Pubdate: Wed, 25 Nov 2015
Source: Globe and Mail (Canada)
Copyright: 2015 The Globe and Mail Company
Contact:  http://www.theglobeandmail.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/168
Author: Misha Glenny
Page: A13

WHY EASING MARIJUANA LAWS IS A GOOD FIRST STEP

MISHA GLENNY Author of Nemesis: One Man and the Battle for Rio

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's commitment toward major drug law
reform is a welcome if belated recognition that when it comes to
marijuana, Canada has been an emperor with no clothes for several years.

For two decades, Canada has been a major producer, consumer and
exporter of marijuana. As in the rest of the Western world, research
indicates that less than 20 per cent of the product is interdicted by
law enforcement. This is nowhere what is needed to dissuade marijuana
producers and distributors, large and small, from engaging in their
activities. Prohibition increases the value of the commodity and
profits hit stratospheric levels unknown in legitimate business.

Experiments in various parts of the world, such as Portugal, the
Netherlands and the United States, have shown that decriminalization
or legalization reduces the harm inflicted by the consumption of
drugs. In Colorado and Washington State, health and education programs
are beginning to reap the benefits of new revenue streams derived from
the legalization of marijuana.

Mr. Trudeau's pledge also sends a signal of hope to countries that
suffer incomparably more than does Canada as a consequence of the
pernicious war on drugs. These are the top producers and distributors
of drugs. In Afghanistan, for example, the Taliban fight against NATO
was sustained in large part by revenue derived from the heroin trade.

In Latin America, the war on drugs, driven by Washington and other
Western capitals, results in tens of thousands of people dying, most
of them young, poor and disenfranchised men - Mexicans, Colombians,
Hondurans and more. Most are innocent victims of armed conflicts
fuelled by drug profits, whose death rates would lead to them being
characterized elsewhere as civil wars, if drugs were not involved.

For many years, Brazil has consistently been in the top 10 leading
countries in the world for homicides. According to Ilona Szabo,
director of the Rio-based Igarape Institute, engaged in groundbreaking
work on urban violence in South America, 56,000 people die violently
each year in Brazil, and about 50 per cent of the homicides on the
country's streets are related to the war on drugs.

For the past three years, I researched the biography of the man who
ran Brazil's largest slum, or favela, until his arrest in 2013. Until
his mid-20s, Antonio Bonfim Lopes was a respected member of the
Rocinha favela, working in more fashionable areas of the city,
distributing Rio's equivalent of TV Guide. Then his baby daughter fell
ill with a potentially fatal disease. The only way he could afford her
treatment was to borrow money from the only man who lent to slum
residents - the local drug baron.

To repay the debt, Mr. Lopes had no choice but to go to work for the
drug trade and became known across Brazil as Nem of Rocinha. To his
credit, he worked to reduce the homicide rate in his favela to one of
the lowest in Brazil. But he was still an unelected, unaccountable
leader, albeit an enlightened one, whose power rested on a significant
arsenal of weapons purchased on the back of the drug trade.

The war on drugs combines with poverty and high rates of inequality in
the developing world to lock young men into a vicious circle of death
and dependency, wreaking havoc on their prospects and their families.
Most often, women are left to pick up the pieces.

Without drug law reforms, Western societies will perpetuate one of the
most sustained acts of immorality in history. Mr. Trudeau is correct
to identify marijuana as the place to start, as it is understandably
feared much less than are drugs such as cocaine and heroin.

If five years after the legalization or decriminalization of
marijuana, Western civilization has not gone into terminal decline as
a consequence, we should consider an appropriately innovative policy
for other drugs, too. The hundreds of thousands of dead in Latin
America and elsewhere are calling out for it.
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MAP posted-by: Matt