DRUGS: THE PROBLEM IS MORE THAN JUST THE SUBSTANCES, IT'S THE
PROHIBITION ITSELF

Maria Lucia Karam, a Retired Brazilian Judge, Argues That Drugs
Should Be Legalised - but Regulated

It made big news last week when the Mexican president, Felipe
Calderon, called for a reasoned debate about the failure of drug
prohibition. In doing so, he joined his already outspoken
predecessors Vicente Fox and Ernesto Zedillo, as well as other former
Latin American presidents like Cesar Gaviria of Colombia and Fernando
Henrique Cardoso of Brazil. Latin American policymakers have learned
that drug prohibition, more than the drugs themselves, is a problem.
Prohibition of desire simply cannot work.

Since taking office in late 2006, Calderon has sent more than 45,000
soldiers into battle with the cartels, but, almost four years later,
the Mexican drug business continues to thrive. This policy failure is
not unique to Mexico. After 40 years of the international "war on
drugs", the only consistent outcome has been that drugs keep getting
cheaper, more potent and far easier for people - especially our
children - to access everywhere.

This failure, however, is not even the main concern. More relevant
are the immense risks, harm and pains caused by prohibition.
Especially the violence.

A recent multi-decade review by the International Centre for Science
in Drug Policy found that, when police crack down on drug users and
dealers, the result is almost always an increase in violence.

Mexicans can confirm it. Calderon's offensive against the cartels has
unleashed a wave of violence that has killed more than 28,000 people,
including innocent civilians caught in shootouts. The folks in the
Mexican bar who saw the decapitated heads roll over their dance floor
as prohibition-funded gangs sent their message of dominance can
surely confirm it.

Brazilians can also confirm it. In the city of Rio de Janeiro, in
2008 alone, there were 2,757 murders. One in five was a summary
execution during police operations against drug dealers in the
ghettos called favelas.

In the Brazilian drug war, these are the "enemies". They are mostly
very young. They proudly hold their machine-guns that replace the
toys they never had.

They battle for marginalised territories and for their occasional
profits. Like most poor Brazilian boys, they dream of becoming famous
soccer players, but they do not have the opportunity. They have no
hope. They do not live long. They kill and die. Soon, other children
take their places.

The tragic deaths of these lost children are inevitable outcomes of a
policy that is defined as a "war", in which the "criminal" now
becomes the "enemy", who must kill or be killed. They arm themselves
against the police and their competitors. The police arm themselves
against them. It is a self-fulfilling, bloody prophecy. It is the
predictable hallmark of drug prohibition.

Violence is not necessarily related to drugs. As the alcohol or
tobacco businesses demonstrate, the production and supply of drugs
are not inherently violent activities. Weapons and violence only
accompany those activities when undertaken in an illegal market. The
prohibition yields the violence, as disputes must be settled out of
court and on the streets. Paradoxically, when we prohibit these
widely used substances, we are actually relinquishing meaningful
control over them.

Prohibition consigns the drug market to criminalised actors not
subject to oversight of any kind. Legalisation would mean regulation
and regulation is the best way to control the dangers of drug use,
while cutting the cartels off at the knees.

Every country that has provided a glimpse of what a regulated future
might look like has experienced lowered rates of death, disease,
crime and addiction. The Swiss policy of treating heroin addiction as
a health issue rather than a moral or criminal one has been a
resounding success with, among other indicators, a 60% reduction in
criminal activity among participating addicts. When Portugal
legalised the possession of all drugs, it experienced a decade of
sharp declines in overall drug use, especially among the young. In
Amsterdam, where over-the-counter marijuana sales have been tolerated
for decades, rates of use among teenagers are much lower than they
are in the US, where harsh penalties abound.

Latin America is advancing the debate, but even in the US there are
efforts to undo the damage of prohibition, the most prominent being
California's effort to legalise marijuana.

Hopefully, the thousands of Mexicans, Brazilians and people from
other parts of the world who have been killed in the insane "war on
drugs" will not have died in vain. Their deaths are already showing
that it is time to put an end to all the pain and harms caused by
drug prohibition; it is time to legalise and regulate the production,
the supply and the consumption of all drugs.