MAJOR INTERNATIONAL LEADERS PLEAD FOR THE US AND THE WORLD TO GET
SMART AND STOP THE WAR ON DRUGS

The Waldorf Astoria may be worlds away from the blood-spotted streets
of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, where the "drug war" has taken over 35,000
lives; the fiefdom-like favelas of Rio, Brazil, where even the police
don't go; or Pakistan, one of the lowest-ranking on human development
in the world, and neighbor to its largest opium producer. But members
of the Global Commission on Drug Policy came to the famed New York
hotel Friday to bring together leading thinkers and call for an end
to the global "war on drugs," whose failed policies have claimed
thousands of victims around the world over the last five decades.

The Commission on Drug Policy released a report Thursday outlining
these failures and recommending reforms, among them a shift from
criminalization to public health and from incarceration to
consideration of a full range of alternatives, from decriminalization
to legalization and regulation.

Despite the evidence, the political will and public support to
transform drug policy remains anemic, as voiced by Ricken Patel,
executive director at Avaaz, a global advocacy organization. He
described his initial reaction to the drug policy commission at the
New York press conference: "What have these people been smoking?"

But the commission's mandate is perhaps unprecedentedly deep and
broad; the commissioners hail from 15 countries around the world,
from North and Latin America, to Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.
They are four former presidents, United Nations dignitaries, authors
and intellectuals, health and security officials, NGO directors and
entrepreneurs.

Fernando Henrique Cardoso, former president of Brazil, chairs the
commission that also boasts a Nobel laureate; Peruvian author Mario
Vargas Llosa won the Nobel prize for literature this year. Kofi Annan
is a personally impassioned member, due to regrets that he did not do
more on drug policy in his former capacity as Secretary General of
the UN, according to fellow member Richard Branson, entrepreneur,
public advocate and the man who also said that within one year he'll
be sending civilians into space. Asma Jahangir, former UN Special
Rapporteur on Arbitrary, Extrajudicial and Summary Executions, is
from Pakistan, and George Papandreou, one of the commission's only
acting heads of state, is prime minister of the beleaguered country of Greece.

Public support for an end to the war on drugs shows signs of shifting
as well. Patel presented Cardoso with a golf-check-like board, citing
over 550,000 signatures of support from every country in the world
for their campaign to overhaul global drug policy -- with an
additional 1,500 added during the meeting itself, according to Patel.
The commission delivered its report and the petition to UN Secretary
General Ban Ki-moon today.

But the diversity of the panel at the Waldorf and the strong
representation of two regions that have long led a continuing shift
away from the "prohibitionist" policies of the world-wide war on
drugs -- Latin America and Western Europe -- made the absence of the
primary architect of these policies all the more glaring.

Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, who
hosted the event, noted several of the commission's absent members,
describing honorary chair George Schultz as former secretary of
"everything," to much laughter. John Whitehead, a banker and chair of
the World Trade Center Memorial, is also a member, as is Paul
Volcker, former Chairman of the U.S. Economic Recovery Board and the
U.S. Federal Reserve.

Yet, thus far the country that created many of the drug policies that
have since been exported and enforced around the globe has been
resistant to the calls of the Commission. Fifty years ago, in 1961,
the United Nations initiated the UN Single Convention on Narcotic
Drugs. Ten years later, President Ronald Reagan launched the U.S.
government's "war on drugs" that continues to this day. The goal was
a drug-free world, and the means to achieve it was fierce
enforcement, a harsh crackdown on those involved in the production,
distribution and consumption of drugs like heroin, cocaine and cannabis.

Instead, according to UN estimates, in the decade from 1998 to 2008,
annual rates of consumption of drugs have rocketed up by 34.5 percent
for opiates, 27 percent for cocaine and 8.5 percent for cannabis. As
of 2008 estimates, there were more than 17 million opiates and
cocaine users, and 160 million consumers of cannabis.

The global drug trade is valued at trillions of dollars (and not just
from cocaine; the Mexican officials approximate that almost half of
the cartels' billions of dollars of annual revenue come from
marijuana). But attempts to eradicate it have cost the United States
alone $1 trillion, not to mention thousands of lives. Within our
borders, rates of incarceration, often for lesser offenses related to
drugs, are the highest in the world, over Russia, China or Iran.

Additionally, the current size of the prison population -- more than
2.3 million -- is directly related to the war on drugs and
overwhelmingly made up of people of color. These rates of
incarceration have also led to levels of overcrowding that recently
prompted the U.S. Supreme Court to order the state of California to
release some 30,000 prisoners, after ruling that crowded conditions
violated inmates' constitutional protections, and according to
Justice Anthony Kennedy, also their "human dignity."

"I think the business community can try to educate governments into
realizing that filling up prisons with millions of drug users costing
the countries billions of dollars is not the best use of their
money," said Branson, who uniquely represents business interests on
the commission.

But Branson also describes the U.S. obligation to combat consumption
as "enormous" because it is the biggest market for drugs.
Internationally, the U.S. has given billions in aid to countries for
the adoption of similar policies to the war on drugs within its own
borders, with a majority going to its southern neighbor. "Every time
somebody in the U.S. snorts cocaine, they're effectively contributing
to the death of a Mexican," Branson said.

Colombia is often cited as a successful example of U.S. strategy.
Ravaged by cartels and violence from the drug trade, the Colombian
government adopted the U.S.-recommended Plan Colombia, and has been
able to regain control; however, as former president Cesar Gaviria
pointed out in a sunny back room at the Waldorf, the broader drug war
has not ended, but intensified.

According to the Economist, nearly all the world's cocaine is
produced in Colombia, Peru and Bolivia, and consumed in the U.S.,
where a kilo will start at $12,500, wholesale, though prices have
also been pushed higher by pressure on Mexican drug trade routes. The
main market route shifted from Colombia-Florida, across the
Caribbean, to the Pacific Coast of Mexico, but pressure there is
pushing the trade into other Central American countries. As
commission members noted, payment in drugs rather than cash is also
contributing to the first significant use inside these countries as
well, and the disturbing development of a local trade. Gaviria added,
"Mexico is making an extraordinary effort, and they should be helped
on that, but at the same time I think they have the right to ask the
U.S. to look at the policy and see if it's effective."

Many feel we are further from the ultimate objective of the 1961 UN
Convention -- the improvement of the "health and welfare of mankind"
- -- than ever before. Frustration with these failures is feeding a
growing movement for drug policy reform. Mexico is the latest Latin
American country to decriminalize the possession of small amounts of
cannabis, cocaine, heroin and other drugs in 2009 -- much to the
chagrin of the United Nations international drug enforcement body,
the International Narcotics Control Board. Argentina's Supreme Court
has ruled that punishing the personal use of cannabis is unconstitutional.

Three former presidents and commission members -- Gaviria, Cardoso
and Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico -- have all argued that legalization
would undermine the major source of income for cartels that still
ravage the region, and that the prohibition of drugs fuels violence
while not stopping consumption.

According to the commission's report, the starting point for
effective policy must be "the recognition of the global drug problem
as a set of interlinked health and social challenges to be managed,
rather than a war to be won."

The report highlights several examples of countries that have
successfully adopted this approach.

Countries that have enacted "harm reduction" strategies, which can
include syringe access and medication, and public health initiatives
- -- like the UK, Switzerland, Germany and Australia -- have had lower
rates of HIV transmission among people who inject drugs than in
countries that have resisted such strategies, like Thailand and
Russia. Switzerland, the UK and the Netherlands, which in the heyday
of Reagan's war on drugs in the '80s had severe drug issues, chose
instead to adopt a policy based on public health rather than
criminalization -- and have seen results in decreased number of
addicts, charges brought against drug users and crime.

In 2001, Portugal became the first European country to decriminalize
the use and possession of all illicit drugs, and met much criticism
by those who believed it would lead to even greater drug use and the
problems associated with it. But subsequent studies have shown that
removing criminality, but combining this strategy with therapy, has
reduced the burden on law enforcement and overall levels of
problematic drug use.

Similar criticisms continue to be voiced in the U.S., though interest
in alternative policies has grown, as seen in a California ballot
initiative last November. Studies have projected that both taxation
and the money saved from ineffective enforcement would bring billions
to state and federal governments.

But the California initiative did fail, and despite evidence of the
failure of the war on drugs, the Obama administration has continued
its policies, increasing spending on interdiction and enforcement to
record levels in dollars and percentage, according to the Associated
Press. In 2010, they accounted for $10 billion of Obama's $15.5
billion budget for drug control. Although the administration has
emphasized a "public health" approach, a White House spokesman
immediately dismissed the report and the recommendations of the
commission. "Making drugs more available -- as this report suggests
- -- will make it harder to keep our communities healthy and safe,"
said Rafael Lemaitre, spokesman for the Office of National Drug
Control Policy, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Marion Caspers-Merk, former State Secretary at the German Federal
Ministry of Health, believes this disparity is a primary obstacle to
mobilizing support for drug policy reform. "There is a lot of
political pressure that a policy mix is something that will not be
accepted by a society that figures of addicted people as criminals,"
she said. Yet even members of the commission recognized that the
chances of a true transformation of international drug policy are
slim without the support of one of the world's strongest policy players.

"These are busy people," said Thorvald Stoltenberg of the lack of US
representation at the meeting and relatively speaking on the
commission. Stoltenberg sat on the panel as a former minister of
Foreign Affairs for Norway and UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
"The success of this to a large extent depends on US policy."

Gaviria was pessimistic at the prospect of US support. "It is
difficult to have a sense that the US will move in a change of
language and change of policy if they don't have debate," Gaviria
said. "It makes it very difficult to look for alternatives."

Gaviria, like several members of the commission, made the US present
in his arguments for the need to end the war on drugs.

"The only approach to this problem of narcotrafficking is not
prohibitionism ... there are a lot of things to do that can be more
effective and at least less harmful for societies than what we have
now," Gaviria said, but added, "We are trying to promote debate; we
don't pretend we are going to change the world."