THE NEVER-ENDING, TERRIBLE HUMAN TOLL OF THE 'WAR ON DRUGS'

In Tijuana, Mexico, drug gangsters have been breaking into police
radio frequencies and threatening specific police officers with
death. These are no idle threats; shortly after they're made, the
marked police officers are found dead.

This reveals just how powerful drug gangs are in Mexico, and has led
to deeply demoralized and increasingly corrupt police forces. More
than 500 officers have been killed in the past year, and their
worn-out equipment and body armour is no match for the
state-of-the-art gear used by drug lords.

Since the police can no longer handle the situation, Mexican
President Felipe Calderon called in the military soon after he took
office in 2006. The result of this move was predictable: Some 6,000
people are murdered annually in Mexico's drug wars, and more than 20
soldiers have been killed since last October.

In northern Mexican towns such as Tijuana, Ciudad Juarez and
Monterrey, where the drug war rages most intensely, townspeople have
taken to the streets, accusing the military of all manner of human
rights abuses, including rape and murder.

It is no overstatement to say that Mexico, a relatively mature
democracy, is teetering on the brink.

And if that can happen to Mexico, one can only imagine what things
are like in a state that has already failed. But one doesn't have to
imagine -- one need only look at the small West African country of
Guinea-Bissau.

With increasing enforcement of drug trafficking in the Caribbean,
Colombian drug lords merely changed the routes by which they deliver
cocaine to Europe. And the poor countries of West Africa provided the
perfect transshipment zone.

Guinea-Bissau, whose president was recently assassinated, is now the
country of choice for Colombian traffickers. The world's
fifth-poorest country, Guinea-Bissau is often referred to as the
world's first narco-state, as the people and the government are easy
prey for the powerful and wealthy drug lords.

Guinea-Bissau has little by the way of police and military -- at
least police and military members who have not been paid off -- and
has no functioning jail. But what it does have, despite its intense
poverty, is drug dealers who live in gated mansions, drive exotic
European sports cars and live it up in the country's nightclubs.

Drug trafficking is now the primary, and practically the only,
business in Guinea-Bissau. With the arrival of the Latin Americans,
Guinea-Bissauans, who are mostly subsistence farmers and fishers,
realized that there was a lot of money to be made, and many now
eagerly aid the traffickers. According to the Guardian, one single
flight from Guinea-Bissau to Amsterdam was carrying 32 cocaine "mules."

So successful has this trade been that Asian drug traffickers are now
shipping heroin through West Africa on its way to North America. The
primary source of the heroin is, of course, Afghanistan, which is
also on the verge of becoming a narco-state.

Clearly, the drug war is transforming failed states into
narco-states, and is threatening the very existence of some more
stable democracies.

But that's not all it has done, as it has also severely compromised
human rights around the globe, and severely impeded efforts to deal
with drug addiction.

The drug war has led to the implementation of draconian measures in
many countries, most notably Thailand, where a crackdown in 2003 led
to the extrajudicial killings of some 2,800 people.

According to Human Rights Watch, other countries, including Russia,
Ukraine and Kazakhstan, have exposed suspected drug offenders to
severe beatings, electroshock and partial suffocation.

Drug addicts have also suffered tremendously from these efforts to
rid the world of drugs, as many are deprived of treatment and locked
in prisons where they are suspectible to infection with HIV and other
blood-borne diseases.

The war has even adversely affected the availability of pain
medications, which means many people who have nothing to do with the
drug trade must bear the full brunt of the war and of excruciatingly
painful diseases.

And this is what Antonio Maria Costa, head of the United Nations'
Office of Drugs and Crime, has labelled a "success."

Costa was speaking at a UN convention in Vienna, at which
representatives of 53 countries were this week planning the next 10
years in the international fight against illegal drugs.

Costa admitted that rise of organized crime was a "dramatic
unintended consequence" of the war against the $320-billion drug
trade, but he blamed that on a failure of some countries to take
seriously the UN conventions against drugs.

So, in Costa's words, we see the utter failure to admit failure, to
admit that the war on drugs has devastated nations and irreparably
harmed countless people, including people who have nothing to do with the war.

Unfortunately, Costa's views are echoed by countries like the United
States, Russia and China, the countries that typically have the most
power in developing international drug policy.

In contrast, European and Latin American countries -- which have
suffered enormously from the war -- argued that our efforts to combat
illegal drugs ought to take place within a public health framework,
rather than one governed by law enforcement.

The Europeans released a report on the eve of the meeting noting
that, while the war has been a boon to organized crime there is "no
evidence that the global drug problem was reduced."

Now this is hardly a success if measured by the goal of the previous
convention, held in 1998. At that meeting delegates settled on the
impossibly optimistic slogan "A drug free world -- we can do it."

But evidently we can't do it, at least not through a law enforcement
framework. One hundred years after drug prohibition began, drugs
remain potent and plentiful, and 10 years after countries pledged to
create a drug-free world, all we have to show for it is more carnage,
including in Metro Vancouver.

There is a better way, and it appears the international community has
finally recognized it. Late Thursday, the convention released a
declaration stressing "health as the basis for international drugs
policy." This is a hopeful step, for we must recognize the harms
caused by drugs and the harms caused by the war on drugs. And we must
do everything in our power to stop both.