1754 Drug Decriminalization!
The facts from the real world.
Sept. 25, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
04:09
| 
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Hi everybody, it's Devan Molyneux from Freedom Man Radio. | |
| I hope you're doing well. Do you ever get the feeling that you live in this strange, surreal bubble of disinformation? | |
| I do. A listener sent this to me. | |
| Thank you so much. What is the country that has the most liberal drug laws in Europe? | |
| You'd think the Netherlands, right? | |
| Amsterdam and all that. It's not, actually. | |
| Actually, it's Portugal. | |
| Portugal decriminalized illicit street drugs in 2001, after a couple of years of studying the issue of how to deal with the problems of drug abuse. | |
| And they decriminalized it, which is not quite the same as legalization. | |
| And I've read the first part of a study on this, which is available as a link below this video, what will be the next podcast in podcast feed. | |
| It's really, really quite fascinating They've turned personal drug consumption, which I think is defined as the amount of drugs that a typical user would have for a week or 10 days or something like that. | |
| Drug dealing is still illegal. | |
| But possession of drugs for personal use, cocaine, heroin, you name it. | |
| Has been decriminalized. So it's kind of like a parking ticket. | |
| You get a warning. You get referred to treatment. | |
| You have to go before a commission to show that you've gone to treatment and so on. | |
| Which is an incredible thing. | |
| Have you heard about this? Bet you haven't. | |
| Let's look at some of the facts. | |
| So this is Glenn Greenwald, an attorney, author, and fluent Portuguese speaker who conducted some research. | |
| He says, judging by every metric, decriminalization in Portugal has been a resounding success. | |
| 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 US, Portugal's drug use numbers are impressive. | |
| Following decriminalization, Portugal had the lowest rate of lifetime marijuana use in people over 15 in the EU. Just 10%. | |
| 10%. The most comparable figure in America is in people over 12, 39.8%. | |
| So they have one quarter, even with three years younger in the metric, they have one quarter the lifetime marijuana use. | |
| Proportionally, more Americans have used cocaine than Portuguese have used marijuana. | |
| The wire was right. | |
| Legalization lowers drug use. | |
| A paper reports that between 2001 and 2006 in Portugal, rates of lifetime use of any illegal drug among 7th through 9th 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 other drug treatments for addictions rose to 14,877 from 6040 after decriminalization. | |
| And money saved on enforcement allowed for increased funding of drug-free treatment as well. | |
| This is fascinating, and this is absolutely essential for people to understand. | |
| Violence does not solve social problems. | |
| Drug use, drug addiction, is a fairly specific problem that arises out of damage done to the brain in early childhood abuse. | |
| People who have been, and you can watch more of my Bomb and the Brain series for this, I'll put a link below. | |
| But people who were abused as children end up with different brains that are lacking particular receptors and chemicals and drug use and promiscuity and alcoholism and other kinds of addictive behaviors are ways of attempting to self-medicate for the damage done to brains due to early childhood abuse. | |
| Putting these people in jail, subjecting them to further abuse, using violence against them is to perpetuate what was done to them by their caregivers as children. | |
| It is to participate and to exacerbate. | |
| The cycle of abuse within society. | |
| People who are addicted to drugs need sympathy. | |
| They need treatment. They need to be restrained if necessary in treatment facilities if they're doing damage to themselves or others. | |
| But they are people who are sick and who need help. | |
| So I hope that this makes some kind of sense. | |
| I hope that you will continue to look into this. | |
| It's very, very interesting information. | |
| I hope you will take the time to listen to the first part of the study that I've read. | |
| Thank you so much for watching. |
Export Selection