Читать книгу The War on Drugs - Paula Mallea - Страница 6

How We Got into This Predicament

Shifting Ground

The ground is shifting under the War on Drugs. After more than forty years of tough-on-drugs rhetoric, countries around the world are withdrawing from the law enforcement model espoused by Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan as well as by the international community and its many nation states. One by one, starting in Europe and Latin America, they are beginning to question the wisdom of using the criminal justice system to deal with a problem that they now feel requires a public health model. In turn they are beginning to remove criminal sanctions from some or all drug infractions. Astonishingly, even the United States is rethinking its approach, with two states voting to legalize marijuana and the Attorney General announcing a less harsh approach to some non-violent drug offenders.

Many of those who used to be dedicated drug warriors are renouncing the War on Drugs in order to work for the liberalization of drug laws. A good example revolves around the story of a Canadian advocate for marijuana legalization who is currently serving five years in an American prison. Marc Emery, Canada’s “Prince of Pot,” sold marijuana seeds to American buyers and was convicted in Washington State in 2010 for that offence. The man who put him in prison, District Attorney John McKay, took to a podium in Vancouver two years later and argued for the outright legalization of that very drug.[1] “Criminal prohibition of marijuana is a complete failure,” he said, adding that it allowed gangs and cartels to generate billions in profits and cause mayhem while doing so. At time of writing, Marc Emery is still serving his sentence in the United States. The Harper government has refused, so far, to permit his transfer to a Canadian prison.

John McKay is by no means the only one who has moved from one side of this debate to the other. Prosecutors, police, medical doctors, mayors, Attorneys General, former and current heads of state, and many others now urge the legalization, regulation, and taxation of marijuana. Many also argue that the prohibition of other illegal drugs should be lifted and replaced with a legal regime appropriate to each. How has this sea change occurred, and will it result in the wholesale adoption by nations of a new approach to illegal drugs?

Where is Canada in this developing scenario? Ten years ago we were toying with the idea of decriminalizing marijuana — a very modest proposal. Today, we are outliers, denying the science and research that show the criminal justice model to be counterproductive to public safety, to our fiscal health, and to the health of our communities. We are cracking down on illegal drugs, increasing prison sentences, and reducing funding to the many treatment and prevention programs that we know work. How did we get here and why are we virtually alone in ramping up the demonization of certain drugs?

Canada’s position from the beginning has been fraught with contradiction. We were the first in North America to ban marijuana, but also the first to allow for its use as a medication (spurred on, it must be admitted, by the Supreme Court of Canada). Parliamentary reports as early as 1972 and as recently as 2002 have recommended that the prohibition of marijuana be lifted and that a regime of decriminalization or outright legalization be instituted. In 2004, a Liberal government even tabled legislation that purported to effect some minor changes.

However, in 2006, a Conservative minority was elected that solidly backed the War on Drugs. It swiftly hardened its position on punishment of all drug infractions, including harsh mandatory minimum sentences. As of November 2012, judges no longer have any discretion in sentencing most drug offences. If, for example, an offender grows six marijuana plants, he will face a mandatory prison sentence of six months. If the offender is growing his six plants in a rented unit (a house he shares while attending university, for example), the mandatory minimum is nine months.

Conservative legislators have ensured maximum coverage by designing additional “health and safety factors” and “aggravating factors.” These factors are vague, mandating the application of higher sentences to drug offenders. For example, if an offender is in possession of more than three kilograms of marijuana or resin for the purpose of trafficking, he will receive at least a two-year sentence if he did so “for the abuse of authority or position” or if he did so “in or near a school, in or near an area normally frequented by youth, or in the presence of youth.” Both factors are so vague and/or all-encompassing (for example, where in the average city can you go and not be near an area frequented by youth?) as to virtually guarantee the mandatory minimum will be applied. Prisons are already bursting with the influx of inmates sentenced under this new regime.

Only recently have Canadian politicians opposed to the Conservatives begun to revise their positions on illegal drugs. The New Democratic Party (NDP) now recommends decriminalization of marijuana possession, while the Greens support marijuana’s outright legalization. The Liberal Party of Canada has recently adopted a policy to legalize marijuana, and has designed proposed regulations to this end. None has suggested changes concerning the treatment of other illegal drugs.

Among nations around the world, Canada is now one of the toughest when it comes to waging the War on Drugs. This can only partly be explained by our historic close relationship with the United States. It is true that we are the main trading partner of the United States and share a four-thousand-mile border. Or, as famed author and wit Margaret Atwood put it, we share the longest undefended one-way mirror in the world.[2] If illegal drugs were to be decriminalized or legalized in Canada, it has always been thought that this would negatively affect our relationship with the United States in ways that could only be imagined.

But now the ground is shifting south of the border, sowing confusion among Canadian hardliners who have always been able to rely upon American drug czars and their colossal budgets to support an all-out war. American voters have been retreating from the drug war, electing to legalize pot — in Washington and Colorado in 2013 — and expand the number of states allowing for the use of medical marijuana. Currently, twenty states and Washington, DC, allow the prescribing of medical marijuana,[3] while seven more states are considering this policy change.[4] Recent developments also show that President Obama is becoming less inclined to vigorously prosecute marijuana laws.

There have been many high-profile Americans calling for a new approach to this issue. One of the most influential was broadcaster Walter Cronkite. He said America needed to admit it was wrong about the War on Drugs in the same way that Robert McNamara had later admitted not only that the Vietnam War was “wrong, terribly wrong,” but that he had thought so at the very time he was helping wage it.[5] Cronkite urged then-president Bill Clinton to appoint a bipartisan commission to review the evidence and produce a comprehensive drug policy for the future:

It’s surely time for this nation to stop flying blind, stop accepting the assurances of politicians and other officials that if only we keep doing what we’re doing, add a little more cash, break down a few more doors, lock up a few more [people], then we would see the light at the end of the tunnel. Victory would be ours…. We cannot go into tomorrow with the same formulas that are failing today. We must not blindly add to the body count and the terrible cost of the war on drugs only to learn from another Robert McNamara thirty years from now that what we’ve been doing is wrong, terribly wrong.

Cronkite made these remarks in 1995. Almost twenty years later, his plea continues to be ignored.

One American who changed his mind in a hurry was California state assemblyman Pat Nolan. Mr. Nolan had been all in favour of longer sentences for drug offences until he himself served two years in prison on corruption charges. In a reference to the United States’s moralistic approach to drugs, and to its indiscriminate use of prison sentences, he said, “We should reserve our prison space for people we are afraid of, instead of people we are mad at.”[6]

Among those around the world who now advocate for a repeal of drug prohibition are high-ranking scientists who have over time changed their minds about illegal drugs. Dr. David Nutt first assumed his responsibilities as Chair of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) in Britain thinking that the country was on the right track in its determined prosecution of illegal drugs.[7] However, he soon decided that the criminal justice approach was doing more harm than good, producing perverse consequences. He also came to deplore a world view shared by drug warriors that “taking certain drugs in certain kinds of ways is not just harmful but immoral.”

Dr. Nutt’s Waterloo moment arrived when Britain’s Home Secretary rejected the ACMD’s advice as to the proper categorization of marijuana. The ACMD had recommended that it should continue to be listed in the less-harmful category, but the government instead reclassified it to a category indicating a higher level of harmfulness. Dr. Nutt argued that this ran against the scientific evidence and maintained that, while marijuana was not harmless, it was much less harmful than, say, alcohol. He was determined to provide a consistent public-health message, and maintained that this was an impossible task if the government refused to talk about the harmfulness of certain legal drugs. As he put it, “The more hysterical and exaggerated any Home Secretary was about the harms of cannabis, the less credibility they would have in the eyes of the teenagers binge-drinking themselves into comas every day.”

As a result of the inevitable confrontation, Dr. Nutt was fired and a number of ACMD’s scientific experts resigned. They have since gone on to form the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs (ISCD), which urges people and governments to consider drug policy in the light of objective evidence. Dr. Nutt says, “Being willing to change our minds in the light of new evidence is essential to rational policy-making.” British police officers, medical professionals, politicians, and many others have also changed their minds and are lobbying hard for change.

In Latin America, heads of state and former heads of state are seeking a different approach to illegal drugs. Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Fernando Henrique Cardoso (former president of Brazil), César Gaviria (former president of Colombia), and Ernesto Zedillo (former president of Mexico) were unequivocal: “The War on Drugs has failed…. Prohibitionist policies based on eradication, interdiction, and criminalization of consumption simply haven’t worked. Violence and the organized crime associated with the narcotics trade remain critical problems in our countries.”[8] They claimed that “U.S.–inspired drug policies” had led to the corruption of their judicial and political systems. They tentatively suggested the decriminalization of marijuana, and recommended focusing on a health and education approach to drug use, rather than repression.

Another former president of Mexico, Vicente Fox, has been vocal about the drug war. “The War on Drugs convoked by President Nixon 40 years ago has been a total failure,” he says.[9] He recommends legalizing all drugs, stating that “freedom of choice exercised in an educated, responsible manner” should be the objective.[10] He speaks eloquently of the thousands of young Mexicans who have died because of the drug war: “These people were not born criminals; they did not possess criminality in their genes. And yet because of a flawed public policy, because of lack of education and disinformation, because of lack of better economic incentives and opportunities, they became victims of an insane war against an enemy we can never defeat with the current prohibitions in place.” He says the prerequisite to legalization will be the repeal of prohibition by the United States.

Felipe Calderón (whose repressive regime is widely credited with the deaths of tens of thousands of Mexicans), speaking before he stepped down as Mexico’s president, mused that it was “impossible” to stop the drug trade, and called for “market alternatives.” Most observers have interpreted “market alternatives” to mean a legalized, controlled market in drugs.

Other current Latin American leaders calling for change include Guatemalan president Otto Pérez Molina, a former military strongman. At the 2012 Summit of the Americas, he called the War on Drugs “a global deceit,” saying drugs cannot be eradicated.[11] He urged leaders to stop being ideologues and start thinking about drug use as a public health issue. He would prefer to see all drugs legalized, with limits and conditions.

Juan Manuel Santos, current president of Colombia, has emerged as a leading voice on the international political stage calling for major changes.[12] He is concerned that the consuming countries appear not to be interested in change. He would be inclined to legalize marijuana and perhaps cocaine, but only “if there is a world consensus.” He says that “a new approach should try [to] take away the violent profit that comes with drug trafficking…. If that means legalising, and the world thinks that’s the solution, I will welcome it.” He, too, deplores the corruption that comes with the drug trade.

Two Latin American leaders have already moved away from the prohibition model. President Evo Morales of Bolivia has managed to make the growing of coca leaves in his country legal, and their use permitted by the United Nations.[13] And President José Mujica of Uruguay has just succeeded in legalizing marijuana.[14] No wild-haired radical, Mujica is a seventy-eight-year-old former guerrilla who spent fourteen years in prison. He says, “Nowhere in the world has repression yielded results [in the War on Drugs].” President Mujica has just been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his leadership on drug policy.

It will not be lost on the reader that the national leaders who are calling for change are all heads of drug-producing states. These are countries whose citizens are dying in the tens of thousands. The War on Drugs is wrecking their economies, their environments are being destroyed, and corruption and violence are endemic, threatening the very foundations of their states. In the words of President Santos, they are losing their best politicians, best journalists, best police, and best judges to the drug war.[15]

The consuming countries, on the other hand — Canada, the United States, European nations — continue to be mostly resistant to policy change. Although small incursions against the all-out drug war are being made in the United States and in some European nations, by and large the consuming countries are content to let producing nations take the fall for consumers’ habits. As one Uruguayan legislator said, “The U.S. provides the arms and we provide the dead.”[16]

When thinking about how best to push for change, it’s helpful to understand the history. How is it that certain drugs became the subject of prohibition while others did not? What lies behind the distinctions that were made over the past century? Do these distinctions make any sense? Are they distinctions that today should not be acceptable because they smack of discrimination and moralism? Why did incarceration become the default mode for what is essentially a public health problem? How do we strip away this history and deal with problems of drug abuse in ways that accord with the science and evidence?

The Early History of Criminalization

Today’s illegal drugs were regularly used — by respectable society no less — as legal drugs until quite recently in our history. Any number of patented medicines once contained cocaine or morphine.[17] Coca-Cola contained cocaine until 1900, and Bayer Pharmaceutical Products sold heroin over the counter in 1898. Even Queen Victoria was known to take and enjoy both marijuana and cocaine.[18] During the late 1800s, there were cough medicines for children that contained extracts of marijuana, heroin, and cocaine. British department store Harrods sold both cocaine and heroin over the counter until 1916, and prepared gift packs for First World War soldiers that contained morphine and cocaine.[19] Heroin has always been available on prescription in the United Kingdom with certain restrictions (with the exception of a short time in the mid-1950s when pressure from the United States convinced the government to ban it). Marijuana, cocaine, and heroin were, in fact, almost mainstream drugs until the beginning of the twentieth century.

Some American states passed laws in the late 1800s that limited the commerce in cocaine, marijuana, and opium. As will be seen, these were largely racist laws targeting mainly black, Mexican, and Chinese men. They were intended to protect white women from predation by these minorities and to sideline populations that were seen to be taking jobs away from white people.[20] But how did this all come to pass?

In 1906, the federal Pure Food and Drug Act was passed in the United States, and this resulted in the demise of the patent medicine industry.[21] This was followed by the 1914 Harrison Narcotic Act, which imposed so many regulations that it was virtually impossible to conduct legal commerce in opium and cocaine. Finally, in 1919, the Supreme Court, in Webb v. United States, cruelly decided that it was illegal for doctors to prescribe drugs to alleviate symptoms of withdrawal. This ushered in the black market that still flourishes today. It drove the industry underground while ensuring that the quality of available drugs became unreliable and therefore dangerous to users.

In 1937, the United States passed its Marijuana Tax Act, which prohibited the non-medicinal and unlicensed possession or sale of marijuana. The hysteria around the use of marijuana by this time had reached its peak. In 1936, Reefer Madness (propaganda thinly disguised as a melodramatic feature film) warned against the dangers of marijuana. In 1937, Harry J. Anslinger, commissioner of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Narcotics (now the Drug Enforcement Agency or DEA), wildly claimed, “Marijuana is the most violence-causing drug in the history of mankind. Most marijuana smokers are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos, and entertainers. Their satanic music, jazz and swing, result from marijuana usage. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes.”[22]

Thus Mr. Anslinger neatly encapsulated the moral outrage, racial prejudice, and unfocused fear that informed the prohibition of marijuana. It should be noted that the American Medical Association (AMA) spoke out against the criminalization of the drug in 1937.

The 1937 law, coupled with considerable red tape and an exorbitant tax, succeeded in removing marijuana from the commercial market and driving it, too, underground. Even hemp, a harmless substance much-prized for its commercial uses as rope, paper, and textiles (it is the stalk of the marijuana plant, with no active THC content) was outlawed after the Second World War.[23]

In Canada, early legislation followed almost in lockstep with the United States. In 1908, the Opium Act made it illegal to import, manufacture, or sell opium for non-medicinal purposes.[24] However, in imitation of the racist approach of the United States, Canadian law enforcement ensured that only the Chinese manufacturers of opium for smoking were put out of business. At the same time, the patent-medicine industry was allowed to continue dispensing opiated liquids to its primarily white customers. In 1922, changes to The Opium and Narcotic Control Act resulted in high conviction rates and harsh sentences against the Chinese population in British Columbia, including deportation back to China.[25]

Cocaine was banned for use in medicines in 1908, and was later included in the 1911 Opium and Drugs Act, which provided for harsher sentences for drug convictions.

Canada was ahead of the United States in banning marijuana. Feminist Emily Murphy is widely credited with helping convince the government to do so. She demonized the drug, describing drug users as “dope fiends,” and received an extraordinary amount of publicity by writing a book and a series of articles for Maclean’s magazine on the subject. The government obliged by the simple expedient of adding cannabis to the schedule of prohibited drugs in 1923. This was announced quietly, succinctly, and somewhat ominously: “There is a new drug in the schedule.”

Eighty years later, a Senate committee excoriated Canada’s 1923 law. It said that the law had provided a solution where there was no problem.[26] It had amounted to a pre-emptive strike. The committee concluded that the 1923 marijuana prohibition was based upon “moral panic, racist sentiment and a notorious absence of debate.”[27]

The rationale for criminalizing drugs in North America relied upon neither science nor public health concerns. Moral indignation, racial prejudice, classism, and cultural differences were responsible for the wholesale outlawing of drugs that had been seen as largely beneficial when used sensibly. It is not going too far to suggest that drug prohibition has been employed as a means of social control.

The ban on marijuana provides a good example of the effect of racism upon drug policy. At the time of its prohibition in the United States, marijuana was considered to be the drug of choice of African-Americans, who used it in speakeasies where jazz — an “immoral” new type of music — was prominent. Raw sex was widely thought to be central to the atmosphere of these clubs, and combined with a widespread fear of black men as predators on white women, these factors were enough for legislators to outlaw the drug associated with them.

An additional factor associated with marijuana prohibition was that Mexican men were immigrating to the United States in significant numbers and were bringing a penchant for the drug with them. The Mexicans were regarded as a threat to jobs for white men at the time, and so criminalizing the drug was one way of ridding the employment market of these interlopers.

The racism implicit in these developments continues today, and African-Americans are incarcerated in the United States at a much higher rate for drug use, even where they use drugs less than Caucasians. In every major county of California, African-Americans are two to four times more likely to be arrested than Caucasians for marijuana offences, even though they are less likely to smoke marijuana.[28] In more general terms, although black and non-black use of marijuana is “similar” across the board, 74 percent of those in American prisons for using marijuana are black. A recent report by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) confirms this, saying that Caucasians and African-Americans use marijuana about equally, but the latter are 3.73 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession.[29]

A recent New York Times editorial described the “war on marijuana” as a tool of racial oppression.[30] It noted that in some U.S. states, African-Americans are eight times more likely to be arrested for marijuana offences and in some counties up to thirty times more likely. Police are targeting these communities, largely in response to numerical arrest goals, which encourage petty arrests and illegal stops. Officers are evaluated on the numbers of arrests they make.

Two recent books set out, in stark and damning detail, the history of continuing oppression of the African-American community through drug laws. Dr. Carl Hart is a neuropsychopharmacologist who demolishes many of the myths surrounding illegal drugs and the generally accepted ideas about who is using them.[31] And civil rights lawyer Michelle Alexander has written a flaming indictment of how the prosecution of illegal drugs has marginalized and disenfranchised millions of African-Americans.[32] She maintains in her book The New Jim Crow that mass incarceration is the new tool of social control, replacing slavery, and that the most effective part of that tool is the War on Drugs.

Political philosopher Noam Chomsky has placed his considerable weight behind this argument, speaking of the reinstitution of criminalization of the African-American population in the late 1970s.[33] He calls it a race war, and says, “It’s not based on crime. The device that was used to recriminalize the black population was drugs. The drug wars are fraud — a total fraud. They have nothing to do with drugs; the price of drugs doesn’t change. What the drug war has succeeded in doing is to criminalize the poor. And the poor in the United States happen to be overwhelmingly black and Latino.”

Then he explains how this selective criminalization was accomplished: “Almost entirely, from the first moment, the orders given to the police as to how to deal with drugs were, ‘You don’t go into the suburbs and arrest the white stockbroker sniffing coke in the evening, but you do go into the ghettos, and if a kid has a joint in his pocket, you put him in jail.’”

Western countries have recently banned another substance that is used traditionally by a specific ethnic community, even though no science exists to justify the prohibition. Qat, a traditional herb chewed in parts of Africa and in some Arab countries for its mild stimulus, was outlawed by the United States in 1993 and by Canada in 1998. Twenty years went by before the United Kingdom followed the U.S. example. Its decision to ban qat in 2013, despite the recommendation of the ACMD, was highly controversial.[34] David Nutt said the decision “shows contempt for reason and evidence, disregard for the sincere efforts of the ACMD, and most of all, indifference to the welfare and rights of the communities in which qat is used.” He claimed that the U.K. had bowed to persistent pressure from the United States.

The ACMD had found that there was insufficient evidence that chewing qat caused health or other problems. It also found no evidence that qat was linked to organized crime, or used to fund the Somalia-based Al-Shabaab Islamist group, as was alleged by some. On the other hand, the ban risks criminalizing as many as ninety thousand members of the Somali, Yemeni, and Ethiopian communities in Britain who chew qat as part of their social lives. The racism implicit in the decision to ban qat is clear.

Qat is still legal in many east African countries, and can be imported under licence in Australia. Only fourteen European countries have banned the substance. The World Health Organization (WHO) in 2006 blocked the scheduling of qat under United Nations international controls — so under WHO rules, it is still legal.[35] However, the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB), which was set up by the 1961 United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, persists in trying to overturn this decision.

In addition to the racist element, there has always been a prejudice along socio-economic lines affecting the prosecution of the War on Drugs. For example, among organized crime hierarchies, it is most often street-level dealers and consumers of drugs who are caught by law enforcement and punished.[36] High-end dealers and financiers largely remain untouched and continue in the trade.

A quick survey of the socio-economic status of prison inmates in Canada today shows that it is still mainly the poor and marginalized, particularly Native people, who are successfully prosecuted and incarcerated. This is as true for drug offences as for violent, anti-social behaviour.[37] It is rare for a well-to-do cocaine or heroin user to spend time in prison.

Case in point: Keith Richards, famed guitarist with the Rolling Stones, was arrested in Toronto in 1977 and charged with possession for the purpose of trafficking of twenty-two grams of high-grade heroin.[38] The maximum sentence for this offence at the time was life in prison. Two things then happened. The prosecutor reduced the charge to simple possession and asked for a sentence of six months to one year. And the judge sentenced Richards to probation, on the condition that his band would give a free concert performance in aid of the blind within six months. In view of the fact that Richards had a record of five drug charges over the previous ten years, this was a result that left others convicted of heroin offences speechless. One law for the rich; one for the poor. One for the famous; one for the rest.

Over time, a trend has been established of banning substances used by ethnic minorities, marginalized people, and immigrants, and then of treating preferentially those in the prosperous mainstream who choose to indulge. Substances like alcohol and tobacco that have long been accepted by the dominant community continue to be legal.

Despite the fact that most illegal drugs were outlawed some time ago, the orgy of prosecution and imprisonment that we are familiar with today did not really begin until the 1960s. Both the international community and individual nations became part of an historic effort to eliminate the use of particular drugs. They chose to tackle the problem, not through education and treatment, but by punishing drug offenders with prison sentences, even where offences were victimless and non-violent. A dependency on drugs was not treated as a public health issue. Instead, it was prosecuted as evidence of an individual’s moral failure.

The Role of International Institutions

The international community stepped into the game in 1961. In that year, under pressure from the United States, the United Nations passed the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, which enshrined the prohibition of selected drugs in domestic law across the globe. This and subsequent conventions signed in 1971 (and its 1972 Protocol) and 1988 had the effect of ensuring a regime of outright prohibition of certain drugs virtually everywhere in the world.

A close reading of the conventions shows that they did allow for a more flexible approach with respect to some minor drug infractions. However, over the years they became a hammer, enforcing a strict criminal justice model and preventing individual nations from adopting public health approaches (or any other alternative approaches).[39] The International Narcotics Control Board (INCB), set up by the 1961 convention, has always taken a particularly hard line, endorsing repressive drug policies. The Global Commission on Drug Policy says that “the U.N. drug control system continues to act largely as a straitjacket…. For most of the last century, it has been the U.S. government that has led calls for the development and maintenance of repressive drug policies.”[40] The commission goes on to say that there is “strong institutional resistance” to new ideas within the United Nations.

Only very recently has the international community, represented by the United Nations, started to soften its tone. This is partly because it has begun to admit that the science does not support its punitive approach. For years its representatives tried to massage the message to support its law-and-order stance. For example, in 2002, a scandal erupted at the United Nations Office of Drug Control and Crime Prevention (ODCCP). The executive director had edited the World Drug Report 2000 to make it appear as if the ODCCP’s policy of suppression by law enforcement was successfully driving illegal drug use down. Research showed that this was not the case. The Global Commission on Drug Policy has said that public leaders need to admit what they know privately: “That the evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that repressive strategies will not solve the drug problem, and that the war on drugs has not, and cannot, be won.”[41]

Yet in 2012, the United Nations report on drugs and crime (World Drug Report 2012) was still making a mighty effort to reconcile its preferred conclusions with the facts on the ground.[42] It repeatedly asserted, against the evidence, that increased enforcement was driving drug production and use down, that illegal drugs were more dangerous than alcohol and tobacco, and that most people supported the drug war. It referred to drug “epidemics.” These assertions were offered as justification for continued interdiction and more stringent law enforcement. Unfortunately, they too did not accord with the science and statistics.

The U.N. did admit that traffickers are quick to adapt to increased law enforcement by changing the routes and methods they use to bring drugs north. Western Africa is a new route to Europe, while organized crime is beginning to use containers and airplanes in response to the crackdown on Caribbean and Central American sea and land routes. European markets have also shifted from Colombia to Bolivia and Peru for their supply of cocaine.

Other organizations and nations dedicated to the War on Drugs also do not address the fact that drug lords are always one step ahead of law enforcement, and always will be. There is simply so much money to be made from the illicit market that organized crime can afford equipment and technology that are out of the reach of the average enforcement budget. And traffickers are agile in moving to places where the law has not yet reached, or where it can be readily corrupted.

The U.N. report went on to say that drug use has stabilized worldwide over the past decade, including in Canada, and that marijuana use in the United States has dropped 50 percent from its peak in 1979. After lengthy discussions of marijuana, cocaine, and the opioids, the report admitted that, except for marijuana, the most prevalent type of illegal drug use is none of these. It is, in fact, the non-medical use of (legal) pharmaceuticals.

The report discussed the “direct” costs of illegal drug use (losses in productivity, costs of health care, crime committed by users to obtain the price of their drugs, costs of drug treatment). However, it paid scant attention to the costs of organized crime violence, adulterated and dangerous products, the spread of disease, and other costs that are directly attributable to criminalization and the black market that it creates.

The report predicted the success of the drug war in the future. At the same time, in a baffling display of inconsistency and incoherence, it estimated that the total number of drug users could increase by 25 percent by 2050 (an implicit admission that the enforcement model will not succeed in driving the percentages down). Then it agreed that few people who use an illicit drug one time ever progress to frequent or regular (monthly) use.

If this seems like a collection of self-contradictory statements, it is. Having created confusion around the issue of worldwide drug use, the report then made passing reference to what it called the “unintended effects” of drug control: black markets, organized crime, replacement or displacement of the markets to other regions, and so on. But these kinds of “unintended consequences” are wholly predictable. They are the results, not of the use of drugs, but of the criminalization of those drugs. They are also, by all accounts, responsible for the most extensive harms that are created. The report, however, did not deal seriously with these consequences of prohibition.

There are notable international efforts to shift the discussion away from the law enforcement model and toward a variety of alternatives. For example, there are teams of scientists working on HIV/AIDS who are encouraging a public health approach. In 2010, the XVIII International AIDS Conference (chaired by Canadian Dr. Julio Montaner) adopted the Vienna Declaration.[43] It sought “to improve community health and safety by calling for the incorporation of scientific evidence into illicit drug policies.” It recommended redirecting enforcement budgets to programs of “evidence-based prevention, regulatory, treatment and harm reduction interventions.” The declaration was signed by former presidents of Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia. Canada has refused to sign the Vienna Declaration.

In another significant recent development, the Global Commission on Drug Policy declared in its 2011 report that the War on Drugs had failed, and recommended a new approach.[44] The Global Commission states as its purpose: “to bring to the international level an informed, science-based discussion about humane and effective ways to reduce the harm caused by drugs to people and societies.”

The commission is a significant organization because its membership comprises a number of luminaries whose opinions are sought after and respected around the world. Among these are former heads of state César Gaviria (Colombia), Ernesto Zedillo (Mexico), Fernando Henrique Cardoso (Brazil), George Papandreou (Greece),[45] and Ruth Dreifuss (Switzerland). Louise Arbour, former U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights and former justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, is also a commissioner. So are George P. Shultz, former secretary of state for the United States, and Paul Volcker, former chair of the United States Federal Reserve. Kofi Annan, former secretary general of the United Nations, was a founding commissioner, as was entrepreneur Richard Branson.

The recommendations of the Global Commission’s 2011 report (and subsequent reports dealing with the effects of the drug war on epidemics of HIV/AIDS and Hepatitis C) are thoughtful and based upon the best evidence available. They do not rule out any option, including full legalization. Encouraging experimentation by governments with different models of legal regulation of drugs, the commission says, “It is unhelpful to ignore those who argue for a taxed and regulated market for currently illicit drugs. This is a policy option that should be explored with the same rigor as any other.”[46]

In a remarkable turnaround, the Executive Summary of the World Drug Report 2013 has also admitted that “the international drug control system is floundering.”[47] This report is the closest that the United Nations has come to admitting that the law enforcement system is inadequate to the task. Since the driving force behind much of the international prohibition effort has been the United States, it is helpful to identify the origins of the War on Drugs and its development there, as well as to trace its influence upon other western and Latin American countries.