Cómo mejorar la ingesta de drogas en 2016

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Cómo mejorar la ingesta de drogas en 2016

18 enero 2016

Este artículo sugiere varias medidas, fundamentadas en un enfoque de reducción de daños, que haría más seguro el consumo de drogas: desde la formación de los usuarios en el manejo de naloxona para prevenir muertes por sobredosis a la mejora del acceso a información y a análisis de pureza de sustancias. Más información, en inglés, está disponible abajo.

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For over a century, world leaders have been deliberating over what exactly they should do about drugs. Unfortunately, all that deliberation hasn't got them too far in terms of actually keeping people or the planet very safe. The widespread collateral damage of the illegal drug trade – the exploitation, environmental damage, criminalisation, corruption, murderous gang feuds, addiction and needless overdoses – are all evidence that the way it's currently being handled does not appear to work.

The only alternative, it seems, is for governments to seize the reins of the drug trade, by controlling how drugs are cultivated, manufactured, marketed, distributed and sold; in other words, legalisation.

In 2016, cracks are already visible in the prohibition paradigm. Four US states have legalised recreational marijuana, 23 of them have legalised medical marijuana and the general trend worldwide is for governments, especially those in Latin America and Europe, to start edging away from a hardline, punitive stance towards policies based around ethical cultivation, harm reduction and decriminalisation.

Alternative ways of tackling the world drug problem – desperately sought by countries at the bloody epicentre of the drug war, such as Mexico – will be discussed at a special UN general assembly session in New York in April. The meeting comes in the wake of a leaked document last October written by a senior UN figure that advocated the decriminalisation of all drugs. The UN, under pressure from one member country, rumoured to be America, frantically downplayed the significance of its own expert's briefing document. Nonetheless, the drug reform genie is out of the bottle.

The end of prohibition in most countries, apart from authoritarian regimes such as Russia and Saudi Arabia, will most likely come in 10 to 20 years time, at a tipping point when a new generation will ensure the media and politicians jump to a different, more progressive beat on how society deals with the drug issue. A sway in public opinion, where drug morality will be more about helping people than stigmatising them, will finally enable governments to embrace the financial benefits of a sanctioned psychoactive drug industry.

In the meantime, as we wait for global drug policy to turn around at oil tanker speed, there are ways – working within the current system of prohibition – to make drugs better in 2016. I'll focus principally on the UK throughout this article, as that's where I live, but the points I'll make ring true around the world.

The first priority when it comes to drugs is to make them less likely to kill people. As we now know, this is not achieved by simply telling them drugs are bad and trying to arrest drug dealers, because it's not drug dealers killing people. On the contrary: the first rule of selling drugs after "make a profit" is "don't kill off your customers". What is killing people is isolation, both from the kind of services that can help them stay alive and from basic life-saving information.

The more substances are banned, the more obscure and unpredictably dangerous their replacements have become. As a result, there are now more ways of getting high than ever before, making the UN's 1998 ambition of creating "a drug-free world" look positively delusional.

Click here to read the full article.

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Thumbnail: Flickr Arvind Grover