Decriminalization

A bill aiming to reduce the costs of combating marijuana on the streets and in the courts by decriminalizing possession of small amounts of the drug is being heard by two legislative committees. Possession of one ounce or less of marijuana would be considered a civil violation similar to a traffic ticket and subject to a fine of $100 under the bill.

Former president Alejandro Toledo, the frontrunner in Peru's presidential race, said he would consider decriminalizing drug use if elected. Peru currently allows people to possess small amounts of recreational drugs, including cocaine. Toledo said he might loosen them further. A growing number of Latin American countries already have relaxed laws targeting drug consumers in order to focus police resources on traffickers.

After more than 10 years of trying, 2011 could be the year that Connecticut adopts legislation allowing severely ill patients to smoke marijuana. Governor Dannel P. Malloy says he's inclined to sign that bill. Malloy also supports decriminalization legislation to reduce penalties for possession of small amounts of marijuana to the price of a motor vehicle infraction. Now, with a friendly face in the governor's office, all the legislative proponents of the two measures have to do is push the bills through a variety of committee debates and floor battles in the House and Senate, fend off opposition and get the bills approved before the midnight June 8 deadline.

80-year-old Republican Delegate Harvey Morgan, also an assistant clinical professor of pharmacy at Virginia Commonwealth University, is leading the charge to decriminalize marijuana possession. Legislation proposed by Morgan, known as House Bill 1443, would replace the criminal fine for possession with a civil penalty and eliminate the 30-day jail sentence and criminal record that would follow conviction. "In 2007, nearly 18,000 people were arrested in Virginia for simple possession of marijuana...This places a tremendous burden on law enforcement, prisons and the judicial system. In these times of economic hardship, we need to closely examine how our tax dollars are spent," Morgan said.

After overseeing a comprehensive review of drug policy in Portugal, where possession of everything from marijuana to heroin has been decriminalized since 2001, Alex Stevens, a professor of criminal justice at the University of Kent in Britain, has a blunt rebuttal to the classic "Think of the children" line of thinking. "Criminalization of drugs is not protecting our children," he says. "In fact, it's harming our children." By any conceivable empirical metric, Portugal’s vastly liberalized drug policy has succeeded. And as Stevens argues, the most potent lesson to be learned is that the "decriminalization of drugs does not necessarily lead to increases in drug use."