In this Feb. 7, 2014 photo, Matt Figi hugs and tickles his once severely-ill 7-year-old daughter Charlotte, as they wander around inside a greenhouse for a special strain of medical marijuana known as Charlotte's Web, which was named after the girl early in her treatment, in a remote spot in the mountains west of Colorado Springs, Colo. A few years ago, Charlotte's doctors were out of ideas to help her. Suffering from a rare disorder known as Dravets syndrome, Charlotte had as many as 300 grand mal seizures a week, was confined to a wheelchair, went into repeated cardiac arrest and could barely speak. Now Charlotte is largely seizure-free, able to walk, talk and feed herself, with her parents attributing her dramatic improvement to this strain of medical cannabis. (AP Photo/Brennan Linsley)

When Portugal decriminalised all drug use in 2001 they showed the world there was a different way of doing things, that there was an alternative and viable way of defeating the problem of drugs instead of just locking every single offender up. In 1974 Portugal’s dictatorship fell in the Carnation Revolution, a bloodless military-led coup that led to the transition between authoritarianism to democracy. This freedom led to experimentalism in politics and economics, but unfortunately, with the soldiers bringing back varieties from all over the Portuguese colonies, they were also experimental with hard drugs.

Portugal initially tried to respond in a typically Western fashion. With criminal justice rather than rehabilitation. Locking people up rather than helping them overcome their problems. However, this failed dramatically and by 1999, nearly 1% of all Portuguese people were addicted to heroin and Portugal was leading in drug related AIDS deaths in Europe. Since 2001 drug use levels have fallen to below the European average and between the years of 2000 to 2013 new HIV cases fell from 1,575 a year to 78, and new AIDS cases dropped as well, from 626 a year to 74. Indeed, there is a strong argument that the decriminalisation of drugs, or introduction of Needle Exchange Programmes, or NEPs, where those addicted to heroin and other injectable drugs can go to get sterile needles, can lead to a plummet of new AIDs and HIV cases. Washington DC, for example, was in the middle of an HIV and AIDs epidemic, with Congress continuously blocking the District’s attempt to implement a NEP between 1999 and 2007. On average DC had 19 new cases of HIV and AIDs a month. After Congress finally relented and allowed DC to have a NEP the number of cases dropped by 70%, to under 6 a month. The importance of this should not be underestimated. This case showed that taking a different approach to drugs can actually lead to an increase in public health.

Over the last few years there is a strong and pungent change in the air in the United States. A change that many have dubbed ‘The Green Revolution’ has begun. As of November 2015 four states, Alaska, Colorado, Oregon and Washington have full legalisation and regulation of cannabis, with many others either having decriminalised or legalised medicinal cannabis. This is important due to the fact that the US have been the main exporters of the prohibitionist viewpoint. Indeed, the US Drug Enforcement Agency still has more than 80 offices in 60 countries. The very country that led the world in drug policy throughout the 20th Century has states that have begun to realise that not only is this a lucrative business, Colorado made $60 million on taxed and regulated recreational cannabis in the very first year of it becoming legal, but that it’s benefits reach beyond purely monetary.

The medical benefits are still up for discussion among medical experts but there seems to be more and more cases of cannabis being used to replace prescription drugs that are debilitating to the user. Over the past couple of years CNN’s chief medical correspondent and neurosurgeon Sanjay Gupta has produced a three part documentary called Weed. To offer him a bit more gravitas, if he needed it, he was also offered the position of Surgeon General of the United States in 2009, which he withdrew from. In the film he meets many patients who have turned to medicinal cannabis in order to relieve their pain. One of the more heartbreaking parts of the documentary is when he meets Charlotte Figi, an 8 year old from Colorado, USA. She suffers from Dravet Syndrome, a severe form of epilepsy, and suffered from multiple seizures every day that stunted her development and meant she was unable to learn to talk. She was put on medications like Valium and Ativan, which would occasionally make her heart stop. At her worst she got up to 300 seizures a week, which led to doctors wanting to put her on a strong veterinary drug for epileptic drugs or to put her in a medically induced coma to give her body rest. They had to find her an alternative quickly or the next time her heart stopped, it could be for the last time.

This alternative was cannabis. Not just any cannabis, of course. As she was five at the time using cannabis with high THC content was out of the question for Charlotte. The Stanley brothers, a group of growers from Colorado, have produced a strain of cannabis, that they have called Charlotte’s Web, after Figi, that is almost 0% THC (THC being the psychoactive substance in cannabis) content and high in CBD (Cannabidiol or CBD being the active ingredient that many people believe has the medical benefits). This has changed her life infinitely for the better. 99% of her seizures have stopped and she is now able to develop like a normal child thanks, almost, purely to cannabis.

One major hurdle for progressive drug policy is the argument that drug use leads to higher crime rates, and to some extent this is true, because of course it is. If something is illegal then crime has to be committed for the drug to even exist, let alone be distributed and bought. By keeping drugs illegal governments are leaving an incredibly lucrative business in the hands of criminals and gangs. A case in point is the Mexican drug cartels. In 2011 there were almost 23,000 murders in Mexico, whereas in 2014 the rate dropped to 15,649. This seems to coincide with legalisation of cannabis in Colorado and Washington, although there are many other factors related to this, including the fact that many of the cartel leaders have been captured. Whilst it can be argued whether or not legalisation has led to the slight demise of the drug cartels, it is a fact that most of the money the drug cartels use to bribe officials and buy weapons comes from the selling of drugs. Even as the cannabis seizures on the Mexico-US border have gone down, the seizures for heroin and crystal meth have gone up. I’m not making this point to say that we should legalise and regulate all drugs, we are not at the stage where we could do that competently, and try telling a mother that her government is going to legalise heroin, cocaine and meth, I’m making this point to show that it is because of prohibition that criminals are profiting to levels above and beyond most legal ventures, and that when you have got politicians and criminals wanting the same thing (to keep drugs illegal) then you have an issue with policy.

One reason that the drugs war must be ended is that it is inherently a racist law. Both in the UK and the USA, the incarceration rates for drug possession and selling is skewed massively toward ethnic minorities. Whilst around the same percentage of each ethnic group in the US takes drugs it is the ethnic minorities of black and hispanics that bear the brunt of the US justice system. 38.4% of all prisoners convicted in the USA of drug offences were black, compared to 32.4% of convicted drug offenders being white. When you compare this to the population percentages, black people make up 13.8% of the total US population, it is obvious that this is not representative and that the drugs laws clearly lead to higher levels of incarceration of ethnic minorities then they do white people. Compare this as well to the UK where black people are, according to a study by Release (a national centre on drug expertise), 6 times (45 out of every 1000) more likely to be stop and searched than white people (7 out of every 1000), even though only 5% of all black people in the UK take drugs, compared to 10% of all white people in the UK. This is especially revealing when you take into account that white people make up 87.2% of the total population of the UK, whereas black people only make up 3%. This shows how, while it may not have been intended as a race law, the way the laws are being carried out has led to mass discrimination.

It is evident that the only thing the War on Drugs has achieved for us is to lock up addicts and non-violent members of society. That someone could go to prison for selling a plant that grows naturally in many parts of the world for a longer period of time than someone who assaults another human being is a ridiculous notion, and one that should, if the revolution keeps moving in the way that it is, be banished to echelons of history sooner rather than later.

Will Dixon

@willdixon554

http://www.drugpolicy.org/new-solutions-drug-policy/international-success

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-politics/study-needle-exchange-program-leads-to-big-drop-in-dc-hiv-infections/2015/09/02/ce383e14-51a5-11e5-9812-92d5948a40f8_story.html

http://time.com/3801889/us-legalization-marijuana-trade/

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http://www.release.org.uk/publications/numbers-black-and-white-ethnic-disparities-policing-and-prosecution-drug-offences