23536
Bluelight Crew
WARSAW — In the year 2000, as the president of Poland, I signed one of Europe’s most conservative laws on drug possession. Any amount of illicit substances a person possessed meant they were eligible for up to three years in prison. Our hope was that this would help to liberate Poland, and especially its youths, from drugs that not only have a potential to ruin the lives of the people who abuse them but also have been propelling the spread of H.I.V. among people who inject them.
We assumed that giving the criminal justice system the power to arrest, prosecute and jail people caught with even minuscule amounts of drugs, including marijuana, would improve police effectiveness in bringing to justice persons responsible for supplying illicit drugs. We also expected that the prospect of being put behind bars would deter people from abusing illegal drugs, and thus dampen demand.
We were mistaken on both of our assumptions. Jail sentences for the possession of illicit drugs — in any amount and for any purpose — did not lead to the jailing of drug traffickers. Nor did it prove to be a deterrent to drug abuse.
What the law did do, however, was enable the police to increase their arrest numbers by hauling in droves of young people caught with small amounts of marijuana. More than a half of all arrests under the law were of people aged 24 and younger. Criminalization of drug users resulted in a dramatic increase in the number of identified cases of drug possession: from 2,815 in 2000 to 30,548 in 2008.
The vast majority of those individuals were not drug dealers. Some of them, however, were adolescents whose prospects for careers as lawyers, public officials or teachers were suddenly blighted.
The law also proved to be very expensive for taxpayers. A cost-benefit analysis by a Polish think tank, the Institute of Public Affairs, showed that the statute cost about €20 million a year, with no positive effect.
Significant numbers of professionals working in the criminal justice system, including prosecutors and judges, when asked whether they believed the law worked as it was supposed to, concluded that it was not an effective tool in combating drug trafficking.
It is my hope that political and community leaders in other countries, especially in Eastern Europe, will learn from Poland’s experience in criminalizing drug possession, a move that clearly fell short of its goals. Such a policy failure should not be repeated anywhere else in the world.
Aleksander Kwasniewski was president of Poland from 1995 to 2005.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/11/opinion/saying-no-to-costly-drug-laws.html
We assumed that giving the criminal justice system the power to arrest, prosecute and jail people caught with even minuscule amounts of drugs, including marijuana, would improve police effectiveness in bringing to justice persons responsible for supplying illicit drugs. We also expected that the prospect of being put behind bars would deter people from abusing illegal drugs, and thus dampen demand.
We were mistaken on both of our assumptions. Jail sentences for the possession of illicit drugs — in any amount and for any purpose — did not lead to the jailing of drug traffickers. Nor did it prove to be a deterrent to drug abuse.
What the law did do, however, was enable the police to increase their arrest numbers by hauling in droves of young people caught with small amounts of marijuana. More than a half of all arrests under the law were of people aged 24 and younger. Criminalization of drug users resulted in a dramatic increase in the number of identified cases of drug possession: from 2,815 in 2000 to 30,548 in 2008.
The vast majority of those individuals were not drug dealers. Some of them, however, were adolescents whose prospects for careers as lawyers, public officials or teachers were suddenly blighted.
The law also proved to be very expensive for taxpayers. A cost-benefit analysis by a Polish think tank, the Institute of Public Affairs, showed that the statute cost about €20 million a year, with no positive effect.
Significant numbers of professionals working in the criminal justice system, including prosecutors and judges, when asked whether they believed the law worked as it was supposed to, concluded that it was not an effective tool in combating drug trafficking.
It is my hope that political and community leaders in other countries, especially in Eastern Europe, will learn from Poland’s experience in criminalizing drug possession, a move that clearly fell short of its goals. Such a policy failure should not be repeated anywhere else in the world.
Aleksander Kwasniewski was president of Poland from 1995 to 2005.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/11/opinion/saying-no-to-costly-drug-laws.html
