The main point of the bill is the increase of the minimum prison sentence for drug trafficking, from 5 to 8 years. According to the text, this relates to scenarios when an individual found with an undetermined amount of illegal drugs (without distinction – from marijuana to crack cocaine) is associated with 3 or more individuals with the intention of profiting on the sale and/or distribution of the substance. However, it is unclear what exactly constitutes said association, and critics fear that the text will just reinforce the current practice: in large, poor people are considered traffickers and better off individuals are judged as users.

Another change that was severely refuted by specialists gathered at the International Conference on Drugs, which took place just a few weeks ago in Brasilia, is the change in compulsory treatment to drug users. According to new bill, drug users can be sent to compulsory treatment in rehabilitation centres without the process having to go through a judge. Which brings another concern, as many of these rehabilitation centres are private institutions tied to religious organizations.

If the Brazilian politicians showed very little tolerance regarding the use and commercialization of all the currently illegal drugs, the same couldn’t be said about the legal drugs. In the same bill, there was an article according to which all Brazilian produced, alcohol based beverage, would have to show images and writing warnings about the risks of alcohol use on their labels. The article, thou, was written off. As Deputy Nelson Marquezelli said, “it would be an irresponsible act against the national alcohol industry”.

Some key articles of the text are still to be voted, and should go to the Senate before it is finally put in practice.

For the first time, the majority of Americans support regulated cannabis for adult consumption. Nowhere has this support been more evident than in Colorado and Washington, states that recently approved new bills to this effect. This shift in public opinion presents a direct challenge to the U.S. federal law, but also to the United Nations Drug Conventions and the international drug policy regime.

The Global Commission on Drug Policy, building on the call for a paradigm shift formulated by the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy, has called loudly for precisely these kinds of changes since 2011. Twenty global leaders have highlighted the devastating consequences of repressive drug policies on people, governance and economies not just in Latin America, but around the world.

Our flagship report — War on Drugs — sets out two main recommendations: (i) replace the criminalization of drug use with a public health approach, and (ii) experiment with models of legal regulation designed to undermine the power of organized crime. By brokering a genuinely global conversation on drug policy reform, we broke a century-old taboo.

A new unexpected voice was added to the debate on drug policy reform. The Secretary General of the Organization of American States (OAS) José Miguel Insulza presented Colombian President Santos with the findings of a much anticipated report on alternative scenarios for drug control and regulation for the Americas. The study itself was originally the idea of President Santos and endorsed by all heads of American States at the 2012 Summit of the Americas in Cartagena.

The OAS-backed study proposes four possible scenarios for future drug policy reflecting an emerging consensus across Latin America. Fortunately, none of the scenarios call for the status quo. Most experts endorse the first three scenarios — the shift from repressive approaches to ones that privilege citizen security, the experimentation with different approaches to regulating illegal drugs, and the strengthening of community resilience. Obviously, all serious leaders agree that the fourth scenario, the threat of creating narco-states, is to be avoided at all costs. Taken together, the report represents the first comprehensive treatment of drug policy reform from a multilateral organization.

The OAS study sets out complementary, rather than mutually excluding paths. They are based on the realistic expectation that demand for psychoactive substances will continue to exist over the coming decade and that only a small proportion of users will become dependent. In fact, many states are already decriminalizing drug use and experimenting with cannabis regulation, while also investing in harm reduction programs including the medical supply of harder drugs. Rather than causing problems as predicted by their critics, they are generating positive and measurable results.

The OAS and countries across Latin America are positively contributing to the breaking of the taboo that blocked for so long the debate on more humane and efficient drug policy. It is time that governments around the world are allowed to responsibly experiment with regulation models that are tailored to their realities and local needs. The leadership demonstrated by President Santos and the OAS Secretary General is welcomed. But the report is just the start — leaders across the Americas need to take this study seriously and consider how their own policies can be improved. In doing so, they will be breaking the vicious cycle of violence, corruption, and over-crowded prisons and will put people’s health and security first.

A proposal currently pending before the New York State legislature, the Compassionate Care Act – A.6357 (Gottfried) / S.4406 (Savino) – would allow healthcare practitioners to talk to their patients about medical marijuana and certify those with serious, debilitating illnesses so that they may have access to a small amount of medical marijuana to relieve their symptoms. The bill, which would create one of the nation’s most tightly regulated medical marijuana programs, also has the support of hundreds patients and healthcare providers and dozens of organizations across the state.

“An astonishing 82% of New Yorkers support medical marijuana, including 81% of both Democrats and Republicans,” said gabriel sayegh, DPA’s New York State Director. “New Yorkers clearly, overwhelmingly support compassionate care for the sick and dying. So what’s the hold up in Albany? This proposal has been delayed for fifteen years. It’s time for our elected representatives in Albany to show some moral clarity and compassion, and move this measure forward so that those New Yorkers suffering with cancer or other debilitating conditions can get the relief they need and deserve. ”

Eighteen states and the District of Columbia have passed laws protecting patients who use medical marijuana with a physician’s recommendation – including other northeastern states such as New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont and Rhode Island. Illinois could soon become the 19th medical marijuana state if Governor Quinn signs a bill passed by the Illinois Senate last week.

The survey also found that 52% of Americans favor federal legislation that would prevent the federal government from prosecuting people who grow, possess, or sell marijuana in the states that have legalized it. Recently, Representative Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) introduced the “Respect State Marijuana Laws Act” which would do exactly that. You can click here to easily contact your Representative and urge him or her to support this measure.

Full results of this poll are available here.

So I was interested to learn, 11 years later, that Kleiman is leading the team hired to advise Washington State as it designs something the modern world has never seen: a fully legal commercial market in cannabis. Washington is one of the first two states (Colorado is the other) to legalize the production, sale and consumption of marijuana as a recreational drug for consumers 21 and over. The marijuana debate has entered a new stage. Today the most interesting and important question is no longer whether marijuana will be legalized — eventually, bit by bit, it will be — but how.

“At some point you have to say, a law that people don’t obey is a bad law,” Kleiman told me when I asked how his views had evolved. He has not come to believe marijuana is harmless, but he suspects that the best hope of minimizing its harm may be a well-regulated market.

Ah, but what does that look like? A few places, like the Netherlands, have had limited legalization; many jurisdictions have decriminalized personal use; and 18 states in this country have approved the drug for medical use. (Twelve others, including New York, are considering it.) But Washington and Colorado have set out to invent a whole industry from scratch and, in theory, to avoid the shortcomings of other markets in legal vices — tobacco, alcohol, gambling — that lurched into being without much forethought, and have supplied, along with much pleasure, much misery.

The biggest shadow hanging over this project is the Department of Justice. Federal law still makes felons of anyone who trades in cannabis. Despite the tolerant drift of the polls, despite evidence indicating that states with medical marijuana programs have not, as opponents feared, experienced an increase in use by teenagers, despite new moves toward legalization in Latin America, no one expects Congress to remove cannabis from the list of criminal substances any time soon. (“Not until the second Hillary Clinton administration,” Kleiman says.) But federal authorities have always left a lot of room for local discretion on marijuana enforcement. They could, for example, declare that they will prosecute only drug producers who grow more than a certain amount, and those who traffic across state lines. Attorney General Eric Holder, perhaps preoccupied with scandal management, has been slow to come up with enforcement guidelines that could give the states a comfort zone in which to experiment.

One practical challenge facing the legalization pioneers is how to keep the marijuana market from being swallowed by a few big profiteers — the pot equivalent of Big Tobacco, or even the actual tobacco industry — a powerful oligopoly with every incentive to turn us into a nation of stoners. There is nothing inherently evil about the profit motive, but there is evidence that pot dealers, like purveyors of alcohol, get the bulk of their profit from those who use the product to excess. “When you get a for-profit producer or distributor industry going, their incentives are to increase sales,” said Jonathan Caulkins of Carnegie Mellon, another member of the Washington consulting team. “And the vast majority of sales go to people who are daily or near-daily consumers.”

What Kleiman and his colleagues (speaking for themselves, not Washington State) imagine as the likely best model is something resembling the wine industry — a fragmented market, many producers, none dominant. This could be done by limiting the size of licensed purveyors. It would help, too, to let individuals grow a few plants at home — something Colorado’s new law permits but Washington’s does not, because polling showed Washingtonians didn’t want that.

If you read the proposal Kleiman’s team submitted to Washington State, you may be a little boggled by the complexities of turning an illicit herb into a regulated, safe, consumer-friendly business. Among the things on the to-do list: certifying labs to test for potency and contamination. (Pot can contain, among other nasty things, pesticides, molds and salmonella.) Devising rules on labeling, so users know what they’re getting. Hiring inspectors, to make sure the sellers comply. Establishing limits on advertising, because you don’t want allowing to become promoting. And all these rules must account not just for smoking but for pot pastries, pot candies, pot-infused beverages, pot lozenges, pot ice cream, pot vapor inhalers.

The Global Commission on Drug Policy, building on the call for a paradigm shift formulated by the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy, has called loudly for precisely these kinds of changes since 2011. Twenty global leaders have highlighted the devastating consequences of repressive drug policies on people, governance and economies not just in Latin America, but around the world.

Our flagship report – War on Drugs – sets out two main recommendations: (i) replace the criminalisation of drug use with a public health approach, and (ii) experiment with models of legal regulation designed to undermine the power of organised crime. By brokering a genuinely global conversation on drug policy reform, we broke a century-old taboo.

A new unexpected voice was added to the debate on drug policy reform. The Secretary General of the Organization of American States (OAS) José Miguel Insulza presented Colombian President Santos with the findings of a much anticipated report on alternative scenarios for drug control and regulation for the Americas. The study itself was originally the idea of Santos and endorsed by all heads of American states at the 2012 Summit of the Americas in Cartagena.

The OAS-backed study proposes four possible scenarios for future drug policy reflecting an emerging consensus across Latin America. Fortunately, none of the scenarios call for the status quo. Most experts endorse the first three scenarios – the shift from repressive approaches to ones that privilege citizen security, the experimentation with different approaches to regulating illegal drugs, and the strengthening of community resilience. Obviously, all serious leaders agree that the fourth scenario, the threat of creating narco-states, is to be avoided at all costs. Taken together, the report represents the first comprehensive treatment of drug policy reform from a multilateral organisation.

The OAS study sets out complementary, rather than mutually excluding paths. They are based on the realistic expectation that demand for psychoactive substances will continue to exist over the coming decade and that only a small proportion of users will become dependent. In fact, many states are already decriminalising drug use and experimenting with cannabis regulation, while also investing in harm reduction programmes including the medical supply of harder drugs. Rather than causing problems as predicted by their critics, they are generating positive and measurable results.

The OAS and countries across Latin America are positively contributing to the breaking of the taboo that blocked for so long the debate on more humane and efficient drug policy. It is time that governments around the world are allowed to responsibly experiment with regulation models that are tailored to their realities and local needs. The leadership demonstrated by President Santos and the OAS secretary general is welcomed. But the report is just the start – leaders across the Americas need to take this study seriously and consider how their own policies can be improved. In doing so, they will be breaking the vicious cycle of violence, corruption, and overcrowded prisons and will put people’s health and security first.

The decriminalization of drug use and the regulation of marijuana consumption are the principle recommendations made in “The Drug Problem in the Americas” report presented by the Secretary General of the Organization of American States (OAS), José Miguel Insulza, as an alternative to the war on drugs. The document stems from the request made to the OAS by 34 chiefs of state and governments, including the United States, so that alternative drug policies can be discussed.

Lisa Sanchez, coordinator of the Mexico United Against Crime (MUCD) program, the Transform Drug Policy foundation and a group of specialists commissioned to create the report stated that the document represents a rupture with the current paradigm on drugs. “The reform of drug policy has been a taboo for decades and, for the first time in a while, representatives of 34 countries of the Americas have had the courage to look at real alternatives to end the war on drugs”, he said.

The report, besides presenting an analysis of the current drug policies, including sample alternatives to the model, uses four scenarios to predict how drug policies could potentially develop by 2025. In one of the scenarios we find the legal regulation of marijuana and other drugs, along with the evolution of the international legal framework.

Sanchez states that this is a clear recognition of the failure of the current international system of substance control and shows the need to explore alternatives for its reforms. MUCD adviser, Armando Santacruz, adds that this scenario of reform is already happening in Washington and Colorado. “They are moving towards regulation and taxation of marijuana for non medicinal use and Uruguay will probably follow in the upcoming months”.

For Santacruz, this document has created the conditions for a vigorous debate on different approaches, while the international community gets ready for a Special Session of the United Nations General Assembly in 2016 on the drug question. “We hope that this kind of report will serve to fuel the global debate on drug policy reform”, he claims.

The report is available in English and Spanish

Indeed, in the southern part of Netherlands, the Wietpas (“Weed pass”) was implemented one year ago in order to supress Cannabis tourism mostly from Belgium and France. From then on, only Dutch consumers that produced this pass could come and buy Cannabis in Coffee shops. The mayors claimed that this reform would allow to stop all the inconveniences and troubles that cannabis tourism caused such as traffic jam, night time noise and, above all, crime and dealing.

But this ban didn’t lead to a fall in drug dealing, quite the contrary.

Since its implementation, an explosion of drug supply offences happened in those cities since it led to a sharp increase of street dealing.

One month after the ban begun, the mayor of Maastricht considered it as a “big success” since “the number of foreign tourists had dropped significantly”. This conclusion ignored two facts that were much more relevant to understand what was happening in his city : Dutch newspapers were all relating stories of street dealers that were becoming rich thanks to the ban and in 30 days, the local drugsmeldpunt – the city hotline for drugs – received 619 complaints instead of an average 160 complaints per month before. The Cannabis price might also have decreased at that time considering the huge quantity of Cannabis that flew through the illegal network and the street dealers proliferation.

One year after its implementation, the assessment of this reform is clear: instead of making the streets safer and reducing the cannabis consumption, it contributed to the huge rise of drug related criminality. In Maastricht, the number of drug related crimes has doubled over the past year while in Roermond it tripled.

This explosion of ‘crime’ had important side effects: most of the Dutch consumers in those southern provinces refused to register and this led to a transfer of the Cannabis market from the coffee shops to the streets. In the end, this is endangering the main raison d’être of the Dutch drug policy and of the coffee shops’ existence that is to separate the soft drugs market from the hard drugs one and to regulate the cannabis sale. Indeed, street dealers usually provide soft drugs such as cannabis but also hard drugs, regardless of the age or nationality of their clients.

This ban reform has been so controversial that its implementation was abandoned at the national scale and several cities such as Amsterdam and Rotterdam already announced that they would keep their coffee shop open to foreigners. Moreover, it conducted interestingly to the rise of another debate: the one about “the backdoor supplying”- about the hypocrite Dutch decision to authorize Cannabis sale but to forbid its growing that leads coffee shop owner to get supplying from illegal market. In April 2013, cities such as Utrecht, Leeuwarden or Amsterdam urged the government to legalise the growing of Cannabis. This may seem to be a more effective way to tackle with drug related criminality.

The mentioned report consists of approximately 400 pages with the input of all of the OAS Member States and includes an analytical study and technical document that outlines a series of scenarios and options for the anti-drug strategy over the coming years.

The analytical report covers about 90 pages and comprises a set of reports about each one of the aspects of the problem, such as health, development, security, production, legal alternatives and the costs of the illegal market. The report examines the current environment of drug policies in the hemisphere, taking from the experience of governments, civil society, academic institutions or groups of experts.

The second part constructs four possible scenarios in the development of the problem through 2025, depending on the decisions taken by the leaders. Each chapter provides an analysis to reference the current situation in the region, an evaluation of best practices and new approaches that are being undertaken in different countries, as well as a description of the basic challenges and obstacles to improve results.

On the 17th of April last year, Portugal implemented a law banning any commercial activity related to so-called New Psychoactive Substances (NPS). The regulations created an interim table, initially listing about 160 substances (phenethylamines, tryptamines, cathinones, synthetic cannabinoids and some plants). Within this legal framework, trading listed NPS is deemed to be a misdemeanor, with offenders subject to a fine. Listed substances, if proven toxic within a maximum period of 18 months, pass on to the definitive criminal table. During this time, fines can go up to € 3,740 in the case of individuals and € 44,890 in the case of legal persons.

Possession of substances for consumption comes under the same legal framework as other types of illegal substances, given that drug use is decriminalised in Portugal. To avoid the black market becoming the sole destination for the substances already in circulation, the government has announced a 15-day “amnesty”: During this period, anyone can go to the nearest police station and hand in any substances they have, without fear of prosecution. Traders tried to get around this with marketing ploys: In the days leading up to the ban, the largest distribution chain of NPS in Portugal announced deals such as “two for the price of one”, in order to off-load stock.

Before the law was promulgated, APDES tried to put forward other models of legislation for parliamentary debate, stressing the failure of purely prohibitionist measures. In fact, the EMCDDA has calculated that new substances appear on the market at the rate of one per week. In this game of cat and mouse, the mouse is destined to win. Two days after the law came into force, Dr. João Goulão, director of SICAD (Service of Intervention in Addictive Behaviors and Dependencies) stated, “Since the law [came into force] I have received notification of a half dozen [new substances], and so we are on alert” – acknowledging that these substances are constantly emerging and the list “keeps growing”. He added that “The other [illegal substances] are well known, but with these new ones, we’re playing Russian roulette – things can go wrong at any time” (From a Portuguese Daily Newspaper).

The opinion of APDES is that prohibition only increases the pressure on producers to release onto the market new substances with the ability to circumvent the law, and that some of these may well be more toxic than those already circulating. Only by regulating the production and sale of certain substances with a safe profile could the pressure be reduced.

The government has prohibited any commercial activity related to these substances, but it hasn’t implemented service responses focussed on NPSs, nor has it moved to assess, monitor and evaluate users and their behaviour, or provide support and health education. In party settings – where most of the use of NPS use takes place – the response in terms of prevention and harm reduction is almost inexistent in our country. As a result of austerity measures, the Portuguese Government has frozen state grants giving funding for things such as harm reduction and outreach projects. At the moment, there is no funding for outreach teams working specifically in this field, providing information about the risks and effects of such substances, issuing harm reduction materials, or doing counseling. The only Drug Checking service working in Portugal, promoted by APDES, faces constant financial uncertainty.

Drug Checking, besides being an essential tool to work with drug users – using specific strategies to reduce the harms from adulteration, overdose or misrepresentation – is one of the most effective methods, in partnership with an early warning system, of monitoring the market, detecting new substances and noting new consumption trends.

In spite of the fact that Portuguese drugs policy has been acclaimed as an example of good practice around the world, this new law feels like a step backwards from a more appropriate, pragmatic and effective drug policy.