Education and prevention as principal components in attitudes toward drugs policies

Drugs policies around the world have been mainly prohibitionists. It have had a high social, political and economic price and poor results in decreasing production, trafficking and drugs consumption. In this pilot research, we studied the level of acceptability of various drugs policies, among 100 ordinary people, men and women, sampled randomly. To collect data we used 12 scenarios with two fundamental concepts: State's commitment with prevention and education and drugs policies. The results were extracted by variance analysis and a principal component analysis. We found that people had a major level of acceptability with regulatory policies than of free market policies. Moreover people had a major level of acceptability when the State was commitment with education and prevention.