FORMER BRAZILIAN PRESIDENT SAYS WAR ON DRUGS HAS FAILED

The war on drugs has failed and should make way for a global shift
toward decriminalizing cannabis use and promoting harm reduction,
former Brazilian president Fernando Henrique Cardoso wrote in the
Observer yesterday.

Cardoso said 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 on Saturday 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 wrote. "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."

PRECEDENTS

Cardoso, a sociologist, said Argentina, Mexico, Colombia, Bolivia and
Ecuador had all now taken steps toward drug law liberalization 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 said.

Danny Kushlick of Transform, which campaigns for drug liberalization,
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," he said.

"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," Kushlick said.

COMMISSION

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.

US President -Barack Obama's election to the White House last year is
viewed as an opportunity for fresh thinking, with Cardoso among
guests invited to a discussion on drugs policy with him before Obama
became president.

THE OBSERVER, LONDON