THE Australian drug market appears to be flooded with ice, with the average strength of the substance doubling in most jurisdictions within 12 months and the majority of the 809 labs busted being small "addict-based" operations.
The Australian Crime Commission's illicit drug data report, released in western Sydney today, reveals that in 2011-12 the largest amount of illegal substances were seized in a decade, driven by record successes in uncovering amphetamines, cocaine and steroids.
State and national police seized 23.8 tonnes of drugs during the year, but the commission conceded the supply of drugs could have grown faster than police had been able to seize them.
Australians are splurging more than $7 billion a year on illicit drugs, reaping huge rewards for manufacturers and dealers.
The spending, revealed by Australian Bureau of Statistics research, dwarfs the amount devoted to fighting the drug scourge and helping addicts.
The amount spent was $2 billion more than Australians spent on fashion and nearly double their spending on literature.
Drug experts and anti-drug campaigners said the data showed Australians spent about seven times more buying drugs in 2010 than governments spent on enforcing drug laws.
The figures have raised questions about the effectiveness of spending on anti-drug laws and prohibition.
The vast majority of the drug money is going directly to drug manufacturers and sellers, with early analysis from a Bureau of Statistics staff research project showing profit margins of more than 80 per cent.
The chief executive of drug harm minimisation group Anex, John Ryan, said he was staggered to see how big the drug market was.
http://www.theage.com.au/national/nations-7b-drug-splurge-20130621-2ooe3.html
Uruguay's unprecedented plan to put the government at the center of a legal marijuana industry has made it halfway through congress, giving President Jose Mujica a long-sought victory in his effort to explore alternatives to the global war on drugs.
All 50 members of the governing Broad Front coalition approved the proposal in a party line vote just before midnight Wednesday, keeping a narrow majority of the 96 lawmakers present after more than 13 hours of passionate debate.
The measure now goes to the Senate, where Mujica's coalition has a bigger majority and passage is expected to come within weeks for the proposal to make Uruguay the world's first nation to create a legal, regulated marijuana market.
"Sometimes small countries do great things," said Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the U.S. Drug Policy Alliance. "Uruguay's bold move does more than follow in the footsteps of Colorado and Washington. It provides a model for legally regulating marijuana that other countries, and U.S. states, will want to consider - and a precedent that will embolden others to follow in their footsteps."
http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/uruguay-lawmakers-debate-licensing-marijuana-sales-19826978
The decision by Uruguay lawmakers to legalize the possession and sale of marijuana could signal the beginning of the end for the increasingly unpopular U.S.-led war on drugs, experts say.
"Uruguay being the first nation to engage in legalization and alternative drug policy could be kind of a tipping point," says Nathan Jones, a post-doctoral fellow at Rice University's James Baker Institute for Public Policy in Texas.
He says that Uruguay's move challenges "those international treaties that kind of hold the whole drug prohibition regime together."
On Wednesday, Uruguay's House of Deputies voted 50 to 46 in favour of a bill to legalize the production, commercialization and distribution of pot.
The bill still has to move through the Senate, but with a government majority in the upper house it is expected to pass at some point in the fall.
Once passed, the legislation would make the small South American country the first in the world to completely legalize marijuana.
Uruguayan President Jose Mujica has said he hopes the legislation will neutralize drug-smuggling gangs in his country, adding: "We know we are embarking on a cutting-edge experiment for the whole world."
One of England's most senior police officers has called for class-A drugs to be decriminalised and for the policy of outright prohibition to be radically revised.
In a dramatic move that will reignite the debate over the so-called war on drugs, Mike Barton, Durham's chief constable, has suggested that the NHS could supply drugs to addicts, breaking the monopoly and income stream of criminal gangs.
Comparing drugs prohibition to the ban on alcohol in 1920s America that gave rise to Al Capone and the mafia, Barton argues that criminalising the trade in drugs has put billions of pounds into the pockets of criminal gangs.
Drug policy reformers have praised Barton's challenge to the status quo as sensible and courageous.
Finally, some common sense?
'It is time to end the war on drugs', says top UK police chief
Mike Barton, Durham's chief constable, says NHS 'could be used to supply addicts' and urges drugs policy revolution
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/sep/28/time-end-war-drugs-uk-police-chief?CMP=twt_fd
Marijuana was Canada’s newest mail-order product Tuesday, the inaugural day of a controlled medical marijuana industry that is expected to grow to more than $1 billion dollars within 10 years. But even as the new system privatizes distribution, critics fear regulation under the conservative-led government will make it harder for patients to get access to the drug.
In Canada, medical marijuana has been legal but highly regulated for more than a decade. Patients with doctor approval could grow or have someone else grow small quantities or request limited amounts from Health Canada, the national healthcare department.
But the conservative-led government voted earlier this year to effectively scrap that system in favor of a private””but also strictly regulated””system, targeting the flow of legal marijuana into the black market and shedding Health Canada’s role in marijuana production. Health Canada will phase out the current system, under which it sells registered users marijuana grown by Prairie Plant Systems, by the end of March.
Instead, starting Tuesday, medical marijuana users, or aspiring users, can send in an application directly to sanctioned corporate producers, along with a doctor’s note (or in some cases, a nurse’s note). If approved, they can place an order, pay the market price (the black market price is about $10 a gram; officials say the medical marijuana price will drop below that within a year), and wait for the secure courier to deliver their weed.
The world's most extensive study of the drug trade has just been published in the medical journal BMJ Open, providing the first "global snapshot" of four decades of the war on drugs. You can already guess the result. The war on drugs could not have been a bigger failure. To sum up their most important findings, the average purity of heroin and cocaine have increased, respectively, 60 percent and 11 percent between 1990 and 2007. Cannabis purity is up a whopping 161 percent over that same time. Not only are drugs way purer than ever, they're also way, way cheaper. Coke is on an 80 percent discount from 1990, heroin 81 percent, cannabis 86 percent. After a trillion dollars spent on the drug war, now is the greatest time in history to get high.
The new study only confirms what has been well-established for a decade at least, that trying to attack the drug supply is more or less pointless. The real question is demand, trying to mitigate its disastrous social consequences and treating the desire for drugs as a medical condition rather than as a moral failure.
But there's another question about demand that the research from BMJ Open poses. Why is there so much of it? No drug dealer ever worries about demand. Ever. The hunger for illegal drugs in America is assumed to be limitless. Why? One answer is that drugs feed a human despair that is equally limitless. And there is plenty of despair, no doubt. But the question becomes more complicated when you consider how many people are drugging themselves legally. In 2010 the CDC found that 48 percent of Americans used prescription drugs, 31 percent were taking two or more, and 11 percent were taking five or more. Two of the most common prescription drugs were stimulants, for adolescents, and anti-depressants, for middle-aged Americans.
The War on Drugs Is Over. Drugs Won. - Esquire
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/news/war-on-drugs-is-over?src=rss
What do you make of this sentence DB? "The hunger for illegal drugs in America is assumed to be limitless. Why? One answer is that drugs feed a human despair that is equally limitless".
What do you make of this sentence DB? "The hunger for illegal drugs in America is assumed to be limitless. Why? One answer is that drugs feed a human despair that is equally limitless".
A UN report said "the global drug trade generated an estimated US$321.6 billion in 2003."[1] With a world GDP of US$36 trillion in the same year, the illegal drug trade may be estimated as nearly 1% of total global trade. Consumption of illegal drugs is widespread globally.
Tell the nurses, the doctors and all ambos thats its recreational, after they have been punched, threatened with a knife, the list goes on....
Tell the nurses, the doctors and all ambos thats its recreational, after they have been punched, threatened with a knife, the list goes on....
Drugs clog up resources.
As of Oct. 1, possession of marijuana is decriminalized in Switzerland.
Anyone over the age of 18 caught with 10 grams or less of the drug will no longer have to make a court appearance and will not have offenses entered into their permanent record; instead, violators will have to pay a fine of 100 Swiss Francs (approximately $110), then be on their way.
Lawmakers in the country relaxed weed regulations in an effort to unify what had been a patchwork of often confusing policies that varied from one local area to another. Per The Independent, the measure is also expected to save money by cutting back on the 30,000 marijuana-related cases courts have had to handle each year. It will also free up police resources to pursue larger drug trafficking incidents.
But "decriminalized" is not the same as "legal," as a Swiss Broadcasting Corporation report makes clear. Growing marijuana plants, imbibing the drug in any form and dealing it are still forbidden.
Colorado farmer Ryan Loflin made history last weekend by harvesting the nation's first commercial hemp crop in 56 years.
Hemp advocates said Loflin's harvest is a landmark event that could one day lead to larger-scale domestic farming of hemp for industrial uses such as food additives, cosmetics and building materials.
Hemp is genetically related to marijuana but contains only trace amounts of THC, the psychoactive substance that gets marijuana users high.
Loflin's 55-acre crop in southeastern Colorado's Baca County won't yield large amounts of hemp-seed oil and other by-products but is "quite significant symbolically," said Tom Murphy, national outreach coordinator for advocacy group Vote Hemp.
The sale of hemp products in the U.S. reached an estimated $500 million last year, according to the Hemp Industries Association. Yet all of the hemp used for the products was imported because federal law prohibits its cultivation in the U.S. under the Controlled Substances Act of 1970. The last known commercial crop was harvested in Wisconsin in 1957.
Colorado's passage of Amendment 64 paved the way for legal cultivation of hemp, but Loflin chose to plant his crop earlier this year before implementation of the state's hemp-growing regulations, which are scheduled to take effect next year.
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