Roar Mikalsen - HUMAN RISING - radiofri..

til alt vondt; den sier at vi aldri kan bli kvitt rusmisbruk så lenge vi ikke tar tak i de uheldige
sosiale forholdene som forårsaker det; og den tar også et oppgjør med de
woodoofarmasøytiske egenskapene vi tildeler de illegale stoffene:
”A 1972 report to the Ford Foundation, ‘Dealing With Drug Abuse,’ concluded that
current drug policies were unlikely to eliminate or greatly affect drug abuse. This conclusion
led to the creation and joint funding by four major foundations of a broadly based,
independent national Drug Abuse Council. The council reviewed and assessed laws,
programs, and projects-federal, state, and local, private and governmental-related to use
and misuse of psychoactive drugs. In its final report, the council's board of directors offered
a set of observations considered central to the process of reaching consistent, coherent, and
responsible approaches to drug use and misuse:
Psychoactive substances have been available throughout recorded history and will
remain so. To try to eliminate them completely is unrealistic. The use of psychoactive drugs
is pervasive, but misuse is much less frequent, and the failure to make the distinction
between use and misuse creates the impression that all use is misuse and leads to addiction.
There is a clear relationship between drug misuse and pervasive societal ills such as poverty,
racial discrimination, and unemployment, and we can expect drug misuse so long as these
adverse social conditions exist.
The price of an effective strategy to eliminate drug misuse through the criminal law
would be perceived by many Americans as too high in terms of invasions of privacy and
abrogations of individual liberties. Drug laws and policies attend insufficiently to the
problems of people misusing drugs and too much to the properties of drugs themselves, as
though the drugs were somehow inherently to blame. Too many Americans have unrealistic
expectations about what drug policies and programs can accomplish. We have a regrettable
tendency to blame our drug problems on others, failing to recognize that our drug problems
are products of our own national experience.
The council's directors then offered a set of suggestions, Principal among them are
the following:
Treatment for drug dependence should be available chiefly because people need
help, rather than as a crime control or behavior control method.
There should be a major study of the effects of drug laws and their enforcement on
personal decisions to use or not use illicit drugs.
Legislative efforts to decriminalize at both state and federal levels the possession of
small amounts of marijuana for personal use should continue.
Rapporten slutter slik: ‘... that serious consideration be given to the use of state and
local option as a means of attempting solutions appropriate in one place but not in others.
Local options could encourage greater flexibility and ingenuity rather than reliance on an
unrealistic, rigid homogeneity in national drug policy. We need to respond to the diversity of
people who use and misuse drugs, base all our policies on a consistent set of principles
seeking to discourage misuse, and keep our seemingly innate drug-using behavior within
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