Face It: Drugs Have Won the War

by Rick Gunderman

The War on Drugs is sapping billions of dollars in public funding which could otherwise have gone to health care, education, public infrastructure, or childcare. Worse yet, there is not a shred of evidence to suggest that drug use has gone down since Richard Nixon declared the decades-long crusade against personal consumption.

In fact, the Netherlands – where marijuana use is effectively legal – annual consumption rates are significantly lower than in Canada, New Zealand, Australia, the USA, Spain, France, Belgium, Scotland, England, Austria, Italy, Germany, and Denmark.

There is no person on this planet that needs to understand this reality more than Barack Obama.

On February 22, 2008, before his deposition at the hands of the military, Honduran President Manuel Zelaya called on the United States to legalize drugs as a step towards harm reduction. Zelaya pointed out specifically that Honduras, as a common transiting point between Colombia and the US, suffers many violent murders related to the drug trade. An average of 8-10 murders occur in Honduras every day, and it is estimated that 70% of those murders are linked to the illicit drug trade.

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper recently began to orchestrate his “law and order” crackdown campaign, which includes stepping up the War on Drugs. Reports from Abbotsford, British Columbia (a city with pre-existing drug and gang problems) suggest that violence is on the rise because of the Mexican government’s similar crackdown on cocaine smugglers. Gangs in Abbotsford are fighting tooth-and-nail for control of what little cocaine is finding its way into Canada, creating havoc for the good people of the Fraser Valley.

Those who place the blame exclusively on gangs fail to realize the impact that public policy has on the negative repercussions of the drug trade. As noted, the Netherlands has much lower rates of consumption than most of Europe and North America because the Dutch government’s drug policy focuses on harm reduction. The Canadian city of Vancouver has tried similar harm reduction approaches, including the introduction of a safe-injection site for the city’s hard-drug users.

Harper’s crackdown agenda was put to the test last week when the Supreme Court of Canada threw out a case where $4 million in cocaine was seized because the officer who made the bust trampled on the suspect’s rights under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Despite the prime minister’s heavy-handed approach to running the government and the lives of the Canadian people, the Supreme Court upheld its duty to enforce the Charter in the face of a quasi-authoritarian government.

The Supreme Court’s decision highlights, although does not precisely emphasize, the exact issue that should surround the debate on drug policy but never seems to surface in parliamentary circles. Individual harm reduction and disempowering organized crime are important, but the key issue is that it is not moral or within the spirit of liberty to make criminals out of individuals who engage in personal drug consumption. Just like the government has no place in the bedrooms of the nation, neither does it have a place in dictating what an individual chooses to put into their bodies. It is matter of free will.

It is very rare that I come across anything in The Economist (a neoliberal publication if there ever was one) that I find valuable, but they surprised me with two articles deploring drug prohibition and advocating legalization. They can be found at:

http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13237193

and

http://www.economist.com/world/americas/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13905530

Their cases are very articulate and intelligently argued.