The late Albert Einstein defined "insanity" as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Keep that thought in mind as you read what follows.
For two days this week a United Nations meeting in Vienna will review the failed 10-year-old global "war on drugs" policy. Their goal is to proclaim international drug policy for the next decade, hopefully with a new and far different declaration of purpose.
The Economist magazine observes that a century ago "a group of foreign diplomats gathered in Shanghai for the first ever international effort to ban trade in a drugs. On February 26th 1909, they agreed to set up the International Opium Commission -- just a few decades after Britain had fought a war with China to assert its lucrative right to buy, distribute and sell opium. Many other failed bans of mood-altering drugs have followed."
Unmitigated Disaster
The Economist, hardly a leftist publication by any measure, says about the Vienna meeting: "Like First World War generals, many will claim that all that is needed is more of the same. In fact the war on drugs has been a disaster, creating failed states in the developing world even as addiction has flourished in the rich world. By any sensible measure, this 100 year struggle has been illiberal, murderous and pointless. That is why The Economist continues to believe that the least bad policy is to legalize drugs."
Drug Free Indeed!
In 1998 the UN General Assembly committed member countries to achieving a "drug free world" and to "eliminating or significantly reducing" the production of opium, cocaine and cannabis by 2008. They adopted the slogan "A drug free world -- we can do it" and launched a campaign that supposedly would eradicate all narcotics by using tough law enforcement to stop producers, drug lord traffickers and end user consumers globally.
But a report from the European Commission this week says the global struggle against drugs in the last ten years has achieved nothing -- a view with which most objective observers agree.
Drug policy campaigners, social scientists and health experts say that this strategy has failed miserably. Statistics show that drug production, trafficking and use have all skyrocketed during the decade, while the cost of law enforcement, both financially and socially, has rocketed, with vast numbers of people imprisoned.
A Police State Spawned
Indeed a major and fallacious official justification for attacks on financial privacy and on tax havens, was the lie that the war on drugs could be won if we all surrendered our privacy. That war on drugs was also the principle cause of the militarization of U.S. domestic police, with countless mistaken SWAT team drug raids resulting in needless innocent deaths.
Meanwhile, over $4 billion in cash and private property has been confiscated by police under forfeiture laws -- and in 85% of the cases no charges were brought against the persons from which property was grabbed. In most cases, federal, state and local police kept the loot.
In the United States, where illegal drug use is highest, a vast police-prison-government lobby has arisen. It devours about $70 billion a year in taxpayer funds, supposedly to combat drugs. What a costly hoax!
Prison America
Illegal drug use has risen steadily over the past decade and now a fifth of the entire 2.1 million U.S. prison population, the highest per capita in the world, is behind bars for drug offenses.
The total number of U.S. citizens accountable to the American correction system is the highest in the world. It even exceeds the combined Soviet Union and China prison population during the height of their dominate Communist regime. Currently in the U.S. one in every 31 adults is either in jail or prison or on parole or probation. That amounts to 7.3 million Americans at a cost that exceeds $68 billion annually.
Keep in mind that one fifth of all those numbers results from drug offenses.
More of the Same?
Those campaigning against the U.S led strategy at the Vienna conference predict another 10 years of the same failed approach will fuel the organized crime that shares the estimated $200 to $300 billion a year illegal drug trade, will increase the spread of HIV, and produce more narco-states such as Guinea-Bissau, Afghanistan, Columbia and, increasingly, Mexico -- which now is in an undeclared state of war because of drug gangs.
There have been more than 8,000 drug deaths in Mexico in recent years, and now this daily violence is spilling over the U.S. border into Texas, New Mexico and Arizona.
Political Promises
As The Economist says: "Fighting drugs is the kind of promise politicians love to make. It assuages the sense of moral panic that has been the handmaiden of prohibition for a century. It is intended to reassure the parents of teenagers across the world. Yet it is a hugely irresponsible promise, because it cannot be fulfilled."
Drugs and drug use will not go away. They have been around as long as humans have been on earth.
As the 12 Step Serenity Prayer says: "God grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, courage to change the things we can, and wisdom to know the difference." There could be no better rule to follow than that Prayer when considering future drug policies.
A Solution
As a conservative and a libertarian, I believe we can lessen the effects of drugs on society by strictly controlling drug distribution and sale, (thus ending obscene drug profit incentives), by minimizing health implications and by reducing the causal links between crime, terrorism, poverty -- and politics -- that absolute drug prohibition guarantees.
That's my personal view, and that's the way that it looks from here.
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