Reply to Thread

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

Message: <blockquote data-quote="_CY_" data-source="post: 2504548" data-attributes="member: 7629">Drugs policyA turning tideREPORTS can be notable both for what they say and for the people they are endorsed by. A report on drugs policy that will be launched later today in London is a case in point. Ending the Drug Wars is published by the London School of Economics, and contains a series of articles by members of the LSEs expert group on the economics of drugs policy. The launch is being attended by Mauricio López Bonillo, the interior minister of Guatemala, one of a band of countries in Latin America which are openly challenging the old orthodoxy on the war on drugs.The report presents compelling evidence for the costs of an all-out policy of prohibitionism. In countries that are primarily consumers of drugs, notably the United States, hardline policies mean mass incarcerationdrug offences are reckoned to account for 40% of the 9m individuals on the planet who are in jail. That has implications for public health, among other things. Between 70-85% of inmates of state correctional facilities in America need some level of substance-abuse treatment, for example; but because such treatment is often lacking, released prisoners who have developed a lower tolerance for opiates often suffer fatal overdoses when they first get out of jail.In countries that are primarily suppliers, the presence of, and response to, drug traffickers have led to enormous surges in violence. Mexicos homicide rate increased threefold in a period of just four years, following the launch of an all-out attack on drugs cartels by the then president, Felipe Calderon. Similar spirals of violence have been seen in the wake of interdiction efforts in Colombia. John Collins, the editor of the report, argues that drugs policy ought to have as its primary goal reducing harm: Measuring numbers of deaths is a much better gauge of success than number of kilos of cocaine seized.There is a third group of countries, says Mr López Bonilla, of which Guatemala is one. We want to go beyond a simplistic vision of just a question of supply and demand. We want to bring in the perspective of transit countries, who suffer the consequences of a problem which is not of their own making. The countries of Central America are in the path of narcotraffickers bringing their goods northwards from South America; the crackdown in Mexico appears to have encouraged more illegal activity to shift southwards, too. As well as the violence it causes directly, secondary consequences of increased narcotrafficking include heightened corruption and an increase in the numbers of weapons in general circulation.Mr López Bonilla will take the report back to the Guatemalan president, Otto Pérez Molina, who will use it support his call for a new international debate on drugs. That has been interpreted in some quarters as a call for drug legalisation; Mr López Bonilla prefers to talk of depenalisation as a first step. This is not about giving up the fight against drugs but about being more effective, he says. A special commission is looking at policy options within Guatemala; there is talk of allowing controlled production of opiates for medicinal purposes.But the lot of transit countries will only really improve if there is a change of tune right along the drugs supply chain, and here the mood music is genuinely shifting. Mr Pérez Molina is not the only active politician in Latin America to have poked his head above the parapet on this topic; Juan Manuel Santos, Colombias president, said again in April that the war on drugs had failed, and on May 6th Uruguays government signed into law the rules governing its new, legalised marketplace for marijuana. The stance of the United States has softened too, not least because of the legalisation of marijuana for recreational purposes in Colorado and Washington. In 2012 the United States rejected the idea of a public debate on drugs, says Mr López Bonilla. Now it is more understanding. The LSE report is worth a read in its own right. But it is the changing political context that makes it really interesting.<a href="http://www.economist.com/blogs/americasview/2014/05/drugs-policy" target="_blank">http://www.economist.com/blogs/americasview/2014/05/drugs-policy</a></blockquote>

Verification