In recent years, April 20th, a very special day for cannabis users, has become a cause for debate regarding the pros and cons of decriminalization / legalization of drug use – a very complicated issue with many philosophical and practical extentions, which above all have to do with the question of wether it is legitimate and desirable for the state to intervene in our lives for our own sake.

Let us recall Mark J. Perry’s article by the American Enterprise Institute on the social and economic costs of the War on Drugs, which we translated and published in the Think Tanks section of the ever-welcoming liberal.gr

A shot passage from that article:

“It has been 46 years since Nixon declared the “War on Drugs” and today we know that it has been a completely failed mission. We have not defeated drug abuse with a 46-year “War on Drugs”, just as the Prohibition did not defeat the abuse of alcohol. What this war has done is that it has dramatically increased the number of Americans who are imprisoned for drug-related offenses, and especially male offenders, as the graph above shows. According to the data from May this year, almost half (46.3%) of prisoners in federal prisons are serving sentences for drug-related offenses.

We have also exported our own “War on Drugs” to other countries like Mexico, resulting in more than 60,000 drug-related killings, which are more deaths than the ones USA had in the war in Vietnam.

And despite the fact that we Americans take pride in our over 200 year history of “economic and political freedom”, we should be ashamed of the War on Drugs, and our status as “second worldwide imprisoners”, part of which is due to the war on drugs. According to the International Center for Prison Studies, the US is ranked first with a rate of 666 prisoners in every 100,000 people – see the full list here. The US has imprisoned a larger percentage of its population that Cuba (510 per 100,000) and Russia (430). On the contrary, the incarceration rate in Canada is 114 per 100,000 population, in Germany is 76 and in Japan is 45.

Therefore, no matter how much we think America is the “land of the free and the home of the brave”, our performance in locking up Americans for the use of drugs that are currently not allowed by the state, stains the great Americal legacy of freedom. Is it not time to declare a ceasefire in this embarrassing, lethal, costly and failed war against the otherwise peaceful Americans who voluntarily choose to consume or sell substances that are currently banned by the state and will lead to the imprisonement of users or distributers who will be arrested holding them?”.