It is my firm belief that the American people, and certainly Californians, would support decriminalizing drugs and regulating drug markets, if only they knew that the drug problem in their country is much worse than in countries with more liberal policies. The problem is that Americans do know that their country has a serious drug problem, but they also believe or are convinced that in the Netherlands and other European countries the situation is even worse. This is what they have heard from their governments and drug czars.

Just hours before the state’s legislative session ended Tuesday, the California Assembly voted to approve SB 1449, Sen. Mark Leno’s bill to fully decriminalize simple marijuana possession. The bill passed the Senate in June and now goes to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s desk.

ENCOD BULLETIN ON DRUG POLICIES IN EUROPE

NR 67 SEPTEMBER 2010

TIME TO DISCUSS THE ALTERNATIVES

The freshly appointed National Drug Coordinator Jindřich Vobořil, who assumed his post on 1 July, has his hands full. Although the partial decriminalization of cannabis at the beginning of this year didn’t transform the capital into the new Amsterdam, as some headlines suggested, the accessibility of soft drugs, Vobořil says, has secured the Czech Republic one of the highest rankings in Europe regarding cannabis use.

According to a 2009 report by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, for the third time in a row, Czechs rank among top four heaviest cannabis users in Europe, and almost half of those aged between 15 and 24 have used marihuana at least once.

To many people, the "war on drugs" sounds like a metaphor, like the "war on poverty". It is not. It is being fought with tanks and sub-machine guns and hand grenades, funded in part by your taxes, and it has killed 28,000 people under the current Mexican President alone. The death toll in Tijuana ­ one of the front lines of this war ­ is now higher than in Baghdad. Yesterday, another pile of 72 mutilated corpses was found near San Fernando ­ an event that no longer shocks the country.