ADDICTED TO FAILURE

It's time for Latin America to start breaking with Washington over
the war on drugs.

President George W. Bush's early pronouncements about the importance
of Latin America raised hopes for a new golden era in relations
between the United States and its neighbors. But things haven't quite
worked out according to expectation. Skirmishes over trade, economic
policy, and the war in Iraq have completely eroded the optimism that
greeted Bush's arrival in the White House two and a half years ago.
Meanwhile, the region's manifold problems have only intensified.
Rather than continuing to wait for a regional partnership that exists
in communique form only, Latin America must begin to act in its own
best interest. It can start by disentangling itself from the
unwinnable war on drugs.

The futility of the war on drugs has long been obvious, but the
evidence of failure grows starker each year. Attacking the supply
side has yielded nothing: Drugs are cheaper, purer, and more
plentiful than ever. Despite crop-eradication programs, there is
substantially more opium poppy and coca cultivated today than there
was two decades ago. Attempting to stamp out the supply of drugs is
like pushing on a balloon—cut off production in one country and
another quickly fills the void. Colombia, for instance, produced no
heroin 15 years ago. Now the country is the leading supplier to the
United States, having replaced Mexico, Turkey, Southeast Asia, and
Southwest Asia, each of which was a major source of heroin at one
time or another.

Far from improving the health of nations, the war on drugs has cut a
swath of misery and corruption throughout Latin America. Just as they
have done in Medellin and other Colombian cities, drug gangs are
turning the streets of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo into free-fire
zones. Across the region, tens of thousands of farmers have seen both
their livelihoods and land destroyed. (The pesticides and herbicides
that are used to stamp out illicit crops frequently cause lasting
environmental damage.) The enormous economic dislocation and
intensifying waves of social unrest in Latin America are the results
of failed prohibitionist policies, not drugs per se.

In all of human history, no society has ever been drug free, nor will
any be so in the future. Drugs are not going to disappear; the
challenge is to mitigate the harm they cause. The wisest course for
Latin America would be legalization. The presidents of Mexico,
Brazil, Bolivia, and Uruguay have all said or hinted as much. But
legalization is still too radical an option; it is a commonsense
solution whose time has not quite arrived. For now, countries in
Latin America can lower the toll of both drugs and the war on drugs
by pursuing three strategies: embracing the concept of "harm
reduction," rehabilitating the cultivation and sale of coca, and
creating a "coalition of the willing" to resist Washington's
simplistic prohibitionist paradigm.

First, do no harm. The "harm reduction" approach, which was pioneered
in Europe and Australia in the 1980s, uses a variety of
means—methadone and heroin maintenance programs, needle exchanges,
safer injection sites, and cannabis "coffee shops"—to reduce the
personal destruction of drug use (overdoses and infectious diseases)
and the social costs (criminality and black markets). It is a
pragmatic policy that treats drugs for what they are: a public health
issue, not a criminal justice one. With HIV/AIDS and drug abuse
spreading throughout the region, some Latin American countries are
already pursuing these ideas, but broader, more sweeping initiatives
are needed. Harm reduction is also a sensible way of addressing
illegal drug production and trafficking. Blanket suppression often
proves counterproductive. De facto regulation, which is what harm
reduction essentially amounts to, is the key to combating Latin
America's worst drug-related problems.

Restore coca's good name. At the same time, the region should move to
relegalize the sale of coca-based products. The coca plant,
indigenous to Bolivia and Peru, has a number of sound uses and may
well offer health and medicinal benefits. For instance, coca contains
high levels of both calcium and phosphorus. The World Health
Organization documented these positive effects in a landmark study
produced in 1995. There was a thriving global market for coca a
century ago. There would surely be substantial worldwide demand today
for coca-based products such as lozenges, gums, teas, and tonics were
it not for the current restrictions, and lifting them would provide a
much-needed boost to economic development in both Bolivia and Peru.
The effort to eradicate coca has been a complete flop, and a cruel
one, too. The entire region should undertake a campaign to relegitimize coca.

Create Latin America's own "coalition of the willing." Indeed, the
effort to bring some sanity to the discussion of drugs must be a
regional project. No one Latin American government can stand up to
Washington. But bullying Bolivia with the threat of an aid cutoff is
one thing; bullying an entire region is quite another, and the United
States would have a real problem were it to face an organized revolt
involving a number of Latin American countries.

Such a coalition would attract members beyond Latin America. In
Europe and Oceania, support for the war on drugs, never enthusiastic,
has waned. Jamaica is in the process of decriminalizing cannabis.
Change is also afoot to the north: Canada is moving forward with
cannabis decriminalization, heroin maintenance trials, and safer
injection sites. In short, when it comes to drugs, the United States
is increasingly out of step with its neighbors and allies.

Now is a propitious moment for Latin America to break with the drug
policies imposed on it by the United States. Leaders in the region
should call the war on drugs what it is—a failure and a farce—and
politely tell Washington that Latin America will no longer contribute
to a callous, misguided effort that undermines the region's economic
prospects and social cohesion. Were Washington to pitch the
inevitable fit and threaten sanctions, it might just be reminded that
when dealing with friends, honesty, not hypocrisy, is usually the best policy.

Ethan Nadelmann is founder and executive director of the Drug Policy
Alliance in New York City.