Pubdate: Sat, 02 Sep 2000
Source: Edmonton Journal (CN AB)
Copyright: 2000 The Edmonton Journal
Contact:  http://www.edmontonjournal.com/
Forum: http://forums.canada.com/~edmonton

THE WAR ON DRUGS HASN'T WORKED

What does it tell us that the U.S. has launched a new, $1.3-billion 
offensive against drugs in Colombia?

Well -- it seems to suggest the great War on Drugs isn't going too well. 
Thank goodness, given American stubbornness and loyalty to unsuccessful 
tactics, that Colombia is not a war like Vietnam. Yet, anyway.

Remember the names Pablo Escobar and Medellin drug cartel? And how in 1993, 
after four years of terror and counter terror, Medellin was smashed and 
Escobar finally caught and killed? What a victory it was over the supply 
side of the drug market.

But, then, oops! There was the Cali cartel. Remember it? Members were 
suspected of helping the government liquidate their Medellin rivals before 
stepping in to the vacuum caused by voracious overseas demand for drugs.

A new offensive was launched; by 1996 victory had again been declared. 
Except now, four years later, the enemy is so strong again that Colombia is 
preparing to spend another $7.5 billion over five years.

It is a testament to the long failure of the drug wars that most readers 
are now quite familiar with the basic arguments that can flow from this 
history.

The basic rationale of the War on Drugs is a Prohibition one: to solve the 
awful social and health consequences of drug use by making cocaine and 
heroin too expensive and difficult to obtain. Colombia exports fully 
three-quarters of the world's cocaine, in large measure because the 
collapse of effective government during a 35-year civil war makes it a good 
place for drug types to operate and corrupt what remains of legitimate 
authority.

The current initiative makes perfect sense on the surface: to assist the 
Colombian military in its battle against the drug growers and smugglers, to 
improve the quality of government (the current low level of which 
strengthens the hand of Marxist rebels), to pressure the army to distance 
itself from the country's vicious paramilitaries, to improve the justice 
system, and to foster an economy more resistant to the poppy's siren call.

On the other hand, of course, there is the suspicion that an international 
market that currently demands $400 billion worth of drugs annually would 
probably induce criminals to find other sources of supply. And the 
suspicion that rising prices caused by success in the drug war would make 
the rewards of drug crime even greater.

There's the statistic that a quarter of U.S. jail occupants are drug 
convicts, and that even in Canada, 12 per cent of federal inmates are 
products of the drug prohibition.

And there is the overall argument that the cost in crime, the cost in 
damage to individual lives, to communities and to entire countries, and the 
cost in diversion of untold billions of consumer and tax dollars from more 
constructive uses, might possibly be higher than the cost of some form of 
carefully regulated legalization of drugs.

A five-year-old study by the U.S. Rand Institute, for example, concluded 
that a dollar spent on treatment of addiction is 10 times more 
cost-efficient than fighting smuggling, and 23 times greater than crop 
eradication.

One imagines, to return to Colombia, that if demand for illegal cocaine 
dried up tomorrow, the loss of revenue for weapons purchases and the 
possibility of using the Americans' $1.3 billion for other things would do 
more to boost Colombia's outlook than another anti-drug offensive.

True, it's impossible to know for sure what the cost might be of learning 
to live legally with drugs the way we have done with alcohol and tobacco. 
It might be unpleasant to lose the moral satisfaction of knowing we are 
"fighting".

The thing is, the primary goal of drug policy is not to give us moral 
satisfaction, but rather to build a world in which drugs do less harm to 
their victims -- here in Edmonton, in U.S. inner cities, and in Colombia.

Prohibition hasn't worked. The war on drugs hasn't worked. The world must 
at least try to find a better way.
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MAP posted-by: Larry Stevens