On Air 1700GMT: What would the world look like if all drugs were legalised?
| 13:08 UK time, Thursday, 2 June 2011
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This topic was discussed on World Have Your Say on 2 June, 2011. Listen to the programme.
Close your eyes for a minute and picture this. You go down to your local pharmacy and order some cocaine over-the-counter. Later, you catch up with a friend at a coffee shop that sells weed and smoke a couple joints. Another pal joins you, who has just come from shooting up with heroin.
No need to worry about trouble from the police. All of the above are legal.
Okay - so that's a pretty mythical scenario at the moment. But what if it wasn't?
A released on Thursday says the global war on drugs has "failed".
One of the key recommendations: countries should legalise drugs. Not all drugs - but some of them.
In fact there's a large . Take a read of .
So today on the programme we're asking: what would the world look like if all drugs were legalised?
We're trying to get the views of an economist, a doctor, a police officer, an addict and a trafficker.
But we want to hear from you too. What would your country look like if drugs were made legal?
The new report was written by some big names: past UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, the former leaders of Mexico, Colombia and Brazil and the entrepreneur Richard Branson. They argue that decriminalising drugs will not lead to an increase in drug use.
They point to , the Netherlands and Australia as examples of countries that have decriminalised certain drugs. Their conclusion: the number of people who used drugs actually decreased.
We've had the debate around whether drugs should be legalised. We're not re-hashing that again. We're going to slip into an imaginary scenario of drugs being legalised overnight.
If you woke up to this new world, what effect would it have on your society?
