JOHN ENTWISTLE: 
Europe, in a nutshell, tried the prohibition model, and
they modeled it just like us, and they tried it, they did
contracts with us, and they tried to prohibit all drug use, including all
marijuana use in general. With the exception of Amsterdam they were pretty
successful--the problem is they were successful in obtaining everything
you get with prohibition: crime, terrible incidents of other drug abuse,
complete anarchy in the market, the spread of diseases like tuberculosis,
AIDS, hepatitis, liver disease.
As of about five years ago, a movement
started in Europe that was based in the cities, that was started by various
people who were fighting drug abuse and the effects of that, and
sociologists who were concerned with improving the health of society in
general by reducing crime and reducing spread of disease. They had some
indicators and gauges they were going by. They started putting stuff
through that set of criteria. They came up with a harm-reduction model in Europe that
spread to way over 25 cities--it's a big movement. It hasn't run in North
America at all: it's been fully co-opted. But in Europe, the harm-reduction movement fully embraces the concept of making marijuana as
available as alcohol, with the specific intent of competing with alcohol
and with the specific intent of, beyond that, of competing with heroin in
the marketplace. With the specific desire of replacing those two very
dangerous drugs with one that is less dangerous, based on the hope that
people, for no other reason than availability, will make that choice to
live safer. They are presuming that people will not make the choice to do
without any option in that area, and by giving them a safe option in
addition to the harmful ones, less harm will be done to the individual and
to society. You will see less disease and crime.
They've been employing
this model with limited success in Europe, but limited only in the sense of
how far they can go how fast. Everything they've done in the spirit of
that harm-reduction, which starts at that point, where you actually try to
influence the consumption of drugs in society by influencing availability
across the board and regulating it that way as opposed to trying to reduce
marijuana's availability and then trying to stomp out the use of other
drugs.
That's what going on in Europe. Here we're continuing with the same basic
prohibition. To the extent that harm reduction concepts have entered
America, it's extremely limited and tends to be only the subset of harm
reduction that deals with methodone maintenance and with heroin addiction.
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