THE WAR ON DRUGS HASN'T WORKED

What does it tell us that the U.S. has launched a new, $1.3-billion
offensive against drugs in Colombia?

Well -- it seems to suggest the great War on Drugs isn't going too well.
Thank goodness, given American stubbornness and loyalty to unsuccessful
tactics, that Colombia is not a war like Vietnam. Yet, anyway.

Remember the names Pablo Escobar and Medellin drug cartel? And how in 1993,
after four years of terror and counter terror, Medellin was smashed and
Escobar finally caught and killed? What a victory it was over the supply
side of the drug market.

But, then, oops! There was the Cali cartel. Remember it? Members were
suspected of helping the government liquidate their Medellin rivals before
stepping in to the vacuum caused by voracious overseas demand for drugs.

A new offensive was launched; by 1996 victory had again been declared.
Except now, four years later, the enemy is so strong again that Colombia is
preparing to spend another $7.5 billion over five years.

It is a testament to the long failure of the drug wars that most readers
are now quite familiar with the basic arguments that can flow from this
history.

The basic rationale of the War on Drugs is a Prohibition one: to solve the
awful social and health consequences of drug use by making cocaine and
heroin too expensive and difficult to obtain. Colombia exports fully
three-quarters of the world's cocaine, in large measure because the
collapse of effective government during a 35-year civil war makes it a good
place for drug types to operate and corrupt what remains of legitimate
authority.

The current initiative makes perfect sense on the surface: to assist the
Colombian military in its battle against the drug growers and smugglers, to
improve the quality of government (the current low level of which
strengthens the hand of Marxist rebels), to pressure the army to distance
itself from the country's vicious paramilitaries, to improve the justice
system, and to foster an economy more resistant to the poppy's siren call.

On the other hand, of course, there is the suspicion that an international
market that currently demands $400 billion worth of drugs annually would
probably induce criminals to find other sources of supply. And the
suspicion that rising prices caused by success in the drug war would make
the rewards of drug crime even greater.

There's the statistic that a quarter of U.S. jail occupants are drug
convicts, and that even in Canada, 12 per cent of federal inmates are
products of the drug prohibition.

And there is the overall argument that the cost in crime, the cost in
damage to individual lives, to communities and to entire countries, and the
cost in diversion of untold billions of consumer and tax dollars from more
constructive uses, might possibly be higher than the cost of some form of
carefully regulated legalization of drugs.

A five-year-old study by the U.S. Rand Institute, for example, concluded
that a dollar spent on treatment of addiction is 10 times more
cost-efficient than fighting smuggling, and 23 times greater than crop
eradication.

One imagines, to return to Colombia, that if demand for illegal cocaine
dried up tomorrow, the loss of revenue for weapons purchases and the
possibility of using the Americans' $1.3 billion for other things would do
more to boost Colombia's outlook than another anti-drug offensive.

True, it's impossible to know for sure what the cost might be of learning
to live legally with drugs the way we have done with alcohol and tobacco.
It might be unpleasant to lose the moral satisfaction of knowing we are
"fighting".

The thing is, the primary goal of drug policy is not to give us moral
satisfaction, but rather to build a world in which drugs do less harm to
their victims -- here in Edmonton, in U.S. inner cities, and in Colombia.

Prohibition hasn't worked. The war on drugs hasn't worked. The world must
at least try to find a better way.