Whack-a-mole vs. Legalization: Top UK Officials Announce UN-inspired War on Drugs Failed

Three cheers for the Brits - an Baroness Molly Meacher!!!

Top UK Officials: UN-inspired War on Drugs Failed: "On the 50th anniversary of the United Nations treaty that led to the global “War on Drugs,” a group of prominent officials and legislators from the United Kingdom declared the battle a failure and formed a commission calling for new policies to deal with problems associated with drugs.

Among the heavyweights promoting changes in national drug laws are the former heads of the U.K. internal security agency MI5, the Crown Prosecution Service, the government news service BBC, the British Medical Association and even the General Medical Council. Top British legislators from various parties in Parliament and the House of Lords are involved too.

The newly created “All-Party Parliamentary Group on Drug Policy Reform” is calling for policies “based on scientific evidence.” Members said that despite governments pouring enormous sums of money into prohibition, availability and abuse of drugs have only increased. On top of that, the war has served to enrich terrorists and crime bosses while destabilizing entire countries like Mexico.

The chairwoman of the group, Baroness Molly Meacher, has already come out with strong statements against the current prohibition model. “Criminalizing drug users has been an expensive catastrophe for individuals and communities,” Meacher told The Daily Telegraph in an interview. “In the U.K. the time has come for a review of our 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act, [the law that criminalized drugs to comply with the UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs treaty].”

Meacher, who is also in charge of a National Health Service trust, called on the British government to heed the advice of current international experts at the UN itself in recognizing drug addiction as a health problem, not something to be punished. She also cited the model pursued by other European nations that have successfully experimented with different approaches."