never actually
legalized cannabis — the Dutch simply don't enforce their laws against
the shops. The correct answer is Portugal, which in 2001 became the
first European country to officially abolish all criminal penalties for
personal possession of drugs, including marijuana, cocaine, heroin and
methamphetamine.

At the recommendation of a national commission charged with addressing
Portugal's drug problem, jail time was replaced with the offer of
therapy. The argument was that the fear of prison drives addicts
underground and that incarceration is more expensive than treatment — so
why not give drug addicts health services instead? Under Portugal's new
regime, people found guilty of possessing small amounts of drugs are
sent to a panel consisting of a psychologist, social worker and legal
adviser for appropriate treatment (which may be refused without criminal
punishment), instead of jail.

The question is, does the new policy work? At the time, critics in the
poor, socially conservative and largely Catholic nation said
decriminalizing drug possession would open the country to "drug
tourists" and exacerbate Portugal's drug problem; the country had some
of the highest levels of hard-drug use in Europe. But the recently
released results of a report commissioned by the Cato Institute, a
libertarian think tank, suggest otherwise.

The paper, published by Cato in April, found that in the five years
after personal possession was decriminalized, illegal drug use among
teens in Portugal declined and rates of new HIV infections caused by
sharing of dirty needles dropped, while the number of people seeking
treatment for drug addiction more than doubled.

"Judging by every metric, decriminalization in Portugal has been a
resounding success," says Glenn Greenwald, an attorney, author and
fluent Portuguese speaker, who conducted the research. "It has enabled
the Portuguese government to manage and control the drug problem far
better than virtually every other Western country does."

Compared to the European Union and the U.S., Portugal's drug use numbers
are impressive. Following decriminalization, Portugal had the lowest
rate of lifetime marijuana use in people over 15 in the E.U.: 10%. The
most comparable figure in America is in people over 12: 39.8%.
Proportionally, more Americans have used cocaine than Portuguese have
used marijuana.

The Cato paper reports that between 2001 and 2006 in Portugal, rates of
lifetime use of any illegal drug among seventh through ninth graders
fell from 14.1% to 10.6%; drug use in older teens also declined.
Lifetime heroin use among 16-to-18-year-olds fell from 2.5% to 1.8%
(although there was a slight increase in marijuana use in that age
group). New HIV infections in drug users fell by 17% between 1999 and
2003, and deaths related to heroin and similar drugs were cut by more
than half. In addition, the number of people on methadone and
buprenorphine treatment for drug addiction rose to 14,877 from 6,040,
after decriminalization, and money saved on enforcement allowed for
increased funding of drug-free treatment as well.

Portugal's case study is of some interest to lawmakers in the U.S.,
confronted now with the violent overflow of escalating drug gang wars in
Mexico. The U.S. has long championed a hard-line drug policy, supporting
only international agreements that enforce drug prohibition and imposing
on its citizens some of the world's harshest penalties for drug
possession and sales. Yet America has the highest rates of cocaine and
marijuana use in the world, and while most of the E.U. (including
Holland) has more liberal drug laws than the U.S., it also has less drug
use.

"I think we can learn that we should stop being reflexively opposed when
someone else does [decriminalize] and should take seriously the
possibility that anti-user enforcement isn't having much influence on
our drug consumption," says Mark Kleiman, author of the forthcoming When
Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment and
director of the drug policy analysis program at UCLA. Kleiman does not
consider Portugal a realistic model for the U.S., however, because of
differences in size and culture between the two countries.

But there is a movement afoot in the U.S., in the legislatures of New
York State, California and Massachusetts, to reconsider our overly
punitive drug laws. Recently, Senators Jim Webb and Arlen Specter
proposed that Congress create a national commission, not unlike
Portugal's, to deal with prison reform and overhaul drug-sentencing
policy. As Webb noted, the U.S. is home to 5% of the global population
but 25% of its prisoners.

At the Cato Institute in early April, Greenwald contended that a major
problem with most American drug policy debate is that it's based on
"speculation and fear mongering," rather than empirical evidence on the
effects of more lenient drug policies. In Portugal, the effect was to
neutralize what had become the country's number one public health
problem, he says.

"The impact in the life of families and our society is much lower than
it was before decriminalization," says Joao Castel-Branco Goulao,
Portugual's "drug czar" and president of the Institute on Drugs and Drug
Addiction, adding that police are now able to re-focus on tracking much
higher level dealers and larger quantities of drugs.

Peter Reuter, a professor of criminology and public policy at the
University of Maryland, like Kleiman, is skeptical. He conceded in a
presentation at the Cato Institute that "it's fair to say that
decriminalization in Portugal has met its central goal. Drug use did not
rise." However, he notes that Portugal is a small country and that the
cyclical nature of drug epidemics — which tends to occur no matter what
policies are in place — may account for the declines in heroin use and
deaths.

The Cato report's author, Greenwald, hews to the first point: that the
data shows that decriminalization does not result in increased drug use.
Since that is what concerns the public and policymakers most about
decriminalization, he says, "that is the central concession that will
transform the debate."

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