The United Nation's War on Drugs Is a Failure - It's Time for a Different Approach Jamie Doward - The Guardian
go to original April 3, 2016

The year 2008 was momentous. Lehman Brothers collapsed, Radovan Karadžic was arrested, Russian troops massed on the Georgian border, and Barack Obama beat John McCain to the White House.

But 2008 was also significant for something that didn’t happen. It was the year that the world didn’t eliminate the illicit drugs problem. This quixotic goal had been set a decade earlier at a United Nations general assembly special session when, under the vainglorious slogan “We can do it”, the supranational body pledged that, by 2008, the world would be “drug free”.

Now, as the UN prepares to host another special session on drugs in New York this month, the failure of the 1998 assembly to realize the goal is recorded in the vast amounts of money, resources, time and blood that have been expended in pursuing the apparently impossible.

As Ending the War on Drugs, a new book of essays from some of the leading critics of drugs laws, spells out in chilling detail, pursuing such an ambition has cost taxpayers around the world $100bn a year, roughly the same amount spent on foreign aid.

The main beneficiaries of the laws – framed around the 1961 UN single convention on narcotic drugs, which prohibits the production and supply of a number of named substances – are criminal organizations, which have gained control of a global market with a turnover of more than $320bn a year.

Meanwhile, millions of people have been criminalized for non-violent drug offenses, leading to more than 1.4 million arrests in the US in 2014 alone. In countries such as Iran and Saudi Arabia, executions for drug trafficking have soared.

The death toll has reached nightmare proportions. In Mexico, 30 people a day are dying in the battle between drug cartels and government forces. And these are just the obvious deaths. Last month a commission set up by the Lancet medical journal and Johns Hopkins University declared that the drugs laws had not only failed to curb drug use and fueled violent crime, they had also helped to spread HIV and hepatitis C by encouraging unsafe injecting.

By any yardstick, the 1961 convention has been a spectacular failure, one that has had devastating consequences for those caught in the crosshairs of the war on drugs – a war, critics say, that is of the UN’s making.

Read the rest at The Guardian

Related: Colombia Joins Countries from Mexico to Chile for Legalization on Marijuana (Albany Daily Star)

Related: Former Latin American Leaders Urge World to End War on Drugs 'Disaster' (The Guardian)

Related: Mexico Groups Well Placed for Global Meth Market (Insight Crime)

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