Yep, dead wrong. Portugal and the Netherlands have the right idea.

Uhhh...whose drug laws...jus sayin

I have an AA in Addiction Studies and a BA in sociology.

I've pretty much concluded that the best way to end the illegal drug trade is to make recreational drug use legal, but highly regulated and taxed.

As fully autonomous cars are to be a reality in the ner future (first models will be out in 2019, and mos tcar manufacturers will have them out by 2023), the legalization of recreationa ldrugs becomes much more of a pragmatic possibility.

Defiitely. Have a pending ap for medical marijuana. In the US piece of crap Jeff Sessions is trying to reverse allthe states that have legalized fo rrecreational use and then medical use. Portugal has probably got it right. I think I got high when I was in Coimbra, Portugal at the University there..

Portugal sounds good to me... i can sit back at night and smoke some weed. Everybody gets rich that sells drugs. Make it legal and the price may go down...lol.

I totally agree and laud them for it. Regardless, the successes of other countries will never convince the people in the U,S, to follow suit as they're addicted to this power of harassment of drug users.

The Dutch

After just reading your headline I thought: Portugal. There are probably a few other nations that get it kind of right. Not yet us, but New Zealand might finally be moving in the right direction, I just hope it will move fast. We in New Zealand could and should be growing loads of legal Cannabis ... but as it has been recently, people switched from pot to meth, because police have shut so many growers down, and meth is easier to find. ( and infinitely more damaging)

portugal has a perfect plan.

it makes sense to decriminalise all drugs because the people with the need will pay for clean drugs and end dealers forever.

It seems that our prison system is largely a for-profit scheme and the "war on drugs" has really been a war on poor people and minorities to fill the prisons. I'm no fan of the drug cartel and the dealers pushing illicit, harmful drugs onto kids, but it's clear that what we've been doing in recent decades hasn't been working toward the ostensible goal of reducing drug use in the United States.

Places like the Netherlands seem to have a better grasp on how to handle intoxicating substances than locations such as the United States and the Philippines do.

Attempting to fight a war on drugs is and has always been a losing battle. Traffickers love a good war on drugs. Illegal drugs means that they don't have to pay taxes on their wares.

Prohibition has never worked and never will work to stop people from using all manner of intoxicants.
The misguided marijuana tax stamp fiasco wiped our the hemp industry while making an entirely different strain of the plant illegal. The War on Drugs has been an unmitigated failure of gargantuan proportions wasting hundreds of billions of dollars without affecting demand or supply. We have the highest per capita incarceration rate in the world from locking up small time non-violent drug offenders, primarily young black and hispanic men and from mandatory sentencing guidelines.

What we are doing with our drug policies, laws, policing and and prisons is wrong. Portugal has a lot of guts and it's working there with the help of socialized medicine. But, without the medical component, the social network and support, the outright legalization of hard drugs like heroin, meth and cocaine would be disastrous in America.

What we should do is grow up and legalize the use is cannabis. It's 2017 and we are still putting people in cages for smoking flowers.

Yes. I'm Australian and we definitely have it totally wrong. But it's like climate change — people refuse to accept clear evidence.

Considering the source, I'm immediately suspicious of the content.