Cannabis News Marijuana Policy Project
  Global War Against Drugs Unrealistic
Posted by CN Staff on May 06, 2002 at 21:48:23 PT
By Ethan Nadelmann 
Source: Taipei Times 

justice If we're lucky, our grandchildren will recall the global war on drugs of the late 20th and early 21st century as some bizarre mania to which only past generations could succumb.

The world's drug problems are far more severe today than they were a century ago. Not that drug use has increased fantastically -- after all, huge quantities of alcohol, opium and other drugs were consumed back then.

The real problem is that today's drug control policies foster more harm than good -- indeed, they probably cause more overall harm than drug abuse itself.

Like alcohol prohibition in the US during the 1920s and early 1930s, global drug prohibition has failed to reduce drug abuse even as it generates extraordinary levels of crime, violence, corruption and disease.

In 1998, the UN estimated the total value of the illicit drug trade at US $400 billion, or 7 percent of global trade. Critics say the figure is only half that -- still a remarkable sum.

Colombia today is far worse than Chicago under Al Capone. So, too, are other Latin American, Caribbean and Asian countries. Drug prohibition effectively imposes a tax on the global trade in illicit drugs that is enforced by governments and collected by those willing to violate the laws. No other set of laws produces so much revenue for criminals, terrorists and corrupt officials. No other laws generate so much corruption or such violence; and no other set of laws contributes so much to the spread of HIV/AIDS, hepatitis and other diseases.

The war on drugs persists in part because of two myths. The first assumes that human beings are better off "drug free" and that all societies should strive to be drug free. But few -- if any -- drug-free societies ever existed.

The second myth presumes that prohibition reduces the harm associated with drugs. Global markets in cannabis, opium and coca products are basically similar to other global commodities markets, yet global drug-control policies operate on the assumption that the drug markets bear more in common with smallpox and other infectious diseases for which there is no demand.

Governments can act unilaterally and multilaterally to regulate commodity markets, but it is a mistake to perceive prohibition as the ultimate or maximum form of regulation. Prohibition in fact represents the abdication of regulation. Whatever is not suppressed is effectively unregulated, except by criminal organizations.

Around the world, drug-law violations account for the largest share of the roughly 8 million people incarcerated in jails and prisons. In 1980, 50,000 people were incarcerated in the US for drug-law violations. Today, the total approaches 500,000, with a few hundred thousand more locked up on other prohibition-related offenses. That total represents almost 10 percent of all the world's inmates.

Throughout the developing world, peasants involved in producing opium, coca and cannabis are arrested, sometimes beaten, and often extorted by government agents enforcing drug laws. In Bolivia and Peru, coca was integrated into society. The same was true of opium in Asia. Prohibitions imposed by the US and other governments decimated traditions that often "domesticated" these drugs so as to reduce their harm, while simultaneously encouraging transitions to refined drugs like heroin and cocaine. US law enforcement and intelligence agencies routinely provide information to other governments knowing that it will be used not just to arrest but to torture those they identify.

All these consequences can be defined as human-rights abuses. But the core human rights issue is different -- the notion that people should not be punished for what they put into their bodies. That right of sovereignty over one's mind and body -- which also incorporates the right not to be forced to take drugs against one's will -- represents in some respects the most fundamental of all rights.

Heroin users are denied the most effective medication available to remedy their addiction, ie, methadone. People unable or unwilling to stop injecting drugs are denied access to sterile syringes, with devastating consequences. Millions who smoke marijuana or consume other psychoactive drugs are harmed far more by state action than by drug use.

More and more voices are calling for a systematic review and revision of the international anti-drug conventions that sustain today's policies. Some emphasize the anti-scientific and otherwise illegitimate basis for including cannabis and coca in the conventions. Others point to the contradictions between anti-drug conventions and international human-rights conventions. Others note that the anti-drug conventions exacerbate the problems they seek to ameliorate.

A new global drug control regime is needed. It must reject the foolish rhetoric of creating "a drug-free world" and acknowledge that the true challenge is learning to live with drugs so that they cause the least harm. An effective strategy needs to establish realistic objectives and criteria for evaluating success or failure, and these criteria must focus on reducing the death, disease, crime and suffering associated with both drug use and drug policies. It also must embrace the principle that people should not be punished for what they put into their bodies, but only for the harm they do others. Those are the key elements of a more ethical and effective drug control regime than the one that haunts today's world.

Ethan Nadelmann is the founder and executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, which promotes alternatives to the global war on drugs, and is the author of Cops Across Borders: The Internationalization of US Criminal Law Enforcement.

Note: Government actions to prohibit the use of drugs not only do more harm than good, but also infringe on people's rights to decide what they do with their own bodies.

Source: Taipei Times, The (Taiwan)
Author: Ethan Nadelmann
Published: Tuesday, May 7th, 2002
Copyright: 2002 The Taipei Times
Contact: letters@taipeitimes.com
Website: http://www.taipeitimes.com/

Related Articles & Web Site:

Drug Policy Alliance
http://www.drugpolicy.org/

Two Voices on Bush Drug Policy
http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread9784.shtml

An Unwinnable War on Drugs
http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread9505.shtml


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Comment #16 posted by goneposthole on May 07, 2002 at 16:33:39 PT
Wernher von Braun
oops. I got it right this time.

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Comment #15 posted by goneposthole on May 07, 2002 at 16:30:56 PT
Werhner von Braun
The correct spelling pf his name.

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Comment #14 posted by goneposthole on May 07, 2002 at 16:17:46 PT
I guess Einstein was no Einstein
Inferior Germans like Werner Von Braun, who engineered the Saturn 5 rocket. You know, the one that rocketed to the moon.

Actually, J. Robert Oppenheimer was Einstein's boss.

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Comment #13 posted by null on May 07, 2002 at 15:08:37 PT
Einstein, Anslinger and Others
From E_Johnson: But he wasn't Saint Einstein, he was normal man, and he had some strong opinions that haven't been widely broadcast that were not up to today's stndards of political correctness.

I think your advice is solid, EJ. But for a normal person he certainly had a number of brilliant things to say like the ones quoted below. ;)

History has a fondness for glossing over the unpleasant, doesn't it?

Here's a great quote: Marijuana is taken by ".....musicians. And I'm not speaking about good musicians, but the jazz type..."

Harry J. Anslinger Federal Bureau of Narcotics 1948

As a total aside, EJ: You have such in depth knowledge of Soviet culture, have you ever read "The Master and Margarita" by Mikhail Bulgakov? (Described by the official Big Soviet Encyclopedia as a "slanderer of Soviet reality.")



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Comment #12 posted by E_Johnson on May 07, 2002 at 14:43:19 PT
Be careful with Einstein
Einstein was marketed as a saint in America and his heirs guarded his reputation by heavuily censoring his papers and letters.

But he wasn't Saint Einstein, he was normal man, and he had some strong opinions that haven't been widely broadcast that were not up to today's stndards of political correctness.

For example, he believed that Germans were an inferior people. He wrote it many times. Only in the last ten years was unrestricted access to his writings and letters granted to historians so this knownledge has not become part of the popular apprecation of him.

His failure to get an academic job, so that he had to take a clerical position at the Patent Office, was partly because he was verbally abusive to his professors. He considered them fools, and he was not shy about informing them of that fact. He called one esteemed personage a stupid ape in writing.

Nothing written about Einstein before 1991 takes into account this side of him, because biographers before 1991 could only see what the guardians of his library would allow them to see.

The uncensored Einstein is more interesting, but less saintly.



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Comment #11 posted by E_Johnson on May 07, 2002 at 14:33:10 PT
dankhank, it reminds me of a song....
E_Johnson, pray tell which jovial red-hatted fellow you indicate seems regrettably comforted by the burning of human beings ...

As an employee of the Catholic Church I wish to know ...

I don't remember his name but he gave a soundbite a couple of years back when the Pope was apologizing for burning heretics. Everyone was decrying the ignorance of the past, but this fellow felt it was a necessary part of building the Church in those days and said so quite bluntly and unashamedly.

His sentiments really stuck in my mind. But not his name.

Reminds me of a song...

Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name...

But what's troubling you is the nature of my game



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Comment #10 posted by Ethan Russo MD on May 07, 2002 at 14:17:24 PT:

More from Einstein
I like what he says next even better. This is what separates the cannabis community from those who would persecute us:

"The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as all serious endeavour in art and science. He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness."

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Comment #9 posted by null on May 07, 2002 at 13:52:43 PT
Einstein on nationalism
I am against any nationalism, even in the guise of mere patriotism.Privileges based on position and property have always seemed to me unjust and pernicious, as did any exaggerated personality cult. I am an adherent of the ideal of democracy, although I well know the weaknesses of the democratic form of government. Social equality and economic protection of the individual appeared to me always as the important communal aims of the state.Although I am a typical loner in daily life, my consciousness of belonging to the invisible community of those who strive for truth, beauty, and justice has preserved me from feeling isolated.

I think this sentiment might be familiar to many of us here at CN. If only everyone had such high-minded thoughts...

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Comment #8 posted by Dankhank on May 07, 2002 at 12:49:40 PT:

Intrigued
E_Johnson, pray tell which jovial red-hatted fellow you indicate seems regrettably comforted by the burning of human beings ...

As an employee of the Catholic Church I wish to know ...

:-)

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Comment #7 posted by E_Johnson on May 07, 2002 at 11:59:43 PT
Try again -- they used to hunt witches
Browser problems errrgh. Try again:

If we're lucky, our grandchildren will recall the global war on drugs of the late 20th and early 21st century as some bizarre mania to which only past generations could succumb.

Well, not all of them. There is still at least one cardinal in the Vatican who is willing to state in public that burning heretics and torturing witches were "necessary but regrettable" steps towards building a unified Christian religion.

But maybe he's forgotten about the Reformation. They don't get reminded of it much in Italy. ;-)



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Comment #6 posted by E_Johnson on May 07, 2002 at 11:55:05 PT
They used to hunt witches, didn't they?

Well, not all of them. There is still at least one cardinal in the Vatican who is willing to state in public that burning heretics and torturing witches were necessary but regrettable steps towards building a unified Christian religion.

But maybe he's forgotten about the Reformation. They don't get reminded of it much in Italy. ;-)



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Comment #5 posted by idbsne1 on May 07, 2002 at 07:57:43 PT
Well said Dr. Russo.....!!
"Personally, I think it would be a better world when we think of ourselves as fellow humans rather than be identifying primarily by virtue of national origin."

From "Territories" by my favorite group, RUSH...

"They shoot, without shame In the name of a piece of dirt For a change of accent, or the color of your shirt

Better the pride that resides In a citizen of the world Than the pride that divides When a colorful rag is unfurled..."

This is cool that it was in a Taiwanese paper...

idbsne1

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Comment #4 posted by goneposthole on May 07, 2002 at 06:05:48 PT
There were no drugs in existence a century ago
Mr. Nadelman doesn't know his history, so we, the fascist pigs will rewrite it for him. Also, there were no Jews or gypsies mass murdered at Auschwitz or any of those so-called concentration camps. It is all a pigment of somebody's imagination.

You will learn the proper way of recording history. Nothing bad has ever happened. We will tell you what went on throughout history and you will believe it.

Signed- your favorite fascist pigs

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Comment #3 posted by Ethan Russo MD on May 07, 2002 at 05:22:46 PT:

Take Notice
Notice the author. Notice the source. The anti-prohibitionist message is finally going global in a big way, and many nations are ready to cut and run from a war that has caused inestimable harm.

This nation is increasingly isolated, and by its own design.

Personally, I think it would be a better world when we think of ourselves as fellow humans rather than be identifying primarily by virtue of national origin.

[ Post Comment ]

 
Comment #2 posted by Jose Melendez on May 07, 2002 at 05:19:59 PT
is Letterman under a gag order?
Last night, David Letterman commented that there were all sorts of events and gatherings in New York City, did NOT mention the Million Marijuana March but his punch line was that it was a good thing Mayor Bloomberg was not in town... the crowd seemed to get that the joke was really about the pot rally, or maybe I am just reading into it. Bill Maher mentioned that it is ridiculous we can market dangerous foods to two year olds, yet marijuana, which "never killed anyone" is illegal. Indeed, there seem to be no deaths from marijuana that are not attributable to drug prohibition. But what do I know?

[ Post Comment ]
 
Comment #1 posted by p4me on May 07, 2002 at 01:47:44 PT
Is that alcohol 9 and marijuana 65 with...
marijuana still gaining. Did alcohol prohibition last 9 years and isn't 2002 65 years from 1937? What will the final score be?

Today on the 6:30 CBS News Sharyl Attiksson reported on the ways the pill industry uses the courts to extend the 20 year patents on their products in order to fight the generics who want in on the big money. She focused on the popular purple pill, Prilosec, used for heartburn.

When the live portion began Attiksson started with "Protecting legitimate patents is perfectly legal but critics say there's abuse of the systems with the makers of blockbuster drugs fighting tooth and nail..."

By filing an action using the courts as a defense or a weapon depending on your perspective. Astra Zeneca makes 11 million more dollars a day in profits that the case lingers because the generic drugs cannot be introduced until the case is settled. General Motors spent $55 million dollars on this one drug for its employees and if the generic product were not legallyblocked from market General Motors cost would have been half. It went on about how much it was costing the government- 25 million a month. Then think of all the other pills in this 158 billion or 208 billion dollar industry. I have heard both numbers. I can furnish you with another number for reference. The entire meat packing industry is an 80 billion dollar industry.

Big business using the system to line their pockets at the expense of the sick and the public treasury. What is new about that? Just because the conglomerate media does not use the word corruption on the front page of tomorrows sifted news does not mean that that the informed citizenry doesn't know better.

I say the program NOW with Bill Moyers on PBS this last Friday. His closing comments are at the PBS.org website. It was about the first papers being released about the energy policy and the meetings Cheney had when the Energy Policy was being formed. It is a damming thing that Bill Moyers who was the Press Secretary for Caveman Nixon had to say.

You know how that THE CHILDREN, THE CHILDREN, THE CHILDREN. The constant chant from the Cavemen in the highest caves. Dam that gets old. So I was trying to think of something besides children and I though about MOMS As in MOMS Against Drunk Driving or something. Except I was not really thinking about the real MOMS, I was thinking about letters and words to go with them. I submit "Medicine or More $hit" and maybe MOMS from Congress for the name of a group. After 65 years don't you think a war out policy deserves to retire? I guess people retire and war out policies die?

Today's forecast- The corruption will continue and there will be more $hit from the government. The conglomerate media will not cover the story.

Starve the economy and have a thrifty meal. VAAI



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