Decriminalising personal possession, though helpful in other ways, won’t do much to tackle organised crime, which retains its grip on the market. But America’s tentative moves in the direction of legalising the supply of drugs, rather than just going easy on users, could start to change things…If California’s hippies long for legalisation, the bullet-weary citizens of Mexico’s poorest barrios are even keener.
—The Economist, November 2009
Not much more to say about the War on Drugs. Well, of course there is. But I’ve written about it, in my minimal-understanding way, dozens and dozens of times. Here’s an interesting article, and an excerpt, that I will punctuate with a few numbers and spaces to make clearer. It must be noted that this article from Mick Moore—Drugs: towards a global tolerance regime—is not footnoted, which is unfortunate, but its ideas are food for thought:
Let us not delude ourselves that the poor farmers [in Afghanistan, North Africa or wherever] who produce the drugs at least get a good income.
They don’t.
At the farm gate, prices of raw material just after harvest are very low. The price only starts to inflate as drugs cross a national border; international smuggling is a risky, expensive business.
Poor farmers receive very little for their labour. They typically live in remote, conflict-ridden areas from which the [drug] processors and [drug] traffickers exclude normal development activities like schools, road-building, banks and agricultural advisers.
The traffickers can be more confident of a reliable, cheap supply of coca leaf and poppy if [1] government employees, honest politicians and armies can be kept at bay…
…if [2] farmers have little access to alternative sources of credit [to making a living], and if they have to pay high prices to transport fertiliser or to ship bulkier non-narcotic crops [food, for example] to market.
[3]The processors and traffickers prefer that there be little economic infrastructure in producing areas. They want and create weak states and misrule. [The traffickers] finance separatist and insurgent armies [re: terrorists] to keep the government at bay…
…and [4, the traffickers] simultaneously buy off politicians, police, armed forces and customs officers.
[5] The illegality of drugs makes it rational for traffickers to lock producing areas—and sometimes whole countries—into multi-dimensional underdevelopment. The same corrosive consequences for governance, public authority and democracy are replicated as traffickers tranship [traffic] heroin and cocaine through the Caribbean, Central America, Central Asia and, increasingly, West Africa.
[6] Increased tolerance and decriminalisation of drugs use within the main consumer markets of Europe and North America would do nothing to alleviate these upstream effects of illegality in the producing and transhipment countries.
[7] We need a simultaneous shift toward a more tolerant, effectively regulated regime on both the supply and the demand side of the business.
It is no longer utopian to talk of substantial policy change within a few years. Where and how will it come about?
[8] There are clear, strong links between [continued] prohibition [as we have now] and the growing likelihood of defeat for the Western military forces in Afghanistan.
But a certain kind of puritan populism is so well entrenched in American electoral politics that it would be very hard for the Obama administration overtly to promote significant policy change, domestically or internationally.
There are no simple answers, no cures, and hundreds of thousands of personal experiences with drugs, with people on drugs, that mix up the conversation.
It’s a big topic. It effects us all more than we can know: people, friends or even ourselves with addiction; increased crime; increased health costs; increased violence; increased decimation of inner-cities, ghettoes and slums; increased and shocking incarceration rates; increased terrorism and developing country instability etc, etc.
Be good to yourself if educating yourself on the topic. It’s a stunner, to be sure. Facts sometimes run contrary to self-righteousness and morals. Then again, when hasn’t that been true?
Lots of love,
Pete