Portugal's drug policy pays off; US eyes lessonsBy Barry Hatton ....San Francisco's drug court saves the city $14,297 per offender, officials said. Expanding drug courts to all 1.5 million drug offenders in the U.S. would cost more than $13 billion annually, but would return more than $40 billion, according to a study by John Roman, a senior researcher at the Urban Institute's Justice Policy Center....
"People readily, if perhaps with a sheepish smile, can admit they are addicted to their morning cup of coffee without the least fear that their morality, sanity, or competence will be questioned or that they might face criminal charges and a potentially long prison sentence.
In the nineteenth century, the same was true of heroin or cocaine addiction. All of this changed early in the twentieth century as a push for criminalization gained momentum" (Singer 2006: p55).
An Enlightened Exchange in Iranby Tina Rosenberg This is a story about a courageous policy in an unexpected place. In this place homeless shelters have vending machines selling clean syringes for injecting drugs. Drug users are not prosecuted as long as they are in treatment programs. Drug addicts are given clean needles and methadone maintenance therapy ─ available on a widespread basis even in prison. These tactics have worked to reduce crime, lower H.I.V. rates among drug users and keep AIDS from spreading out into the general population. The place is not Amsterdam. It is Tehran....
follow-up piece: How Iran Derailed a Health Crisis So how did Iran do it? How did a conservative theocracy decide to deal with its drug addicts as if it were Canada?... The science behind harm reduction is solid ─ but the politics are acutely dangerous.....
