| | |  Editorials | February 2009 
Time to Rethink Expensive, Futile War on Drugs
 The StarPhoenix
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If President Barack Obama is to succeed in convincing allies to pony up for the war in Afghanistan, he must do better than to reinvent former president George Bush's ill-conceived "War on Terror."
He will have to revisit America's much older and disastrous War on Drugs.
The U.S. officially has fought the latter war starting with Richard Nixon's presidency, when the fear of a country made of peaceniks and hippies convinced the Republican leader to copy former president Lyndon Johnston's short-lived but popular War on Poverty. Although the battle against poverty was an unabashed failure, at least it didn't cost the thousands of lives and countless years of lost freedoms claimed by the war on drugs.
Estimates by the U.S. Justice Department put at more than a million a year the number of Americans who spent at least some of their lives in jail because of the drug policy adopted by Mr. Nixon and followed since by each president. Simple possession of marijuana accounts for the fourth highest number of arrests each year, and that doesn't even begin to take into account the collateral damage to those caught in the web of violence and crime associated with the illicit industry.
The U.S. isn't even considered on the front line of the drug war. Across the Rio Grande River, more than 6,000 people were slaughtered last year, including hundreds of Mexican police officers, many of whom were tortured and mutilated because of the illegal drug industry.
Although it is estimated that the U.S. taxpayers already have squandered half a trillion dollars in the war, there have been few reported successes. In fact, by ignoring the best advice of its own officials, the U.S. has contributed to the strengthening of an industry that, over the years, has extended a minor political squabble in Colombia into the longest-running insurrection in this hemisphere, fuelled the insurgency in Afghanistan, disrupted attempts to govern Southeast Asia and seriously damaged the economic benefits of the third partner in the North American Free Trade Agreement.
It has also cost the lives of Canadian soldiers, who are under instructions now to attack at will those Afghans who've been forced to participate in the drug industry due to lack of alternative opportunities and the determination of Taliban fighters to fund their operations with the illegal trade.
The announcement of a "war on terrorism" is deemed to have been foolish, because of the impossibility to measure successes in such an endeavour. It is even more foolish to pretend that such a phony war somehow can be won by putting even more soldiers into the field, employing heavier military equipment and supporting the darkest of regimes on the promise they'd become anti-narco allies.
For every gain in the drug war, there are a dozen losses. When the U.S. got control of the privateers who ran cocaine through the Caribbean, it caused a consolidation of illegal forces to spring up in Mexico. When the U.S. focused on shutting down the Golden Triangle in Southeast Asia, Afghanistan's fertile fields to sprang into poppy blossoms.
Not only has the drug industry contributed to the corruption -- and retarded development -- of many of America's most important allies, that corruption has crept into the highest offices in Washington. A Senate committee report in 1989, for example, laid out how American officials were contributing to drug smuggling through Central America in order to fund the anti-Nicaraguan Contra forces.
When a government report suggested the best way to control the use of cocaine in America was to address head-on the domestic social and violence problems, lobbyists convinced the White House instead to buy Connecticut-made, Sikorksy Blackhawk helicopters at $15 million each as a part of the much-maligned anti-drug effort, the $1.6 billion Plan Colombia. This just convinced the FARC rebels to step up their illegal activities, buy better arms and work harder to protect the cocaine crops.
There is no question that the fortune in drugs produced in the Andes, grown in Mexico or coming out of Afghanistan and northern Cambodia, are having a devastating impact on the lives and health of millions of Europeans, North Americans and Asians.
But in the 37 years since Mr. Nixon launched the war on drugs, the one thing that consistently has been clear is that the policy of heightened violence and increased incarceration is an abysmal failure.
President Obama, who has control over all three levers of American government, is the first U.S. leader in four decades with the political clout and the academic research to do something about this.
The question is whether he can muster up the will. |
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