Pierre Charasse: Mexico and the World Strategy Against Drugs Pierre Charasse - La Jornada
go to original October 30, 2013

The world debate on the "war against drugs" has been paralyzed for years, mainly because of the closed and inflexible attitudes of the United States and the European Union, but also those of Russia and China, who hold a harsh prohibitionist position for different reasons. Finally, things are starting to get moving. Several countries affected by counterproductive and socially costly policies are asking, pleading, that there be a change in the world view on the problems of drug use in the world. With the Declaration of Antigua Guatemala on the sixth of June, the OAS (Organization of American States), in its 43rd assembly, was able to hold a discussion on the deep questioning of the prohibitionist regime, based on the evidence: the repressive policies have been a definitive failure.

The fight against drugs implemented since the beginning of the twentieth century was created based on very questionable foundations, without scientific support. The origin of all the international agreements since the Conference of Shanghai in 1912 is the will of the United States to impose puritan morals from the nineteenth century on the world, coming partly from the Protestant Anglo-Saxon society that considers abstinence a virtue and pleasure a sin. At the beginning it was very racist and xenophobic against the Chinese and it became an instrument of colonialism and selective interference of the Western powers.

Little by little, the moral justification began to collapse, displaying what was actually behind it: enormous hypocrisy and not very respectable interests. In the 1970s, a new Western prohibitionist ideology substituted it, based on a will, a very paternalistic will, to protect human beings against themselves, with a focus on health and society. But in reality, with the multiplication in agreements on international criminal law, the governments strengthened the prohibitionist regime and transformed the drug problem into a greater question of geopolitics, ignoring its mainly health-related dimension.

Read the rest at Mexico Voices

Translated by Sally Seward

We invite you to add your charity or supporting organizations' news stories and coming events to PVAngels so we can share them with the world. Do it now!