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When you look at the Gallup Poll that came out in late October,
about Americans’ opinions about making marijuana legal,
and you see that support has almost doubled since 1983 to 44%
and that it’s jumped dramatically in just the last four years…
so we really do have the wind at our back.
After the War on Drugs
Although public support for drug prohibition is fading,
most people have no idea what a post-prohibition regime could look like.
November 12th to 14th 2009, at the International Drug Policy Reform Conference
in New Mexico, we asked leading drug policy reformers
to explain their views on future legal regulation models regarding illicit drugs.
In the United States the term legalisation is one that some people
understand in terms of tax and regulate,
but a lot of people think that term is associated with anarchy
The free market system we know is designed to maximise consumption.
If we look at Nike, Coca Cola or blue jeans,
if you look at any large multinational corporation,
they are all in the same business which is increasing consumption.
Regulate and control currently illegal drugs
– that’s the way I talk about it. It is about regulation and control.
Legalisation to me means regulated legalisation - taxation.
We want more control, not less.
All drugs need different models.
Different drugs vary on degree of harm,
degree of addictiveness, degree of compulsivity,
degree of physical damage.
The more harmful drugs would probably need more regulatory options
and the less harmful drugs would need fewer regulatory options.
Transform produced a paper, which is “Blue Print for Legalisation”.
Can you just introduce us to this document?
It’s basically the first time ever that we’ve outlined
– that anyone, really, has outlined precisely and in detail
how people would get hold of drugs in a post-prohibition world.
And that means applying normal regulatory frameworks
to a situation that is currently completely out of control.
We basically have three choices in a post-prohibition world.
We prescribe them by doctors, we dispense them from pharmacies
or we sell them under license.
Cannabis, it’s going to be sold under licence,
in the same way that you would for any other drug.
So it’s not going to be next to your Hershey bar.
It’s a consumer rights issue.
Currently in Holland you buy a packet and you have a vague idea
of how much THC is in there.
But we would like to see a government stamp on it;
we would like to know that the government regulator
has overseen that process;
we'd like to see a health and safety warning on it,
we want to see and ingredients list saying how it’s grown
and the kinds of products that went into the growing process.
And part of the licensing conditions would be giving advice
to people who use it, particularly for people who are misusing,
if they are using too much or are using inappropriately
or for people with mental health problems or people with vulnerabilities.
We have to learn from the lessons of alcohol and tobacco.
I have, when I’m doing my PowerPoint presentations,
images that have been traditionally associated
with alcohol and tobacco.
And they are called sexy bodies and they are called muscular bodies,
there is sex, they’re glamorous, they’re fabulous.
The model of alcohol and tobacco has been
the model of commercialism.
The first issue is branding. If you allow a product to be branded,
it will be advertised - even if you have advertising as illegal.
If you allow branding to occur, advertising will occur.
In fact, if you look at the various ways it can be made available,
it can be made available in a cylindrical,
inconvenient medicine container with a snap-top.
Can you walk down the street and smoke a joint?
Probably not at first. It would be for home use, informed adults,
in unattractive attractive packaging, in non-branded forms.
Do you have any ideas how to regulate the production of cannabis?
Ok, so this isn’t new in terms of regulating production and supply.
All the frameworks are in place.
There are controls over the production of tobacco.
There are controls over the refining of tobacco.
They’re not as good as they should be – they’re really not –
we need better control but the frameworks are basically there.
I fight fiercely to end marijuana prohibition.
But the thought that it would one day be controlled by Phillip Morris,
or Anheuser-Busch, or the major pharmaceutical companies
or consumer goods companies, does not fill me with joy.
But what is happening in the United States
and in other countries as well in the last couple of decades,
is the emergence of all these smaller breweries,
often times just making for the local state,
for local communities or for local states - regulated by the state -
but producing in relatively small amounts.
Sometimes they are owned by the larger companies and sometimes not.
And I think that that model which continues to emphasise
the quality of the product, which continues to provide employment
for local people all around the country -
I think that’s one that jives very well
with where the marijuana market is now.
Ok, let’s talk about other drugs like stimulants and opiates.
How would that regulation differ from that of cannabis?
We regulate legally two very hard drugs: alcohol and tobacco.
So what we’re talking about here is adding drugs
into those frameworks.
So, if we start with ***, *** as the most concentrated form
of *** based products, it would only be available initially from a doctor.
But with all drugs, there are different concentrations -
so that you can put *** in various different things.
You can have *** tincture, you can smoke ***.
So it would likely be that *** would be available
in the same way that cannabis is, in a kind of coffee shop system.
I would not advocate a system where anyone could simply
go into a pharmacy and buy - “I would like to try some heroine today”.
You have to be diagnosed first as an addict
before you could get this and that there should be sanctions
for people who then turn that over to the black market
and give it to people who aren’t diagnosed.
It would make sense to me that both methadone and heroine were available.
Heroine perhaps for take home use, perhaps not, perhaps use on site.
But certainly starting with the most dependent drug users of the population,
give them heroine and methadone in some sort of combination
that works for them and then see.
Monitor the size of the illegal market.
If you have started with the most dependent users
and the illegal market has dropped 80%,
maybe you could leave it at that.
If you wanted to go to other people who wanted to participate,
informed adults, who could use it in a certain way,
you would have to make that decision at that time.
It is unlikely that we are going to see ***
on prescription for recreational use.
Our suggestion is that *** powder will be available
from a chemist, again perhaps with licensing on consumption,
perhaps rationing controls.
Coca leaves, no licensing at all. There is no reason why people
should not be able to go buy that from the same shop
you go and buy your lettuce and tomatoes.
What we are looking at here is the opportunity
to review the entire process the whole time.
So you operate the precautionary principle, operate strict controls,
begin to let them goand) if it looks like it’s going wrong,
you squeeze them back in again. It’s really neat.
Not like what we have now because you don’t have
any opportunity to intervene at all.
Does this apply to psychedelic drugs as well?
No, different model. If you think about psychedelic drugs,
all of the harms from the drugs come from set and setting.
What is set and setting? Set is expectation and setting is circumstances of use.
So if people are unsupervised when they take the drugs, harm can happen.
So the whole process of psychedelic drugs
is essentially you have to require supervision.
How does that model look?
Well what it looks like is you allow people to apply for a licence
and when you are granted a licence, you are guaranteeing that
you will supervise people for set and setting issues
for the entire duration of their trip.
So you become responsible for this person’s behaviour for 8 hours.
The first people that would be invited to participate
would be shamans and psychotherapists
who have been involved in doing this for centuries now.
With tobacco, we have been able to reduce dramatically
the use of tobacco in the United States
and we didn’t do it throwing any of the people in prison.
We did it through public health and education
and I think that’s what we need to do with drugs.
But it has to be honest education.
It can’t be the kind of propaganda that we get
from the drug warriors that try to scare kids.
It only makes them more cynical
and they disregard the message:
“the adults are lying to us again - they’re trying to scare us”
and it has the opposite effect.
Drug reformers, I believe, have clearly the high moral ground,
because a moral position is that of compassion,
and inclusion and caring of people
who are brutalised by our current system.
That’s where morality is.
Morality and compassion for me are the same thing.
So the reformers have the moral high ground.
Putting people in jail is an amoral approach to this particular problem.
The drug policy reform stands in 2009
where the gay rights movement was in the late 60s early 70s
or where the civil rights movement was in the early 50s.
I just don’t want people to all of a sudden get so excited
that when all of a sudden the wind starts to blow
in the other direction or when things start to slip backwards,
that we get demoralised. Because we have to be tough;
we have to see this as a multi-generational struggle -
trying to grab and change as much as we can in the moment,
but being ready to understand this is going to be a long struggle.
There is no two ways about that.
subtitling: István Gábor Takács, Arielle Reid, Tamás Kardos �