Poland liberalizes drug laws in effort to focus on treatment

The Polish parliament Friday passed new legislation that gives prosecutors more leeway in seeking punishments for people caught carrying small amounts of drugs.

The new law allows prosecutors to end investigations if the suspect only has the drugs for personal use and is not a drug dealer. Even in cases involving larger amounts, the accused can avoid prosecution by voluntarily agreeing to drug treatment therapy.

Better to legalise like Czech has. As the law stands now in Poland, possession of even a negligible quantity of marijuana means 48 hours in the cells and pages of paperwork. While the real criminals carry on regardless.

My friend that is studying in Prague can just call the special delivery "Weed Taxi" to get his fix. Insane but true!

The only effective way to curb the drug plague is to focus on the demand end. But that is impossible since the drug empire successfully exploits celebrity slime who brainwash people into thinking that drugs are somehow cool, trendy, cutting edge, bla-bla-bla... Most politicians only pay lip-service to combating drugs, because they are either on the take themselves or feel that people on drugs are easier to control. Stalin correctly believed that about alcoholic inebriation...bread may have been scarce but the vodka flowed freely.

Great news! Polska is gearing up for a serious party time :D I could do with a weed taxi, I've convinced my water monitor to go get some for me. It’s been a week since it left…and it hasn’t been back yet.

Drugs, whether alcohol, marijuana, tobacco, opium etc have been around for millennia. Seems a bit pointless taxing some and banning others - what right does a government have to tell people what they should consume. Better to decriminalise everything and let people make their own minds up.

Sounds like a good idea, the treatment options. Id rather have a clean Ex smack head than a petty thieving smack head in and out of prison for the rest of their lives.

In and out of prison to get large sums of money to buy an essentially benign natural product with an intrinsic value of a few pennies - but with a price hugely inflated due to prohibition and the profits going to organised crime. The Volstead Act all over again.

Inhalation of hemp smoke is a part of Poland's ancient cultural heritage. "....it burns like incense and produces a vapour so thick that no vapour bath in Hellas would surpass it: and the Scythians being delighted with the vapour-bath howl like wolves." (Herodotus, The Histories: Book IV Chapter 75) Legalize it like the full moon in the night sky. Howooooooooooool!

Mate, heroin , benign.................seriously? Sorry,not with you on this one,not by a country mile.
Decimated my generation round here.

lot of trains to spot back in the 90's, huh?

That's perhaps due to the rubbish that it's cut with and the poor diet that goes with affording black market prices for it. Medical grade heroin is exceptionally pure, though almost as bad as alcohol for the liver.

I've also seen the damage that criminalising drugs can do and would have agreed with you until I met rich middle-aged long-term heroin users - and even they occasionally get a bad deal.

Comments like this highlight the hypocrisy of drug laws as they currently are written. Have you ever taken an aspirin for a headache? Ever had a cup of coffee? Ever taken an herbal supplement? Ever taken any of the Thousands of different medications that are available for the thousands of different ailments and diseases? If so, guess what - You've used Drugs! Granted some do more harm than others and should be monitored, but allowing the sale of alcohol and tobacco while prohibiting the sale of marijuana simply makes absolutely no sense and legalization is the only rational way to go.

It's not about drugs being "cool, trendy, etc" - drugs are Everywhere and are a common part of everyday life, it's just that people choose to be selective about what drugs they'll tolerate and which ones they'll demonize. When you take emotion out of it and get down to simple facts it's hard to deny that current attitudes towards illegal drugs need to change.

Marijuana should be legalized.

In the USA, heroin was legal at the beginning of the 20th Century...It was available in tablet from the German Bayer Company (the ones who made aspirin) who also synthesized heroin at any pharmacy...I would say, even legalize heroin, but problem with that IS mafia control, and the use of injection to take the drug...Before heroin made illegal in US, no one ever inject heroin...It was available in pill form.

Cocaine?...This a tough one, as, to me, cocaine in powder form does nothing but damage the nose, and make you crazy...If you chew the coca leaf, as many rural South Americans traditionally did, it was a stimulant, good for making you work, but did not have the harsh effect of cocaine hydrochloride (blow).

I am afraid that various mafias have too much control and make too much liquid cash, to permit legalization of certain drugs.

As far as opiate dependency treatment, certainly methadone works, and there is also suboxone/buprenorphine, which is basically heroin in pill form, but with the drug narcan added, as to discourage crushing up pills, and shooting them...Narcan cancels out any opiate effect when injected with an opiate.

Meth?...Too harsh, ban it, but make forms of speed like the old diet pills available in small doses.

Always the question of, if permitting drug use, will the nation become a society of addicts?...I say, even if legalized, only maybe 7-8% of citizens will regularly use these drugs...Many legal pharmaceuticals are much more deadly.

I have seen small doses of opiates work wonders for depressed and even people diagnosed with more serious psychiatric disorders in my days working in mental health.

Remember drug use of one sort or another is permitted in most if not all countries. Poland for example allows alcohol, nicotine and caffeine, all psychoactive drugs, to be sold.


Exactly, every country has its addicts - I'm addicted to nicotine, some people to alcohol - decriminalising other things wouldn't neccessarily lead to an increase in use - after all, addicts will use something even if there are the harshest penalties.

Absolutely...So why not make certain substances available in a safer form?

As for marijuana, let people grow their own, or it could be a nice little thing to add to the general economy, by having registered growers and distributors...Or, you could just let it be totally free market.

I wonder about the alcohol lobby. Chomsky talks about 'the war on certain drugs'. As far as I'm concerned, plenty of people enjoy using drugs and drug use is not going away regardless of legality - I found it absolutely rife in Saudi where the strictest penalties exist. So maybe it's better to do it in the light rather than the dark?

Previous generations have ingested various toxins, so we can't be worse!

In the countries where decriminalization and legalization have taken place, there hasn't been an increase in users.

Legalize it all and enforce the laws that are in place to prevent people doing harm to one another. Problem solved.

Here, here, brother.. plus it will make a Catholic Mass a lot more tolerable.

Absolutely.


For sure.


No, no...You don't receive Communion when high or drunk.

Mass can be a wonderful experience if your heart is right, if you have a good flock in the Church, and if the priest is a decent man who can give a good sermon.

I just dont get it......I watched it and thought "christ,what a miserable existence" (while breifly coping the grungy style and shaved head lol) but others seem to have seen it as aspirational. Your spot on with the Trainspotting generation bit mate,also the whole zombie like posters as a kid ,Zamo,and a scary episode of Juliet Bravo......

I cant go down the "natural selection " route though as it wasnt just the waste of space muppets who got stuck on it, I knew a lot of "nice middle class kids" who even now still sell the big issue......and they are the more succesfull ones :( When I moved back to my home town a few years ago I gave up after a couple of days trying to get in touch with school mates,it was just too depressing how many are dead or inside.

but if the drugs they chose had been legal they would probably still be alive and free....it's the very illegality that kills people and destroys lives....bad cuts and running around trying to get the stuff, mixing with lowlife, using dirty works and so on and so on.

I am sure there are plenty of doctors who have been addicted to nice clean available morphine for years, and are no more more fecked up than your average "social drinker".

A long, long, time ago before our births, guess what? All drugs were legal. Hmm. Wonder why they became illegal? Just because some jerk came along to rain on everyone's parade taking away their drugs? Doubt it. More like, these drugs were bringing pain and agony into people's lives, so the magistrates decided they were a threat to public health and outlawed them.

Now, we want to take two steps back to the misery that was before because it happened before we were born so we have no idea how awful it was.

awful like prohibition?

Why was prohibition awful?

enormous rise in organised crime?

Either way someone is going to profit. Making the drugs illegal discourages people from becoming addicted to them. If certain drugs weren't illegal in my state, things would be so much worse. It's already bad with prescription drug abuse, and prescription drugs are supposed to be legal, only you have to follow the prescription and not abuse them.

If the illegal drugs became legal here, my state would be lost in hopeless drug addiction. It would be so widespread, it would just be insane.

It is a big mistake to legalize this stuff.
You mentioned alcohol and prohibition. Alcohol is different because not everyone can drink it, it tastes pretty nasty, so not everyone is attracted to it. Not the case with drugs. Most don't have an unpleasant taste so it's much easier for people to take them. That makes them easier to abuse and addiction rates are higher.

maybe there's a deeper problem with your society that needs to be addressed?..:)

It's simple. Make drugs less available and there won't be a problem.