I am assuming that a person of Dr. Abdullah Waheed's caliber, due to his political position, had succumbed and was only conforming to what is falsely perceived as another "popular opinion" when he, most unfortunately I would have to say, claimed that Saudi drug law is "liberal and modern" in his post titled the same.
Ironically, in a reply to Meekaku that Dr. Waheed himself gives under that post, Dr. Waheed has given the link to The Economist's vision of how to adopt the "lesser bad" (but which does not necessarily mean is good as the newspaper itself points out) solution in its article titled How to stop the drug wars.
I cannot distinguish the Saudi law from similar versions now being adopted by countries with a "modern approach" (such as treating addiction as a disease) which now is becoming quite a popular attitude in other countries as well. In fact, the only difference that has occured in the "ancient" apporach as against the "modern" approach seems to be this -- moving away from prison to the treatment room, which actually does not address the root cause of drug trade, which The Economist has pointed out, along with reasons why the world has failed to deal with the problem over the past 100 years.
The Economist' approach is actually the "liberal and modern" approach as anybody who has read the article can see, not the Saudi one. In fact, I have to applaud President Anni for having a liberal attitude which is the only way the drug problem can be addressed (See Anni's "Ganja Speech").
I am pasting below some excerpts from The Economist article which I think gives an insight where governments have gone wrong in tackling the drug issue, the main problem being pressured to stick to arcaic religious dogma and religious conservatism.
I can understand why then Dr. Waheed has chosen to stay on safe ground and called Saudi drug law "modern and liberal" by conveniently ignoring the root causes of the problem -- which can only be dealt with by overcoming the pressures exerted by religious conservatism in order to even start experimenting with a potentially workable solution.
In a sense, this is exactly like what Ibra has done with regard to the child abuse bill he recently submitted to the Parliament: he was too afraid to call for the integration of forensic evidence to prove child abuse because once again he had succumbed to a false "popular opinion" that he will be treading on dangerous political ground if he was seen as calling for a change in conservative sharia law which says that sex can be proven with the witness accounts of two adult men or four adult women. So Ibra totally ignored calling for change in the "evidence laws" and instead only called for harsher punishments for pedophiles which becomes redundant because unless evidence laws are changed there is no way to convict a pedophile.
It is also quite baffling that police can use forensic evidence to convict people on alcohol and drug abuse cases; if your urine or blood tests positive, that's it. I am sure conservative sharia law made no mention of such forensic evidence, so why not use eyewitnesses in alcohol and drug abuse cases, too? Why exclude forensic evidence just from child abuse cases? This kind of double standards just show the prevailing sick attitudes of the men who are now in control of Maldivian politics and society. If more women come into politics, I am sure such discrimination will come to an end because I am sure they will be more sympathetic to women and children.
The way Dr. Waheed wrote that blog post also made me wonder whether he has an affection for Saudi law in general, not just its drug law.
Saudi Arabia may be the cradle of Islam but what reforms Islam was supposed to bring to hundreds of years of pagan jahiliya culture seems not to have worked for the Saudi society and the country remains one of the most perverse of human "civilisations" in the modern 21st century.
If that is Saudi liberal law.....................
... Legalisation would not only drive away the gangsters; it would transform drugs from a law-and-order problem into a public-health problem, which is how they ought to be treated. Governments would tax and regulate the drug trade, and use the funds raised (and the billions saved on law-enforcement) to educate the public about the risks of drug-taking and to treat addiction. The sale of drugs to minors should remain banned. Different drugs would command different levels of taxation and regulation. This system would be fiddly and imperfect, requiring constant monitoring and hard-to-measure trade-offs. Post-tax prices should be set at a level that would strike a balance between damping down use on the one hand, and discouraging a black market and the desperate acts of theft and prostitution to which addicts now resort to feed their habits.
... That fear is based in large part on the presumption that more people would take drugs under a legal regime. That presumption may be wrong. There is no correlation between the harshness of drug laws and the incidence of drug-taking: citizens living under tough regimes (notably America but also Britain) take more drugs, not fewer. Embarrassed drug warriors blame this on alleged cultural differences, but even in fairly similar countries tough rules make little difference to the number of addicts: harsh Sweden and more liberal Norway have precisely the same addiction rates. Legalisation might reduce both supply (pushers by definition push) and demand (part of that dangerous thrill would go). Nobody knows for certain. But it is hard to argue that sales of any product that is made cheaper, safer and more widely available would fall. Any honest proponent of legalisation would be wise to assume that drug-taking as a whole would rise.
...What about addiction? That is partly covered by this first argument, as the harm involved is primarily visited upon the user. But addiction can also inflict misery on the families and especially the children of any addict, and involves wider social costs. That is why discouraging and treating addiction should be the priority for drug policy. Hence the second argument: legalisation offers the opportunity to deal with addiction properly.
...By providing honest information about the health risks of different drugs, and pricing them accordingly, governments could steer consumers towards the least harmful ones. Prohibition has failed to prevent the proliferation of designer drugs, dreamed up in laboratories. Legalisation might encourage legitimate drug companies to try to improve the stuff that people take. The resources gained from tax and saved on repression would allow governments to guarantee treatment to addicts—a way of making legalisation more politically palatable. The success of developed countries in stopping people smoking tobacco, which is similarly subject to tax and regulation, provides grounds for hope.
...This newspaper first argued for legalisation 20 years ago (see article). Reviewing the evidence again (see article), prohibition seems even more harmful, especially for the poor and weak of the world. Legalisation would not drive gangsters completely out of drugs; as with alcohol and cigarettes, there would be taxes to avoid and rules to subvert. Nor would it automatically cure failed states like Afghanistan. Our solution is a messy one; but a century of manifest failure argues for trying it.
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