WILL COMMON SENSE EVER GOVERN OUR DRUG POLICIES?

NEW YORK - This week's meeting in Washington of drug czars from throughout
the Americas is another charade. Year after year, decade after decade,
governments announce the latest drug control strategies, sign the latest
bilateral and multilateral agreements and proclaim that the light at the
end of the tunnel is brighter than ever.

Yes, say the Latin Americans, we will step up our efforts to reduce the
production and export of illicit drugs to consumers in other parts of the
world. Yes, say the North Americans, we will step up our efforts to reduce
the demand for illicit drugs in our countries.

Isn't anyone tired of the same old lines, the same old promises? How many
more billions of dollars will be poured down this sinkhole? How much more
corruption can be tolerated? How many more people must die? Who wants to
see U.S. soldiers wandering around Latin America in search of anyone who
might have anything to do with coca or opium or marijuana?

The need is for new strategies based on honest and realistic assumptions.
Let's start by dropping the "zero tolerance" rhetoric and policies and the
illusory goal of drug-free societies. Accept that drug use is here to stay
and that society has no choice but to learn to live with drugs so that they
cause the least possible harm.

Recognize that many, perhaps most, "drug problems" in the Americas are the
results not of drug use per se -but of prohibitionist policies: the
violence, the corruption, the vast underground markets, the diversion of
ever increasing resources to criminal justice and military agencies, the
environmental harm of crop eradication programs and unregulated illicit
crop production, the enrichment and empowerment of organized and
unorganized criminals, and so much more.

Drug abuse presents, serious challenges in all our societies, but our
prohibitionist approaches have proved remarkably ineffective, costly and
counterproductive.

Pointing to the harms that flow from prohibitionist policies is not the
same as advocating drug legalization. The more sensible and realistic
approach today would be one based on the principles of harm reduction. It
is a policy that seeks to reduce the negative consequences of drug use and
drug prohibition, acknowledging that both are likely to persist for the
foreseeable future.

Harm reduction means first that adults who consume drugs without putting
others in harm's way are not the government's business, whether their drug
is marijuana, coca, heroin, ayahuasca, tobacco or alcohol.

Second, those who become Addicted to drugs merit compassion and treatment,
not demonization and incarceration. It makes no difference whether the drug
is alcohol or cocaine; the principle still stands.

Third, criminal justice resources are best directed not at nonviolent drug
users and sellers but at violent and other predatory criminals.

Harm reduction means designing policies that are likely to do more good
than harm, and trying to anticipate the consequences of new policy
initiatives. With a little foresight, the drug warriors of the 1980s might
have realized that their dramatic escalation in interdiction efforts would
reduce marijuana exports from Latin America and the Caribbean while greatly
increasing the economic attractions of trafficking in cocaine, a much more
compact and hence easily smuggled and more lucrative product.

With some foresight today, drug policymakers might finally grasp that their
relentless efforts to eradicate coca crops have little. impact on the
availability, price or use of cocaine anywhere in the world, but do
perpetuate a destructive cycle of environmental harm. Better perhaps to
Acknowledge the special role of coca in some Latin American countries, and
develop policies and markets based upon coca's great potential as a
relatively benign substance.

"Fighting drugs" does not justify transforming civil societies into civil
war zones, or empowering military forces and paramilitary squads, or
putting human rights on the back burner and the rule of law in a closet.
Crusades have no place in democratic societies, yet that is what the drug
war has become.