Israel’s current drug policy, based on the total prohibition model, has been a total and unmitigated failure. Drug use rates are rising continuously, as are incarceration rates and property crimes. The attempt to deter people from using drugs by criminal prosecution has failed unequivocally. Conversely, this policy has given rise to an enormous criminal market that is financing corruption and violence that leave their marks on every aspect of society and every level of government. The only alternative to this disaster is a policy based on the concept of Harm Reduction. This concept maintains that drug use is a health problem and a social one, not a criminal one. Further, it accepts that the use of conscious-altering drugs cannot be eradicated, and that effort and resources are better directed at minimizing the harm that drug use causes both society and the users. Criminal prosecution and incarceration do nothing to help the addicts, to say nothing of casual users, but rather drive them underground, away from any potential help, and only reinforce their self-image as criminals.

Our proposed policy has three main objectives: To stop the persecution of hundreds of thousands of cannabis users, the great majority of whom are otherwise normative, productive, law abiding citizens; to separate the market for cannabis - a substance which poses relatively little risk to society or the individual, even when abused - fro that of other, more harmful drugs; and finally, to break the vicious cycle in which hard drug addicts are socialized to be career criminals, at enormous cost, and at the expense of actual treatment. 

Therefore, we will work to achieve the following:

The cannabis plant will be removed from the dangerous drug act and all uses thereof will be completely legal. The growing of cannabis for personal recreational use will be completely legal. The retail and wholesale trade in cannabis for recreational use shall be strictly regulated, and limited to designated, licensed outlets so as to prevent the selling of cannabis to minors and in order to achieve maximum separation between the cannabis market and the market of other, more harmful drugs which will remain illegal.

Those who use such illegal drugs will no longer be subject to criminal prosecution but rather be directed to treatment, but those who sell them for profit will be punished to the full extent of the law.

In keeping with the view that drug use is a health problem, the state shall screen all hard drug addicts that come to its attention, and those that are found unready for rehabilitation will be given their daily dose of drug in a controlled environment, at cost. Since the actual cost of the drug is a tiny fraction of its street price, this would effectively put an end to the illegal drug trade as we know it, maximize the amount of addicts who are in touch with welfare and treatment agencies, and bring the drug problem under control, as opposed to the current policy which sweeps it under the rug.