IS AMERICA READY TO ADMIT DEFEAT IN ITS 40-YEAR WAR ON DRUGS?

A Wave of Decriminalisation Is Sweeping Through Latin America

Bruno Avangera, a 40-year-old web designer from Tucuman in Argentina,
pauses to relight a half-smoked joint of cannabis. Then he speaks
approvingly of "progress and the right decision" by the country's
seven supreme court judges, who decided last week that prosecuting
people for the private consumption of small amounts of narcotics was
unconstitutional.

"Last year three of my friends were caught smoking a spliff in a park
and were treated like traffickers," he said. "They went to court,
which took six months. One went to jail alongside murderers. The
others were sent to rehab, where they were treated for an addiction
they didn't have, alongside serious heroin and crack users. It was
pointless and destroyed their lives."

The court's ruling was based on a case involving several men caught
with joints in their pockets. As a result, judges struck down an
existing law stipulating a sentence of up to two years in jail for
those caught with any amount of narcotics. "Each individual adult is
responsible for making decisions freely about their desired lifestyle
without state interference," the ruling said. "Private conduct is
allowed unless it constitutes a real danger or causes damage to
property or the rights of others."

Is the "war on drugs" ending? The Argentinian ruling does not stand
alone. Across Latin America and Mexico, there is a wave of drug law
reform which constitutes a stark rebuff to the United States as it
prepares to mark the 40th anniversary of a conflict officially
declared by President Richard Nixon and fronted by his wife, Pat, in 1969.

That "war" has incarcerated an average of a million US citizens a
year, as every stratum of American society demonstrates its
insatiable need to get high. And it has also engulfed not only
America, but the Americas.

At El Paso at the end of the month, experts from the US and Mexico
will gather to take stock and thrash out alternatives. El Paso stands
cheek by jowl with its twin city, Ciudad Juarez, across the Rio
Grande. There, last Wednesday, the day after the Argentinian court
ruling, cartel gunmen broke into the El Aliviane drug rehabilitation
centre, lined 17 young people against a wall and cut them down with a
fusillade of machine-gun fire. Troops last night captured the
suspected killer, Jose Rodolfo Escajeda, considered one of the most
brutal hitmen in Chihuahua and one of the leaders of the Juarez
cartel. The executions, coming shortly after the killing of 40 people
over three days in Juarez two weeks ago, take the death toll to about
1,400 this year, making it the most dangerous city in the world.

Never have the war on drugs and its flipside, the drug wars, raged so
furiously as on this anniversary. Yet Mexico's is only the latest in
a series of murderous conflicts that have scarred the pan-American
war on drugs, starting with Operation Condor in the 1970s, whereby
the US helped Mexico to obliterate poppy crops, only to give birth to
the new cartels and institutionalised corruption.

Meanwhile, there have been catastrophic drug wars and
narco-insurgency in Colombia, combining with political struggles to
create the biggest internal displacement of people in the western
hemisphere. Drug-related violence has blighted Brazil, Peru, Bolivia,
Venezuela and anywhere the Mexican and Colombian cocaine cartels
sought their product. Latin America has also become a factory for
synthetic drugs, much of it now under Mexican control.

Latin America is seeking a different route to that of outright
interdiction as advocated - and for decades directed - by Washington.
The new thinking is emblematic of a new era in South American
politics and statehood, in which the lexicon demands partnership with
the US, not the subjugation that hallmarked the presidencies of
Nixon, Reagan, the Bushes and Clinton.

Argentina's president, Cristina Fernandez, has openly supported
freeing up the courts of cases involving people caught with small
amounts of drugs. In 2008, she said she complained that in Argentina
"an addict is condemned as if he were a criminal". The government's
cabinet chief, Anibal Fernandez, said the decision was a move away
from "the repressive politics invented by the Nixon administration"
and will offer the opportunity for the state to focus on going after
major traffickers.

But a line is drawn between marijuana and hard drugs, the decision
being seen as a step towards freeing resources for the battle against
"paco" cocaine paste, a cheap but toxic and addictive drug that has
swept through Argentina's barrios. Between 2001 and 2005, the use of
paco increased by more than 200%.

Brazilian drugs campaigners see decriminalisation as a way of
wresting power from heavily armed gangs. Under Brazilian law,
possession of any drug is a crime, and any move to relax drug laws is
likely to face fierce opposition from the Brazilian right and the
Catholic church.

But "for South American countries, the 'harm' from drugs comes less
from drug use than the war against producers and traffickers", said
Benjamin Lessing, a University of California researcher. "The
bloodshed in Mexico is grabbing headlines, but thousands of people
die every year in Rio de Janeiro in clashes between police and traffickers."

Eduardo Machado, an activist from the PE Body Count group, which
documents homicide levels in Recife, one of Brazil's most violent
cities, said the country's war on drugs had sidelined debate over
"the huge public health problem" they caused. "As long as we look at
the problem of drugs in terms of repression, we will carry on
failing," he said. "As long as the debate about drugs revolves around
being more or less repressive, we will continue to lose thousands of
young lives each year."

Even before conventional wisdom began to turn against the war on
drugs, some leftwing leaders in Latin America had their own reasons
to shun collaboration with the US. Not only was the policy failing,
they said, but it was a pretext for Washington meddling.

Venezuela's president, Hugo Chavez, cut ties with the US Drug
Enforcement Administration in 2005, accusing its agents of espionage.
In Bolivia, President Evo Morales, a Chavez ally, expelled American
counter-narcotic agents, also claiming they were spies. He campaigned
to rehabilitate the maligned coca leaf as a sacred Inca symbol with
medicinal and ceremonial properties. On one occasion, he brandished a
leaf during a speech to the UN general assembly and offered coca tea
to visiting dignitaries. When addressing Aymara Indians, the
president is known to shout: "Long live the coca leaf, death to the Yankees!"

Bolivia's impoverished highlanders revere Morales as a fellow
cocalero - coca grower - and are grateful the era of coca crackdowns
and shoot-outs with US-backed drug officials is over. Morales,
however, has promised zero tolerance for cocaine, which he considers
a malign perversion of the coca leaf.

Ecuador's president, Rafael Correa, another leftwinger, has refused
to renew the US military's lease on its base at Manta which was used
for counter-narcotics operations in the Pacific. Last year the
president pardoned 1,500 "mules" who had been sentenced to jail,
saying they were impoverished people who had been exploited.
Ecuadorean legislators have signalled they will follow Argentina in
decriminalising cannabis.

Despite almost a decade of US-backed counter-insurgency operations,
Colombia's cocaine output has proved remarkably resilient, a tribute
to the ruthlessness and inventiveness of coca growers, guerrillas,
paramilitaries and smugglers.

Peru, the second-largest cocaine exporter after Colombia, is the odd
country out in South America's shift against the drug war. It has
made no move towards decriminalisation and is braced for
confrontation. Shining Path guerrillas, a near-extinct movement, have
roared back in the past 16 months, killing soldiers and police and
seizing control of coca-producing valleys.

Mexico is in a curious position: a battlefield in a drugs war that
has claimed some 14,000 lives since December 2006, but also a
laboratory for an experiment that goes beyond even Argentina's -
opting no longer to prosecute those carrying small quantities of
marijuana, cocaine, heroin or synthetic drugs.

Decriminalisation is openly aimed at redirecting stretched resources
against the warmongers and opening prison space to accommodate them
rather than petty addicts. Few serving Mexican politicians have tried
to pretend that, without the war, the legislation would not have been
considered.

In Tijuana, addicts cannot believe their luck - those arriving at the
Narcoticos Anonimos session are amazed that possession of up to four
lines of cocaine or 50mg of heroin will be legal. Juan Morales
Magana, 17, a windscreen-washer and registered methamphetamine and
heroin addict, was working out how many hits the legal limit of 40mg
of meth would get him, though his counsellor, an evangelical pastor,
was ambivalent: "I wouldn't want anyone to think that, just because
it is legal, one should live like this for fun. Drugs are the scourge
of our society. All this can do would limit killing between
small-time cholos [gangsters] for street-corner turf, allowing the
army to go after kingpins and middle men. The danger is that kingpins
will accelerate the domestic market if possession is legal and
smuggling into the US more difficult."

In barrios such as this, drugs are sold from tienditas controlled by
gangs that operate an outsourced tender system for the battling
cartels. "It's unsure how the legislation will affect actions against
the tienditas," said police officer Elisio Montes, whose two best
friends, his former boss and assistant, were murdered by executioners
for the cartels.

"Personally, I sometimes wish drugs would be made legal so that the
gringos can get high and we can live in peace. Then I say to myself:
no - these drugs are addictive after one single hit. They're
terrifying - they destroy lives, they destroy our young people. If
they are legal, they will buy more."

A further reason for scepticism is the prospect of mass drugs tourism
from the US. This is not what Mexican businessmen in the border town
of Nogales, Sonora, had in mind last Tuesday when they discussed how
to restore the image of cities that until recently enjoyed thriving
trade from Americans looking for cheap pharmaceuticals, dental
treatment, souvenirs, alcohol and sex.

The prospect of border towns becoming the equivalent of Amsterdam,
only with cocaine and heroin freely on sale, was not discussed. "It's
interesting,' said hotelier Jesus Antonio Pujol Irastorza. "I have
seen a lot written about this potential problem in the US media, but
almost nothing in the Mexican press."

"For a country that has experienced thousands of deaths from warring
drug cartels," said San Diego police chief William Lansdowne, "it
defies logic why they will pass a law that will clearly increase drug use."

The counter-voices will continue to make themselves heard. But even
in the US, the discourse on drugs is changing. The prosecutor general
in Baja California, Rommel Moreno, said months ago that he found it
"very hard" to talk to his American counterparts "about fighting
drugs with any means other than interdiction", but senses "an
important shift". Officials in the border states talk about
legalising marijuana for personal use, while Professor David Shirk,
director of the Trans-Border Institute in San Diego, said: "I think
it is inevitable that possession of marijuana will be legal in the US
within a decade."

Powerful voices against prohibition will create the underlying theme
at the major conference in El Paso this month and there is even a
movement of police officers and law enforcement agents urging
decriminalisation, unthinkable until recently. "Today, drugs are
illegal, they are out of control, and they are everywhere", said
Kristin Daley, projects director for Law Enforcement Against
Prohibition. "If they were managed in the way that alcohol is, they
would be under control. Instead of criminals getting richer, violence
escalating and drug-related deaths on the rise, we would live under a
system of established pricing, peaceful purchase and a regulated
labelling system."

But they remain wary in Tijuana. Before the drug war, this border
city was a capital of vice tourism, which has now disappeared.
Tijuana lies opposite San Diego, from where most of those seeking
prostitutes and other distractions came, and where a letter recently
appeared in the local Union Tribune newspaper from Omar Firestone,
principal cellist in the Orquesta de Baja California. He warned that
the last thing the city needs is "offering sanctuary to American
druggies" who will "draw the worst of our society to the streets of
Tijuana and increase the flight of those seeking a better life. I
guess the cartels needed a government bailout."