War on Drugs has Failed

The war on drugs and a milestone critique
Jun 3, 2011 10:08 EDT

REUTERS

The war on drugs is a waste of time, money and lives. It cannot be won. The world’s drug warriors are out of ideas.

Fresh thinking is of the essence. Governments should consider legalizing drugs to take profits out of the criminal trade.

Filling prisons with drug users does nothing to curb the billion-dollar illicit business, one of the world’s richest. Drug use is a public health problem, not a crime. Arresting small-time dealers does little but create a market opportunity for other small fry. Destroy drug crops in one region and cultivation moves to another. Cut a supply route in one place and another one opens up.

By one group or another, each of the above points has been made about long-running drug policies that bring to mind Albert Einstein’s famous definition of insanity — doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

But never before has such criticism come from an international panel of establishment figures with such high profiles as the Global Commission on Drug Policy which presented a devastating assessment of the drug war in New York on June 2. Its 19 members include former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, three former Latin American presidents (of Brazil, Mexico and Colombia), former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, Richard Branson, the flamboyant billionaire chairman of the Virgin group, and Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou.

Other commission members of impeccable mainstream respectability: George Shultz, U.S. Secretary of State during the Reagan administration; Louise Arbour, a former U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights and now president of the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank; former Swiss president Ruth Dreifuss; Javier Solana, former European Union foreign affairs chief; Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian Nobel literature laureate, and Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes.

Whether their report will bring about change remains to be seen but it looks like a milestone on a long road toward reforms that some see as inevitable. “Today is the day when we start to end the war on drugs,” Branson said at the commission’s New York news conference.

The commission’s report does not mince words: “The global war on drugs has failed. When the United Nations Single Convention on Narcotics Drugs came into being 50 years ago and when President (Richard) Nixon launched the U.S. government’s war on drugs 40 years ago, policymakers believed that harsh law enforcement action against those involved in drug production, distribution and use would lead to an ever-diminishing market in … drugs such as heroin, cocaine and cannabis and the eventual achievement of a ‘drug-free world.’”

“In practice, the global scale of illegal drug markets – largely controlled by organized crime – has grown dramatically over this period.”

A KIND OF ARMS RACE

So has bloodshed and violence as government forces and drug trafficking organizations engage in what the report calls “a kind of arms race” – tougher crackdowns prompt criminal mafias to respond with greater force.

Exhibit A for this arms race is Mexico, where at least 36,000 people have died since late 2006, when President Felipe Calderon declared war on his country’s drug cartels and unleashed the Mexican army to fight them. The death toll has mounted year by year, the army is not winning, and there is no end in sight.

“Poorly designed drug law enforcement practices can actually increase the level of violence, intimidation and corruption associated with drug markets,” notes the report. It echoes many of the points made in a 2009 by a commission that focused on Latin America but did not go as far as recommending that governments debate and seriously consider “models of legal regulation” of all drugs, not only marijuana.

The driving force in the Global Commission, a private initiative launched in Geneva in January, is former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who also led the 2009 Latin American group together with former Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo and former president Cesar Gaviria of Colombia.

Latin America is the world’s largest exporter of cocaine and marijuana, largely to the insatiable U.S. market, and a major supplier of opium and heroin. Around the world, drug producing countries are vulnerable to what Moises Naim, a scholar at the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former Venezuelan trade minister calls “the politicization of criminals and the criminalization of politicians.” It’s a process that has given birth to “narco states,” a label that has been used for countries as far apart as Venezuela and Afghanistan.

There is reason to be skeptical about the prospect of change within years rather than decades and the commission alluded to it – “a built-in vested interest” in continuing with policies that focus on enforcement, interdiction and eradication. It is an entrenched anti-drug establishment that provides employment for thousands of people, from narcotics agents and intelligence analysts to prison wardens.

One of the essential elements required to change that system is spelt out in the first of the commission report’s 11 recommendations: “Political leaders and public figures should have the courage to articulate publicly what many of them acknowledge privately: that the evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that repressive strategies will not solve the drug problem and that the war on drugs has not, and cannot, be won.” (You can contact the author at Debusmann@Reuters)

My opinion is that the "drug" issue is extremely complex, and is made more confusing by lumping all items together and considering them as a group. For example, if marijuana were legalized and taxed, available only to adults like alcohol and tobacco, we could have a much more reasonable conversation about that. The high street value should drop precipitously and tax revenue would increase. That issue, in my experience, is completely different from the problem of selling prescription drugs to people who take them simply for the psychotic effects. As a medic, I have dealt with all sorts of reactions to legal, prescription drugs that were taken recreationally. The reactions go from simple mental status changes through convulsions to no breathing and ultimately death, depending on when the ambulance arrives. As a medic, I applaud the arrest and treatment of people involved in this activity. I recognize the challenge when elementary students are punished for giving classmates a breath mint. I have no sympathy, however, for people who steal narcotics from grandparents who need them to control chronic pain and use them as entertainmnet. If we don't take this illegal sale of powerful medications seriously, we give the impression that this activity is no big deal. It is a big deal. Medications are not toys, and taking increasing doses of narcotics is very different from having another beer. I will be watching the news to see what happens with the latest Pocahontas Co drug arrests. I hope the cases don't just disappear as so often happens. I know good paying jobs are rare in Pocahontas Co, especially for unskilled workers, but trading lives for income is something we should all work against.

Finally, a common sense approach!

Governor says "we can't arrest ourway out of drug problem"!
June 28, 2011
Tomblin talks drugs in Bluefield

By GREG JORDAN Bluefield Daily Telegraph

BLUEFIELD — Law enforcement can’t arrest West Virginia’s drug problems away, but education and treatment could help stem the demand for illegally-obtained pain medication and other drugs, Acting Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin and other state officials were told Monday when they visited Mercer County.

Local mayors, delegates, prosecutors, magistrates and officers filled the Bluefield Municipal Building’s council chambers when the governor came for a roundtable discussion about the illegal drug cases filling courts and treatment centers across the state.

Tomblin said prescription medication abuse appears to be the biggest drug problem in the state, but the drug of choice varies from region to region. What the state is attempting to do with its public meetings is to hear from local official about the problems in each community and about any suggestions for combating the problem. The state is currently organizing a task force to work on the issue, he said.

“Between 2001 and 2009, over 2,500 people died from drug overdoses,” Tomblin said. “That’s the size of most of our small towns.”

In 2009, there were approximately 22,000 hospitalizations, he added. To feed drug habits, addicts are “searching for that extra dollar, stealing from grandmothers who are deathly ill to stealing telephone cable to satisfy that,” Tomblin said.

Local officials offered a variety of suggestions. Mayor Thomas C. Hatcher of War said more state troopers and county deputies are needed to actively pursue drug cases. The state also needs a “data-based registry” of all individuals filling narcotic prescriptions as well as a “data base” for physicians who prescribe narcotics.

“We know this can’t be arrested away or incarcerated away,” said Bluefield Mayor Linda Whalen, adding that a pharmacist friend turns away phony prescriptions knowing they will be taken to other pharmacies.

“We see people standing on street corners who don’t have a job and don’t want a job because it’s more profitable to sell drugs,” Whalen said. “I think we really need to look at legislating drug testing before you receive an entitlement check.”

Mercer County Sheriff Don Meadows said drug education must start at an early age.

“We say we’ve got to teach the kids in high school about drugs. No, we don’t. We’ve got to teach the young kids about drugs in the second, third and fourth grade,” he said.

The sheriff’s department had such a program in the 1990s, but school officials have said there wasn’t enough time for it, Meadows said.

“We’re not teaching these kids young enough,” he said. “Well, parents have to take some responsibility. Some say we don’t teach discipline in the schools. When I was in the sixth grade, I knew what discipline was. Discipline starts in the home.”

Mercer County Prosecuting Attorney Scott Ash urged the governor and other officials to look at treatment programs as a way to curb the demand for drugs. The county has good police and the Mercer County Drug Court, but there is no place to send people when they need professional help.

“If I could ask for one thing from Charleston, it’s to supply what we can’t supply here ourselves,” he said.

“I know we didn’t solve anything today, but at least we got something started today,” Tomblin said when the meeting concluded.