[Mb-hair] The Americas need a bold new policy on drugs

[Michael Butler]

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The Americas need a bold new policy on drugs
>By Juan Tokatlian
>Published: April 27 2005 20:38 | Last updated: April 27 2005 20:38
>>

Narcotics are still a pressing problem in the US, more than four decades
after the current policy to tackle them was first developed. The drug war
has not worked and, although there is a great deal of evidence to suggest
that the blight of drugs is getting worse, most politicians shy away from
discussing the issue. This is a big mistake. The politics of denial ends up
justifying a continuous futile crusade.

Nearly $400bn of US public money has been devoted to different anti-drug
activities during the past 20 years, with limited success. After spending so
much to control the drug phenomenon, what went wrong? In essence, the
national and international drug control strategy promulgated by the US
during the last four administrations has been flawed. If abstinence is the
most important aim of prohibition, the figures regarding new use and
heightened abuse of drugs and the data on drug- related criminality and the
growth of drug-taking among the young reveal a costly failure.

Notwithstanding the unprecedented percentage of federal and state inmates
incarcerated for drugs offences, the truth is that this policy is close to
collapse. And most illegal drugs are now more easily available, purer and
cheaper than in the early 1980s.

The US drugs strategy has two prongs: first to step up the eradication
effort and reduce the price that producers can charge, discouraging peasants
from cultivating illicit crops; second, to strengthen interdiction at the
processing and transit countries to reduce the availability and potency of
drugs in the US and to increase seizures at US borders, thus raising the
domestic price of narcotics and deterring potential consumers.

However, this policy has produced unintended winners and losers. In contrast
to what was expected and desired, and as an indirect effect of the US drugs
strategy, American organised crime at home and transnational criminal
organisations in Latin America and the Caribbean, in particular, have got
richer and more powerful, while US citizens have become less safe and more
threatened. Prohibition has provided the incentive for well-organised
narco-criminal groups to diversify the market for drugs, to channel the
proceeds through financial havens and to extend strategic partnerships with
other illegal businesses.

The drug phenomenon has created enormous social, political, ecological and
military difficulties throughout the Americas. The legacy of a mistaken war
that has focused on the supply of narcotics encompasses human rights abuses,
environmental catastrophes, imbalances in civil-military relations,
institutional corruption, massive civil rights violations, concentration of
power in drug Mafia and law enforcement failures.

The notion of a Pax Americana used to convey the sense of a single hegemony
by a superpower such as the US. But we may now be witnessing the gradual
consolidation of a hemispheric Pax Mafiosa: the growing power, and even
legitimacy in some cases, of a new criminal social class with the ability,
commitment and opportunity to lead.

Some rural portions of Colombia and Mexico, some urban ghettos in Los
Angeles and Rio de Janeiro, some municipalities in Paraguay and some islands
in the Caribbean provide a foretaste of what may happen if the Pax Mafiosa
becomes consolidated nationally and continentally in the years to come.

Such a Pax Mafiosa would have dire consequences: the establishment of
kleptocratic governments, the breakdown of the rule of law, highly violent
environments, extended social polarisation, potential sanctuary for
terrorist activities and, very probably, failing states.

On Monday, the most important inter-American body - the Organisation of
American States - will meet to choose a new secretary-general. An important
undertaking for the new head should be to convene a high level summit to
debate and promote a new, bold policy on drugs for the Americas. This should
include developing policies to strengthen the rule of law and nation states,
acting in concert to avoid spillover effects in the region, concentrating
the public policy on drugs around demand control and harm reduction and
avoiding military responses to social ills.

The continent does not need a rehearsal of a failed war against narcotics;
it needs preventive diplomacy to curtail a regional Pax Mafiosa.

The writer is the director of Political Science and International Relations
at the Universidad de San Andres, Argentina
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