Last Saturday, at a summit in Antigua, the President of Guatemala called for an end to the war on drugs. He spoke as the leader of a country with one of the highest per capita murder rates in the world – 39 per hundred thousand per year. The UK suffers just 1.2.
Also present were senior representatives from El Salvador and Honduras. With murder rates of 71 and 86 per hundred thousand, these two nations have the worst record in the world, meaning that if you died last year in Honduras, there is a one in sixteen chance that you were murdered. The widespread and deadly violence that has given rise to these figures is a by-product of a long and protracted mission to make the cocaine more difficult and expensive to obtain.
In Afghanistan the black market for opium fuels widespread corruption which undermines the flimsy government and also funds terrorism and insurgency. In West Africa, an emerging drug trafficking network adds to the chaos and violence that typifies much of the region. In Colombia, the world’s largest producer of cocaine, the trade fuelled the disgustingly bloody civil war that began in the 80s and has effectively continued into the 21st century, with only some recent amelioration. In the early 90s much of the country lay in the hands of murderous drug lord Pablo Escobar and in 1992 alone 27,100 people were killed in the violence.
With the exception of El Salvador, the countries most hit by the ‘war on drugs’ do not have a serious domestic drug abuse problem. They are in this position out of international obligation to prop up the failing policy approaches in the developed nations. As the influential UN Global Commission on Drug Policy has pointed out, the vast, deadly and destructive effort put into the ‘war on drugs’ since it began at the United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs in 1961 (although Nixon would only coin the term 10 years later), has failed. It has failed to prevent the steady increase in drug abuse over the past decades and it has failed to stem both demand and supply of narcotics. It has failed because it is totally the wrong approach.
Dr. Hugh and Professor Stevens’ 2010 report on drug consumption in Portugal has shown clearly that in the 10 years since that country decriminalised all drugs, consumption trends were consistent with other countries which had not liberalised their policies. In fact, heroin abuse, the main concern of the Portuguese government, actually decreased over the period. Reinarman et al’s study of cannabis consumption in Dutch cities (where it is legal and regulated) compared with San Fransisco (where it is not), comprehensively concluded that there was no evidence that decriminalisation either decreased use or increased the age at which people began consumption. Similarly, the aforementioned UN report cites a number of studies which show that cannabis decriminalisation in the state of Western Australia did not change consumption patterns. Evidence clearly suggests that there is a negligible link between drug decriminalisation and increased consumption. This is not surprising – consider how easy and how cheap it is to get hold of most drugs in heavily policed western cities.
Besides being utterly ineffective at reducing consumption, criminalisation of drug abuse has had disastrous consequences for users and society at large. In the case of softer drugs like cannabis, it turns otherwise law-abiding citizens into criminals. In the case of more harmful, addictive drugs, it forces the dependent to buy adulterated, dirty strains. In countries which lack the needle swapping programmes and methadone clinics that the UK has reluctantly introduced, HIV prevalence amongst users of injected drugs tends to be around 40%.
Instead of treating drug addiction as a serious sociological and psychological problem, a complex medical issue for those who suffer it, we instead choose to bully and arrest addicts in the forlorn hope that this will somehow cure them of their drug-dependence. We exacerbate the dangers and harm to users and criminalise decent people unnecessarily, at a cost of about £14bn per year in the UK alone.
The ‘war on drugs’ has been a brutal and violent war. The end result is a policy of prohibition that utterly fails to stem casual use and actually increases harm to addicts, while unnecessarily criminalising millions of people at a huge financial cost. It is time to end this madness.