FORMER PRESIDENT OF BRAZIL SAYS HARDLINE WAR ON DRUGS 'HAS FAILED'

Fernando Henrique Cardoso Urges Global Decriminalisation of Cannabis
Use

The war on drugs has failed and should make way for a global shift
towards decriminalising cannabis use and promoting harm reduction,
says the former president of Brazil, writing today in the Observer.
Fernando Henrique Cardoso argues that the hardline approach has
brought "disastrous" consequences for Latin America, which has been
the frontline in the war on drug cultivation for decades, while
failing to change the continent's position as the largest exporter of
cocaine and marijuana.

His intervention, which will reignite growing debate in Europe about
how to tackle drugs, was welcomed yesterday by campaigners for drug
law reform who increasingly see the impact on developing countries
where drugs are produced as critical to the argument.

"After decades of overflights, interdictions, spraying and raids on
jungle drug factories, Latin America remains the world's largest
exporter of cocaine and marijuana," Cardoso writes. "It is producing
more and more opium and heroin. It is developing the capacity to mass
produce synthetic drugs. Continuing the drugs war with more of the
same is ludicrous."

Cardoso, a sociologist, said Argentina, Mexico, Colombia, Bolivia and
Ecuador had all now taken steps towards drug law liberalisation and
that change was "imminent" in Brazil. The way forward worldwide would
involve a "strategy of reaching out, patiently and persistently, to
the users and not the continued waging of a misguided and
counterproductive war that makes the users, rather than the drug
lords, the primary victims," he added.

Danny Kushlick of Transform, which campaigns for drug liberalisation,
said Cardoso's intervention illustrated the human cost of efforts to
combat the drugs trade on often poor and underdeveloped producer
countries: "Until this problem is taken up as a development issue it's
not going to move anywhere. The default position is that this is a
problem of addiction, but people have completely missed the point of
the war on drugs, that the vastly detrimental effects are largely in
production and transit. If you look at a nation state like Guinea
Bissau, which was a fragile state before and now is a fragile
narco-state, that is a prime example of the vulnerability of
developing countries to the fact that these drugs are incredibly expensive."

Cardoso's article follows the conclusions published earlier this year
of a commission on drugs composed of three former Latin American
leaders, who had been lobbying Washington for a change in its conduct
of the war on drugs. Barack Obama's election to the White House is
viewed as an opportunity for fresh thinking, with Cardoso among guests
invited to a discussion on drugs policy with him before he became president.