Drug Decriminalization in Maryland Through an African Centered Research Paradigm- Analysis and Recommendations

a former UN Secretary General, and a Nobel Laureate, launched a report in June 2011
that condemns the war on drugs and calls for governments to seriously consider
alternatives such as decriminalization. The Lancet, a renowned British medical journal
published a special issue in July 2010 to address the problem of HIV among drug users.
The 2010 Vienna Declaration, signed by the heads of UNAIDS and the Global Fund to
Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, bears 20,000 signatures in support of drug
policies that are rooted in science. A global campaign led by AVAAZ—End the War on
Drugs—gathered over 600,000 signatures.”
Surprisingly, Portugal—a small country known for its conservative values, strong
Catholic tradition, and recent emergence as a democracy—has become an international
model for drug policy reform. In a dramatic departure from the norm, Portugal
decriminalized drug possession in 2000. By moving the matter of personal possession
entirely out of the realm of law enforcement and into that of public health, Portugal has
given the world a powerful example of how a national drug policy can work to everyone’s
benefit. In the past decade, Portugal has seen a significant drop in new HIV infections and
drug-related deaths.
Instead of languishing in prison cells, drug dependent individuals in Portugal now receive
effective treatment and compassionate programs that integrate them back into society.
Even law enforcement has benefited, as police officers are now free to focus on intercepting
large-scale trafficking and uncovering international networks of smugglers. As a result,
public safety has increased.” (Domosławski, 2011).
With an understanding of epistemology and the cultural context behind research paradigms, we
can apply the same scrutiny to this statement around the advocacy of drug decriminalization, just
as was pursued around explanations on the harms of the War on Drugs. Again, rather than a
political ethic based upon solidarity and examination of racialized moral panic behind fear of
intoxication, the report uses the language of public health to justify decriminalization. First, it
raises the specter of disease spread, assuming a universal conception of either self preservation
(protecting the larger public from dangerous diseases) or human empathy around the pain of
suffering from disease will convince the reader on the value of decriminalization. An
understanding of Karam’s analysis casts doubt upon this assumption, as it is equally likely that
those reading the text may citge fear disease spread among drug users as reason to keep them
incarcerated, and view their suffering as necessary to create a incentive for individuals to “hit
bottom” and free themselves from their drug addiction. In the extreme, one could imagine, as was
argue in the mist of harm reduction debates in Vancouver, canada, that lawmakers will view
increase overdose rates as a social good, arguing that if enough drugs addicts die there would be
no one left to overdose, thus solving the overdose epidemic (Lupick, 2018).
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