3 decades of the war on drugs had no measurable impact on supply or use. The war on drugs has failed, fuelling higher rates of infection and harming public health and human rights to such a degree that it’s time to decriminalize non-violent minor drug offences, according to a new global report.
The authors of the Johns Hopkins-Lancet Commission on Public Health and International Drug Policy call for minor use, possession and petty use to be decriminalized following measurably worsened human health.
“We’ve had three decades of the war on drugs, we’ve had decades of zero-tolerance policy,” said Dr. Chris Beyrer, a professor of infectious disease epidemiology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore and the senior author of the report published Thursday in The Lancet. “It has had no measurable impact on supply or use, and so as a policy to control substance use it has arguably failed. It has evidently failed.”
CBC News – Mar 24, 2016.
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