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Originally posted by JiggyPotamus
When is the government going to stop pouring funds into this black hole of the war on drugs?
...clear out our prisons, make a lot of money, save a lot of money, save thousands of lives per year, etc...The benefits are enormous.
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, coc aine, heroin and methamphetamine.
"It has enabled the Portuguese government to manage and control the drug problem far better than virtually every other Western country does."
The drug policy of Portugal was put in place in 2000, to be legally effective from July 2001. The new law maintained the status of illegality for using or possessing any drug for personal use without authorization. However, the offense was changed from a criminal one, with prison a possible punishment, to an administrative one if the amount possessed was no more than ten days' supply of that substance.
In Portugal, recreational use of cannabis is forbidden by law; also the medicinal use is not yet officially recognized (there are a debate and some law projects in the Portuguese Parliament). Portugal signed all the UN conventions on narcotics and psychotropic to date. With the 2001 decriminalization bill, the consumer is now regarded as a patient and not as a criminal (having the amount usually used for ten days of personal use is not a punishible crime) but repression persists. One can be sent to a dissuasion committee and have a talk or must pay a fee.
The cultivation of cannabis, even if in very small-scale home grow for personal use only, can legally be prosecuted. However, an unknown number of enthusiasts of small-scale home growing, grow the plants with a high degree of secrecy due to the legal punishment they could face if persecuted and due to potential social stigma as well.
Originally posted by fulllotusqigong
Daniel Hopsicker blows the lid on the CIA shot -- they were drug dealers.
What has remained undisclosed —until now —is ths: one of the agents is linked to the drug trafficking operation out of St Petersburg Florida in which two CIA-connected airplanes were seized—in separate incidents in 2006 and 2007—on Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula carrying a total of ten tons of coc aine.
What intelligence circles call “sloppy tradecraft” was one of the hallmarks of the rendition-linked drug trafficking operation, which escaped becoming a major scandal in the US only through the efforts (or non-efforts, or collusion) of America’s major media.
For example, one of the CIA planes frequently used in the rendition operation, a Gulfstream II (registration number N987SA) did double duty running drugs. It crashed with maximum publicity in the Yucatan in September of 2007, splitting apart and spilling 3.7 tons of coc aine across a rural area 30 miles from Merida, the Yucatan State capital.
Even worse, the downed CIA drug plane shared interlocking ownership with a second American-registered plane from St Petersburg, FL, a DC-9, that had also made headlines in Mexico when it too was busted on the Yucatan Peninsula carrying a massive 5.5 tons of coc aine.
Originally posted by Happy1
reply to post by Erongaricuaro
Oil, food, healthcare, don't mean # when you can make soooooo much money on keeping illegal drugs illegal and selling them to americans.
The real news during the "Americans Summit" in Colombia this year, was that drugs had to be legalized to stop all of the violence. US and Canada said NO. All the americans heard was that the Secret Service was drunk and spent a lot of time with prostitutes and wouldn't pay them.
Will any polititian really be truthful with the american public?