IT'S TIME TO LEGALIZE DRUGS

Prohibition has failed -- again.

Instead of treating the demand for illegal drugs as a market, and
addicts as patients, policymakers the world over have boosted the
profits of drug lords and fostered narcostates that would frighten Al
Capone. Finally, a smarter drug control regime that values reality
over rhetoric is rising to replace the "war" on drugs.

"The Global War on Drugs can Be Won"

No, it can't. A "drug-free world," which the United Nations describes
as a realistic goal, is no more attainable than an "alcohol-free
world" -- and no one has talked about that with a straight face since
the repeal of Prohibition in the United States in 1933. Yet futile
rhetoric about winning a "war on drugs" persists, despite mountains of
evidence documenting its moral and ideological bankruptcy. When the
U.N. General Assembly Special Session on drugs convened in 1998, it
committed to "eliminating or significantly reducing the illicit
cultivation of the coca bush, the cannabis plant and the opium poppy
by the year 2008" and to "achieving significant and measurable results
in the field of demand reduction." But today, global production and
consumption of those drugs are roughly the same as they were a decade
ago; meanwhile, many producers have become more efficient, and cocaine
and heroin have become purer and cheaper.

It's always dangerous when rhetoric drives policy -- and especially so
when "war on drugs" rhetoric leads the public to accept collateral
casualties that would never be permissible in civilian law
enforcement, much less public health.

Politicians still talk of eliminating drugs from the Earth as though
their use is a plague on humanity.

But drug control is not like disease control, for the simple reason
that there's no popular demand for smallpox or polio.

Cannabis and opium have been grown throughout much of the world for
millennia.

The same is true for coca in Latin America. Methamphetamine and other
synthetic drugs can be produced anywhere.

Demand for particular illicit drugs waxes and wanes, depending not
just on availability but also fads, fashion, culture, and competition
from alternative means of stimulation and distraction. The relative
harshness of drug laws and the intensity of enforcement matter
surprisingly little, except in totalitarian states.

After all, rates of illegal drug use in the United States are the same
as, or higher than, Europe, despite America's much more punitive policies.

"We Can Reduce the Demand for Drugs"

Good luck. Reducing the demand for illegal drugs seems to make sense.
But the desire to alter one's state of consciousness, and to use
psychoactive drugs to do so, is nearly universal -- and mostly not a
problem. There's virtually never been a drug-free society, and more
drugs are discovered and devised every year. Demand-reduction efforts
that rely on honest education and positive alternatives to drug use
are helpful, but not when they devolve into unrealistic, "zero
tolerance" policies.

As with sex, abstinence from drugs is the best way to avoid trouble,
but one always needs a fallback strategy for those who can't or won't
refrain. "Zero tolerance" policies deter some people, but they also
dramatically increase the harms and costs for those who don't resist.
Drugs become more potent, drug use becomes more hazardous, and people
who use drugs are marginalized in ways that serve no one.

The better approach is not demand reduction but "harm reduction."
Reducing drug use is fine, but it's not nearly as important as
reducing the death, disease, crime, and suffering associated with both
drug misuse and failed prohibitionist policies.

With respect to legal drugs, such as alcohol and cigarettes, harm
reduction means promoting responsible drinking and designated drivers,
or persuading people to switch to nicotine patches, chewing gums, and
smokeless tobacco.

With respect to illegal drugs, it means reducing the transmission of
infectious disease through syringe-exchange programs, reducing
overdose fatalities by making antidotes readily available, and
allowing people addicted to heroin and other illegal opiates to obtain
methadone from doctors and even pharmaceutical heroin from clinics.

Britain, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland have
already embraced this last option.

There's no longer any question that these strategies decrease
drug-related harms without increasing drug use. What blocks expansion
of such programs is not cost; they typically save taxpayers' money
that would otherwise go to criminal justice and healthcare. No, the
roadblocks are abstinence-only ideologues and a cruel indifference to
the lives and well-being of people who use drugs.

"Reducing the Supply of Drugs Is the Answer"

Not if history is any guide.

Reducing supply makes as much sense as reducing demand; after all, if
no one were planting cannabis, coca, and opium, there wouldn't be any
heroin, cocaine, or marijuana to sell or consume. But the carrot and
stick of crop eradication and substitution have been tried and failed,
with rare exceptions, for half a century. These methods may succeed in
targeted locales, but they usually simply shift production from one
region to another: Opium production moves from Pakistan to
Afghanistan; coca from Peru to Colombia; and cannabis from Mexico to
the United States, while overall global production remains relatively
constant or even increases.

The carrot, in the form of economic development and assistance in
switching to legal crops, is typically both late and inadequate. The
stick, often in the form of forced eradication, including aerial
spraying, wipes out illegal and legal crops alike and can be hazardous
to both people and local environments. The best thing to be said for
emphasizing supply reduction is that it provides a rationale for
wealthier nations to spend a little money on economic development in
poorer countries.

But, for the most part, crop eradication and substitution wreak havoc
among impoverished farmers without diminishing overall global supply.

The global markets in cannabis, coca, and opium products operate
essentially the same way that other global commodity markets do: If
one source is compromised due to bad weather, rising production costs,
or political difficulties, another emerges.

If international drug control circles wanted to think strategically,
the key question would no longer be how to reduce global supply, but
rather: Where does illicit production cause the fewest problems (and
the greatest benefits)? Think of it as a global vice control challenge.

No one expects to eradicate vice, but it must be effectively zoned and
regulated -- even if it's illegal.

"U.S. Drug Policy Is the World's Drug Policy"

Sad, but true. Looking to the United States as a role model for drug
control is like looking to apartheid-era South Africa for how to deal
with race. The United States ranks first in the world in per capita
incarceration -- with less than 5 percent of the world's population,
but almost 25 percent of the world's prisoners.

The number of people locked up for U.S. drug-law violations has
increased from roughly 50,000 in 1980 to almost 500,000 today; that's
more than the number of people Western Europe locks up for everything.
Even more deadly is U.S. resistance to syringe-exchange programs to
reduce HIV/AIDS both at home and abroad.

Who knows how many people might not have contracted HIV if the United
States had implemented at home, and supported abroad, the sorts of
syringe-exchange and other harm-reduction programs that have kept
HIV/AIDS rates so low in Australia, Britain, the Netherlands, and
elsewhere. Perhaps millions.

And yet, despite this dismal record, the United States has succeeded
in constructing an international drug prohibition regime modeled after
its own highly punitive and moralistic approach.

It has dominated the drug control agencies of the United Nations and
other international organizations, and its federal drug enforcement
agency was the first national police organization to go global.

Rarely has one nation so successfully promoted its own failed policies
to the rest of the world.

But now, for the first time, U.S. hegemony in drug control is being
challenged. The European Union is demanding rigorous assessment of
drug control strategies. Exhausted by decades of service to the
U.S.-led war on drugs, Latin Americans are far less inclined to
collaborate closely with U.S. drug enforcement efforts.

Finally waking up to the deadly threat of hiv/aids, China, Indonesia,
Vietnam, and even Malaysia and Iran are increasingly accepting of
syringe-exchange and other harm-reduction programs.

In 2005, the ayatollah in charge of Iran's Ministry of Justice issued
a fatwa declaring methadone maintenance and syringe-exchange programs
compatible with sharia (Islamic) law. One only wishes his American
counterpart were comparably enlightened.

"Afghan Opium Production Must Be Curbed"

Be careful what you wish for. It's easy to believe that eliminating
record-high opium production in Afghanistan -- which today accounts
for roughly 90 percent of global supply, up from 50 percent 10 years
ago -- would solve everything from heroin abuse in Europe and Asia to
the resurgence of the Taliban.

But assume for a moment that the United States, NATO, and Hamid
Karzai's government were somehow able to cut opium production in
Afghanistan. Who would benefit?

Only the Taliban, warlords, and other black-market entrepreneurs whose
stockpiles of opium would skyrocket in value. Hundreds of thousands of
Afghan peasants would flock to cities, ill-prepared to find work. And
many Afghans would return to their farms the following year to plant
another illegal harvest, utilizing guerrilla farming methods to escape
intensified eradication efforts.

Except now, they'd soon be competing with poor farmers elsewhere in
Central Asia, Latin America, or even Africa. This is, after all, a
global commodities market. And outside Afghanistan? Higher heroin
prices typically translate into higher crime rates by addicts.

They also invite cheaper but more dangerous means of consumption, such
as switching from smoking to injecting heroin, which results in higher
HIV and hepatitis c rates. All things considered, wiping out opium in
Afghanistan would yield far fewer benefits than is commonly assumed.

So what's the solution?

Some recommend buying up all the opium in Afghanistan, which would
cost a lot less than is now being spent trying to eradicate it. But,
given that farmers somewhere will produce opium so long as the demand
for heroin persists, maybe the world is better off, all things
considered, with 90 percent of it coming from just one country. And if
that heresy becomes the new gospel, it opens up all sorts of
possibilities for pursuing a new policy in Afghanistan that reconciles
the interests of the United States, NATO, and millions of Afghan citizens.

"Legalization Is the Best Approach"

It might be. Global drug prohibition is clearly a costly
disaster.

The United Nations has estimated the value of the global market in
illicit drugs at $400 billion, or 6 percent of global trade.

The extraordinary profits available to those willing to assume the
risks enrich criminals, terrorists, violent political insurgents, and
corrupt politicians and governments. Many cities, states, and even
countries in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia are reminiscent of
Chicago under Al Capone -- times 50. By bringing the market for drugs
out into the open, legalization would radically change all that for
the better.

More importantly, legalization would strip addiction down to what it
really is: a health issue.

Most people who use drugs are like the responsible alcohol consumer,
causing no harm to themselves or anyone else. They would no longer be
the state's business.

But legalization would also benefit those who struggle with drugs by
reducing the risks of overdose and disease associated with unregulated
products, eliminating the need to obtain drugs from dangerous criminal
markets, and allowing addiction problems to be treated as medical
rather than criminal problems.

No one knows how much governments spend collectively on failing drug
war policies, but it's probably at least $100 billion a year, with
federal, state, and local governments in the United States accounting
for almost half the total.

Add to that the tens of billions of dollars to be gained annually in
tax revenues from the sale of legalized drugs.

Now imagine if just a third of that total were committed to reducing
drug-related disease and addiction.

Virtually everyone, except those who profit or gain politically from
the current system, would benefit.

Some say legalization is immoral.

That's nonsense, unless one believes there is some principled basis
for discriminating against people based solely on what they put into
their bodies, absent harm to others.

Others say legalization would open the floodgates to huge increases in
drug abuse. They forget that we already live in a world in which
psychoactive drugs of all sorts are readily available -- and in which
people too poor to buy drugs resort to sniffing gasoline, glue, and
other industrial products, which can be more harmful than any drug.
No, the greatest downside to legalization may well be the fact that
the legal markets would fall into the hands of the powerful alcohol,
tobacco, and pharmaceutical companies.

Still, legalization is a far more pragmatic option than living with
the corruption, violence, and organized crime of the current system.

"Legalization Will Never Happen"

Never say never.

Wholesale legalization may be a long way off -- but partial
legalization is not. If any drug stands a chance of being legalized,
it's cannabis.

Hundreds of millions of people have used it, the vast majority without
suffering any harm or going on to use "harder" drugs. In Switzerland,
for example, cannabis legalization was twice approved by one chamber
of its parliament, but narrowly rejected by the other.

Elsewhere in Europe, support for the criminalization of cannabis is
waning. In the United States, where roughly 40 percent of the
country's 1.8 million annual drug arrests are for cannabis possession,
typically of tiny amounts, 40 percent of Americans say that the drug
should be taxed, controlled, and regulated like alcohol.

Encouraged by Bolivian President Evo Morales, support is also growing
in Latin America and Europe for removing coca from international
antidrug conventions, given the absence of any credible health reason
for keeping it there. Traditional growers would benefit economically,
and there's some possibility that such products might compete
favorably with more problematic substances, including alcohol.

The global war on drugs persists in part because so many people fail
to distinguish between the harms of drug abuse and the harms of
prohibition. Legalization forces that distinction to the forefront.

The opium problem in Afghanistan is primarily a prohibition problem,
not a drug problem.

The same is true of the narcoviolence and corruption that has
afflicted Latin America and the Caribbean for almost three decades --
and that now threatens Africa. Governments can arrest and kill drug
lord after drug lord, but the ultimate solution is a structural one,
not a prosecutorial one. Few people doubt any longer that the war on
drugs is lost, but courage and vision are needed to transcend the
ignorance, fear, and vested interests that sustain it.

Want To Know More?

Drugpolicy.org, the Web site of the Drug Policy Alliance, offers
statistics, arguments, and information about drug policies worldwide.
Ethan Nadelmann and Peter Andreas examine the politics of global crime
control in Policing the Globe: Criminalization and Crime Control in
International Relations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).