The Drug Trade

A NO-WIN 'WAR ON DRUGS'

The Current Strategy Isn't Working. We Need an Open Discussion About
What's Next.

It has been nearly 40 years since President Nixon began the "war on
drugs" in 1971. Its objective from the outset was to suppress the
manufacture, distribution and consumption of illicit drugs. By all of
those measures -- and by common agreement -- the multibillion-dollar
effort has been a failure. Supply is plentiful, distribution
sophisticated and consumption steady. Today, there is rare consensus
among policymakers, law enforcement leaders and healthcare
professionals: Our drug policy, they concede, is not working.

The goal was laudable -- drug use can and does cause profound social
harm -- but now we know that the methods chosen to address the
problem were flawed. We tried to incarcerate our way out of drug use
and succeeded merely in locking up 800,000 people a year on drug
charges. Worse, violent cartels, drug mafias and street gangs have
created networks of organized crime that stretch from the streets of
Los Angeles to the coca fields and jungles of Colombia and Peru.

It is in this context that the Latin American Commission on Drugs and
Democracy, convened by three former presidents, has called on the
U.S. to end the "war." Among other suggestions, former presidents
Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico, Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil and
Cesar Gaviria of Colombia urge the U.S. to evaluate the public policy
and medicinal merits of decriminalizing marijuana for personal possession.

Such decriminalization (which isn't the same as legalization; it
would be OK to hold small amounts of marijuana for personal use, but
sale and distribution would still be illegal) might solve some
problems but exacerbate others. It could, for example, encourage more
young people to begin using drugs. And though marijuana doesn't cause
anywhere near the number of deaths of tobacco and alcohol, it is a
gateway drug to more dangerous substances, and its decriminalization
could worsen the impact of drugs on our communities.

These are serious questions, but addressing them can only begin once
policymakers accept the need for an open debate, unfettered by the
fear of seeming softheaded. Latin America's leaders have usefully
opened that conversation; it is now up to the Obama administration to
engage in it as part of a hemispheric commitment to fashioning a
better response to drug cultivation, transportation and use.

In 2004, when he was a senator, Obama categorically stated, "The war
on drugs is an utter failure." Let's hope he remembers that -- and acts on it.