In Spite of a Clearly Failed Policy, Mexico's 'War on Drugs' Still Continues Denise Dresser - Reforma
go to original November 22, 2013

For decades we have been told that the “war on drugs” serves a purpose. It serves to reduce production of drugs, they’ve said. It serves to cut the supply, they’ve argued. It serves to limit consumption, they’ve suggested. But it’s really served another purpose. It’s served to exacerbate consumption and to generate a growing illegal traffic that now constitutes one of the largest unregulated markets in the world. It has served to criminalize and punish and imprison and militarize. The war on drugs has become a war on people.

More than meeting the proposed goals, the prohibitionist approach has generated unforeseen collateral consequences. The creation of a criminal black market on the rise. The displacement of policies from the health sector to the police sector. The “balloon effect,” as when control in one zone is tightened, consumption is simply transferred to another. The transfer to consuming other substances when the law intervenes to attack one in particular. The stigmatization of people who use drugs instead of supporting others.

But in spite of what clearly constitutes a failed policy, it still continues. In spite of the fact that it has generated more problems than it has resolved, it still continues. Through populist interests. Through geopolitical pressures. Through the political use of “strong-arm” rhetoric. Through the perpetuation of an automatically-justifying and circular logic that functions to underpin this approach, in which the damages from the prohibitionist policy are combined with the damages derived from consumption. And thus a war is intensified that causes many of the problems that supposedly it was designed to face.

Read the rest at Mexico Voices

Translated by Samantha Lisk

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