Pubdate: Sun, 18 Mar 2007
Source: Trinidad Express (Trinidad)
Copyright: 2007 Trinidad Express
Contact:  http://www.trinidadexpress.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1093
Author: Emile Elias

WE HAVE LOST THE WAR ON DRUGS

We need a new strategy. It should be clear to everybody that the
illegal drug trade is flourishing worldwide and is estimated by the
United Nations to be worth US$400 billion a year. Enormous wealth is
being generated by criminals who are willing to profit from the "risk
premium" of dealing in these illicit drugs.

Cocaine is produced in Colombia at a cost of an estimated US$500 per
kilo, and retails on the streets of America at US$60,000 per kilo.
Marijuana starts life even cheaper than Pangola grass, which is
probably why it is called "weed"? In Afghanistan, the USA and its
"coalition partners" have spent approximately US$2 billion trying to
eradicate the growing of poppy from which heroin is made, and in spite
of the presence of massive numbers of foreign troops, the heroin crop
was last year estimated to be double the previous year's harvest -
because there is a lot of money in it!

That is why drug criminals are getting richer each year.

So, why do we as a society continue to pursue strategies to solve a
medical problem that simply makes criminals rich while diverting
precious police and judicial time trying to solve a medical problem of
addiction using quasi-military methods?

In the United Kingdom, the British have been studying the problem over
the last two years using a high level group of people including the
police, academics, politicians, journalists and drugs workers.

They have recommended that the police be removed from their lead role
in fighting the illegal use of drugs. The report states that large
amounts of money are being wasted on futile efforts to stop the supply
of drugs.

They recommend that we bring to an end the "criminal justice bias" of
the current policy in favour of an approach that would treat addiction
as a health and social problem, rather than simply calling it a crime.

The Swiss have also reportedly tried a new approach by prescribing
heroin to addicts, and this has enjoyed some notable success in
reducing criminality among addicts who no longer need to fund their
addiction by stealing.

In the USA there is the recent case of a 41-year-old woman with
scoliosis, a brain tumour, and chronic nausea, whose doctor says that
using marijuana helps her. How on earth can she be deemed to be a
criminal? How is she such a threat to society to the extent that she
can be criminally charged and sent to prison? The case reached all the
way to the US Supreme Court, which ruled against her! Can you believe
this waste of resources to stop a sick woman from smoking weed!

How is excessive use of tobacco or alcohol any different!

What we need in Trinidad and Tobago and the wider Caribbean is to
appoint an appropriate group of Wise People to study the problem,
analyse the obvious failures, and devise new solutions rather than
pursue the policies of "Prohibition" that were unsuccessfully tried in
the US in the 1920s. Al Capone among others was a creature of those
wrong strategies. Locally we have our own home-grown Capones by the
dozen.

There are distinct similarities between our wasted efforts of today
and those of the USA 80 years ago. Demonising drugs that may be
harmless when used in a limited way does not convince young people to
steer clear of drugs.

I call on the Minister of Social Development to shift his focus and
come up with a proposal to his Cabinet colleagues to approve a study
of this problem by a group of experts who can make the appropriate
recommendations for solutions. Include the judiciary, the police and
opposition supporters in the panel. Take the recommendations out of
the political arena and into the medical and social development sector
and come up with solutions that have a better chance to work than what
we are doing today, that would include expanding education about drug
use, taking the profit motive of the criminals out of the equation,
and giving free drugs to registered addicts while treating their
addiction medically and socially.

Nothing could be worse than the present position. It's time to try
something else as the British and Swiss are now doing.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Derek