Current drug policy, including law enforcement and "harm minimization", ignores the economics of the problem.

To discourage use of illicit drugs, we need retail (“street”) prices to be high. To discourage trafficking, we need upstream (“wholesale”) prices to be low, so that concealable quantities are not valuable enough to be worth trafficking. Law enforcement is a bottleneck in the supply chain, raising prices downstream and lowering prices upstream. So if law enforcement is concentrated on the retailers, it will send the desired price signals.

To encourage retail customers (junkies) to inform on the retailers, the customers must not be at risk of prosecution for possession or purchasing. To avoid raising upstream prices, enforcement further upstream should be strong enough to maintain the need for concealment, but no stronger. The threat of prosecution if caught in the act of sale is enough. The threat of prosecution for mere possession is too much.

To meet these requirements, the supply of prohibited drugs should remain an indictable offence, but possession or purchasing of any quantity should be a summary offence punishable solely by confiscation, with no conviction recorded, so that prosecution would be possible in theory but pointless in practice...

Making possession punishable solely by confiscation would remove the risk of wrongful convictions due to “planted” evidence. That risk is especially high because in most jurisdictions, if drugs are found among your belongings, you are not presumed innocent as to how they got there: the onus is on the accused to prove that the drugs were planted. Occasionally this is indeed proven...

For present purposes, however, the prevalence of obtaining false convictions by planting drugs is immaterial. The mere feasibility of it is incompatible with the rule of law...

So, if you are on the jury in a drug case, and if you are told that the defendant must prove that his/her possession was unwitting, it is your civic duty to put the onus of proof back where it belongs (on the prosecution), raise it to the proper standard (beyond reasonable doubt), and hand down a verdict accordingly...

More: http://is.gd/noreverse .

We outlawed alcohol during the prohibition era and created Al Capone, organised crime, gangs, street wars, drive by shootings. Alcohol is a legal substance that in moderation makes you feel good and loosens inhibitions. Tobacco is another legal substance that is both more addictive than any of the opioid, and indeed, a good deal more harmful with long term consequences not yet seen in opioid. A very good point is that the addiction today is greatest in the overuse of prescriptive "legal" options. Well heroin addiction is invariably treated with a legal opioid/methadone. More addicts equates to more methadone prescriptions.
Prohibition doesn't work , has never ever worked; and all we have ever achieved is the creation of endless criminality.
There is more drug related crime than the combined total of all the others, filling and overflowing our prisons, with each inmate costing the taxpayer $50,,000.00 P.A.
We have a virtual war going on in Mexico, and many other South American countries, with a loss of life in the thousands! Why? Because a few dozen highly placed control freaks; and or, the rabid religious right, somehow believe they have a God given right to police the morals, sleeping arrangements of all others, or what substances you can or cannot imbibe?
And backed by corner store analogies that are a complete and utter nonsense.
Pushers get kids started on illegal drugs, simply because there is a massive economic return in doing so.
We could end this evil trade and all the death and widows etc; it creates; tomorrow, by legalising those with more or less benign health outcomes.
Legal opioid currently comes with the mandatory prescription; and are dispensed by a licensed Pharmacist.
Never in one's wildest dreams, would we ever allow legally dispensed opioid to be purchased over the counter in some corner store!
It says a lot about the intellectual acumen of the Author and the quite grossly disingenuous manipulation, of the actual words of the refereed to enquiry, I believe, that such inherently nasty weasel word spin would ever be made? Rhrosty.

Drugs are bad, but the "war on drugs" is even worse.

We are paying dearly in the service of American anti-drug ideology - policing, prosecuting and jailing people unnecessarily, leaving little police resources to protect us against real crimes. As we push the drug prices higher, we make it more attractive for criminals to push those drugs - had drugs been freely available in the shops, there would be no incentive to push them and the number of users would actually decrease, it will just become no big deal.

Naturally, it is the duty of parents to educate their children about the foolishness of using drugs. For those who choose to take drugs anyway - well let them die young!

If you are still not convinced by the pecuniary costs of the war-on-drugs, then you will be convinced once it happens to YOU that you are arrested and searched for drugs, even though you had nothing to do with them, once YOU undergo that terrible humiliation, once YOUR home is invaded and thoroughly searched by police because they suspect (wrongly) that you grow marijuana there as just happened to a nice elderly couple that I know.

Will Dominic earn brownie points for publishing this piece signalling his ideological colours. He shouldn't because it shows an appalling ignorance of the issue.

I am waiting for the day - but not holding my breath - when politicians don't just takes sides in the old debate between the 'people are bad and need a good kick up the backside to make them behave well', and the other side who believe that 'people are good and just need to be encouraged and helped to do the right thing'.

This fundamental argument between 'right' and 'left' has been going on for so long now and it is not an argument anymore; both of these things are true about us humans and any answer for how we get to be more of one than the other is going to be very complex.

Dominic says he disbelieves the evidence but I suspect that he doesn't understand the evidence that supports harm mininisation. If Dominic did understand the evidence that he says is wrong, he would have told us what the evidence was and why it is wrong. He doesn't do that. He just says it is wrong.

In scientific writing, and surely in any 'publication' when an author says evidence or an argument is wrong, it is obligatory to provide a synopsis of that argument and why it is wrong or at least a link to an argument that shows the reasoning to be wrong. This is not a cue to link to a republican attack-dog site.

But really, Dominic, where has the war on drugs worked, even in places where it has been wholeheartedly carried out?

"What mother or father of a schoolchild would be happy for drugs to be readily available over-the-counter? "
Such places already exist. They are called taverns, pharmacies and supermarkets.
At least the author is honest in declaring the ideological basis for their beliefs. However, it doesn't stop him being wrong. How would he like it if he were forced, on pain of imprisonment to abide by my moral standards. It never fails to amaze me how people believe their own moral standards should be foisted onto the rest of the population via use of the criminal law.
Its time the government got out of the business of telling adults what they can or can't put into their body

Interestingly it was the same people pushing harm minimisation, who wanted nicotine cigarette smokers banned from cardiac treatment, on the grounds that their problem was self inflicted. Talk about muddled reasoning.

Of course, the harm minimisation system means great highly paid jobs for thousands of social workers. Could that actually be the reason that all those in the "industry" promote so hard.

I don't give a damn what druggies put in their bodies, provided like the tobacco addicted, we ban them from taxpayer funded treatment of the health problems generated by their habits.

Interestingly the Netherlands are no longer permitting foreign national into their drug cafes. Probably providing medical treatment was getting too expensive.