Evo Morales, president of Bolivia, eats a coca leaf in front of the UN drug committee meeting in Vienna (see video below). He complains about the continuing war on what is a natural product in his country.
We have discussed drugs here before. We have not been prepared to admit that the war on drugs has failed.
I commend this week’s Economist magazine which notes that it was in 1998 that the UN General Assembly committed itself to achieving a drug-free world and to “eliminating or significantly reducing” the production of opium, cocaine and cannabis by 2008. What a signal uniform worldwide failure.
The cost of this commitment is a world racked by drug-based criminality that tyrannises whole communities, renders whole countries “failed states” and compromises societies at every level.
Far from eliminating or significantly reducing it, the illegal drug trade has boomed. America spends $40bn a year in trying to reduce drug consumption. This against an “industry” now running at hundreds of billions a year in the US alone.
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Supply and demand. If you can’t beat the suppliers, it’s time to focus on the demand for these products…
I was always very taken with Bill Hicks’ assertion that banning botanicals i.e. “making nature against the law” was a bit paranoid.
You may as well say the same about human nature. The desire to change our state is innate and is also present in animals. A cat with catnip looks fairly pleased wit itself and doesn’t appear to suffer from a fear of its brain becoming scrambled egg.
What is perhaps most frustrating, is that by making these plants illegal, you do not diminish their market, you merely pass the market to criminals, who ensure that the market is not safe.
With decriminalisation comes regulation, strength awareness, purity guarantees and age restriction.
The war on drugs is a failed war.
Again to quote Mr Hicks, “a war is when two armies are fighting” and drug users are no army – they’re civilians, exercising a basic human right of free choice about what they do with their bodies and brains.
The war on drugs was never about people’s health. It was about protecting the intetrests of drug companies and tobacco companies and those who make obscene amounts of money from prohibition, such as the private prisons in the USA filled with unpaid workers who mostly were involved in non-violent drug-related “crimes”.
As long as tobacco and alcohol , both of which killed more people tha all drugs put together, are readily available, the prohibitionist argument holds no water…
Has there ever been an instance of prohibition being successful? There are many, at all levels, making big money from the drugs trade.
How long will the UN continue to blindly follow US policy? The only people who deny prohibition has failed are those profiting from it.
For at least another ten years now
Agree wholeheartedly and have been saying this for years, but universally have been met with disagreement.
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