MOST people who take illegal drugs do not cause any harm to themselves or anyone else, according to a study which calls for the current "crude" ABC classification system be abandoned.
The two-year RSA Commission on Illegal Drugs argued that Britain's drug laws should be replaced by a system which recognises that drinking and smoking can cause more harm.
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Current laws are "driven by a moral panic" and a more effective drug policy would focus on harm reduction rather than cutting crime, the commission's report concluded.
The report said: "The use of illegal drugs is by no means always harmful any more than alcohol use is always harmful. The evidence suggests that a majority of people who use drugs are able to use them without harming themselves or others."
The flaws in drug policy are demonstrated, it claimed, by the categorisation of ecstasy along with heroin and cocaine as a Class A drug. Such a classification "probably does most to undermine the credibility of our drug laws in the eyes of that section of the population that is most likely to use drugs: namely, the hundreds of thousands of people for whom 'dance drugs' are a routine feature of a good night out," the report said. - The Scotsman, March 9, 2007
Substance use is not solved by criminalizing use based on morals, but based on education and harm reduction.
By using moral panic, drug laws criminalize drug users as traffickers, and the way laws are written, serve to manufacture drug criminals.
Thus drug war policies only cause harm and worsen drug use.
Only education and harm reduction are necessary, not draconian drug laws.
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