Swiss legalize heroin, but won’t decriminalize cannabis
Sunday, November 30th, 2008 at 3:31 pm | By: Radical Russ
Heroin Legalization Program Approved By Swiss Voters
GENEVA — The world’s most comprehensive legalized heroin program became permanent Sunday with overwhelming approval from Swiss voters who simultaneously rejected the decriminalization of marijuana.The nearly 1,300 selected addicts, who have been unhelped by other therapies, visit one of the centers twice a day to receive the carefully measured dose of heroin produced by a government-approved laboratory.
They keep their paraphernalia in cups labeled with their names and use the equipment and clean needles to inject themselves _ four at a time _ under the supervision of a nurse, and also receive counseling from psychiatrists and social workers.
Sixty-eight percent of the 2.26 million Swiss voters casting ballots approved making the heroin program permanent.
By contrast, around 63.2 percent of voters voted against the marijuana proposal, which was based on a separate citizens’ initiative to decriminalize the consumption of marijuana and growing the plant for personal use.
Jo Lang, a Green Party member of parliament from the central city of Zug, said he was disappointed in the failure of the marijuana measure because it means 600,000 people in Switzerland will be treated as criminals because they use cannabis.
“People have died from alcohol and heroin, but not from cannabis,” Lang said.
The government, which opposed the marijuana proposal, said it feared that liberalizing cannabis could cause problems with neighboring countries.
Talk about “sending a wrong message to the children”! Don’t use cannabis, or we’ll arrest you, but if you get into heroin, we’ll give you a nice place to shoot up some free smack. In a strange way, the Swiss voters just said that cannabis use isn’t addictive. They had to take action against heroin because those people got addicted and would shoot up in the city parks, but apparently cannabis isn’t enough of a problem for the Swiss people to think it needs a harm reduction solution.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for clean needle exchange programs and maintenance heroin programs and I really don’t even mind if the government pays for it. But to accept that treatment of heroin while maintaining a prohibition against cannabis seems insane to me. I’d bet if you legalized the cannabis, you’d end up with less heroin addicts over the long term, too.
Topics: clean needles, heroin, needle exchange, Switzerland
