Global war on drugs 'has failed' say former leaders

[Sachinism]

The Global Commission on Drug Policy report calls for the legalisation of some drugs and an end to the criminalisation of drug users. The panel includes former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, the former leaders of Mexico, Colombia and Brazil, and the entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson. The US and Mexican governments have rejected the findings as misguided. The Global Commission's 24-page report argues that anti-drug policy has failed by fuelling organised crime, costing taxpayers millions of dollars and causing thousands of deaths. It cites UN estimates that opiate use increased 35% worldwide from 1998 to 2008, cocaine by 27%, and cannabis by 8.5%. The 19-member commission includes Mexico's former President Ernesto Zedillo, Brazil's ex-President Fernando Henrique Cardoso and former Colombian President Cesar Gaviria, as well as the former US Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker and the current Prime Minister of Greece George Papandreou. The panel also features prominent Latin American writers Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa, the EU's former foreign policy chief Javier Solana, and George Schultz, a former US secretary of state. 'No harm to others' The authors criticise governments who claim the current war on drugs is effective: "Political leaders and public figures should have the courage to articulate publicly what many of them acknowledge 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," the report said. Instead of punishing users who the report says "do no harm to others," the commission argues that governments should end criminalisation of drug use, experiment with legal models that would undermine organised crime syndicates and offer health and treatment services for drug-users. It calls for drug policies based on methods empirically proven to reduce crime and promote economic and social development. The commission is especially critical of the US, saying it must abandon anti-crime approaches to drug policy and adopt strategies rooted in healthcare and human rights. "We hope this country (the US) at least starts to think there are alternatives," said former Colombian President Cesar Gaviria. "We don't see the US evolving in a way that is compatible with our (countries') long-term interests." Many crimes The office of White House drug tsar Gil Kerlikowske rejected the panel's recommendations. "Drug addiction is a disease that can be successfully prevented and treated," said a spokesman for the Office of National Drug Control Policy. "Making drugs more available - as this report suggests - will make it harder to keep our communities healthy and safe." The government of Mexico, where more than 34,000 people have died in drug-related violence since a crackdown on the cartels began in December 2006, was also critical. Legalisation would be an "insufficient and inefficient" step given the international nature of the illegal drugs trade, said National Security spokesman Alejandro Poire. "Legalisation won't stop organised crime, nor its rivalries and violence," he said. "To think organised crime in Mexico means drug-trafficking overlooks the other crimes committed such as kidnapping, extortion and robbery." http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-13624303

[ravishingravi]

I am and always have been libertarian. It should be legalised. There is no other way.

[f.b.m]

brb, bombing American tobacco fields since its harmful to the people.

[f.b.m]

In other news, War on Drugs is Claimed to be a huge success. Written in 2005, still true today: Link War on Drugs a Big Success by Michael S. Rozeff The War on Drugs may not top the list of most successful programs of the State, but it has got to rank high, right up there with Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, the Cold War, education, and farm subsidies. It has achieved more than any of its most ardent designers and admirers counted on. This octopus program straddles the length and breadth of the entire country, from sea to shining sea. It depletes every sort of community, from Jacksonville to Los Angeles, from trailer parks in rural Iowa to suburban mansions. Its tentacles extend across oceans and continents, from Afghanistan to Colombia and from Mexico to Burma. This program is long-lived, now 125 years old at the national level. It dates from the 1880 prohibition of opium imports from China. This program at one stroke of national law manufactures all sorts of crimes, thereby amalgamating every local police force and justice system into a national apparatus. It provides work, direction, and bureaucracy for countless police, lawyers, and other justice officials. This program has the vitality of youth, shown by its recent success in fastening itself to terrorism. Narcoterrorism is breathing life into many new careers. This program supports the work of policy makers and academics of many stripes. This program secures work for whole departments of government. The Drug Enforcement Administration alone employs 22,000 people and has a $2 billion budget. This program not only penetrates every voting precinct, but also crosses all the branches of government at every level. Any corporation would be extremely satisfied at such market penetration. This program affects the pin-striped State Department in its diplomacy, pressure tactics, aid packages, agreements, embassies, coordination and intervention. Bright young faces find their calling in narcopolitics and narcoterrorism. This program triggers Defense Department involvement overseas via military forces and interventions, foreign bases and use of the most sophisticated electronic devices and aircraft. This program fosters bigger and bigger enemies to fight in the form of mysterious cartels with foreign names and origins, loaded with huge amounts of money, and capable of outwitting the most stalwart DEA agents — until they are given more money and manpower to fight back. This program has found an ideal target: prohibiting the production, circulation, and exchange of certain molecules. This target is ever-receding and ever-expanding, thus requiring and justifying ever-larger budgets and expenditures. This program incentivizes entrepreneurs to create new molecules constantly, thus providing new targets. It encourages ever stronger, purer, and more easily transported versions of the old molecules. This program fosters ever-stronger laws and abrogations of rights. It amplifies ancient seizure and forfeiture laws into routine tools of injustice. It invades bank records. It expands wiretapping. It turns banks into cash transactions police. It turns dogs into policemen. It turns motorists into suspects with no rights. This program nullifies the Bill of Rights. This program, as in all wars, generates ever-new rationalizations and justifications, such as fighting drug-related crime, reducing health-related costs, saving children and families, creating drug-free zones in schools, and reducing the drug-related financing of terrorists. This program fosters ever-more legislative interference with and control over the judiciary. Laws requiring mandatory jail sentences for drug "crimes" multiply and stiffen. This program fosters more laws and regulations concerning ever-longer lists of controlled molecules, including common medicines and remedies that might be used in the synthesis of other molecules. This program provides continual political food and sustenance for many politicians. Presidents build and sustain popularity around the War on Drugs. This program provides an easily read signal to the electorate of a politician's staunch crime-fighting credentials. This program enhances and encourages crime, mobs, gangs, and violence. It turns whole areas of cities into no-man's lands. It elevates organized crime syndicates and provides them ready cash. This program creates the fear and insecurity that government can step in to alleviate. Its advertising campaigns tell of epidemics, waves of drugs, out-of-control drug wars, eradication, aerial spraying, drug horrors. This program brings the State's authorities into the public schools. This program attracts youth to the forbidden fruit, who then are more easily trapped into the State's police, justice, prison, and welfare bureaucracies. This program creates millions of arrests. It creates a constantly increasing flow of criminals and an ever-rising prison population. It destroys lives and families, creating demands for more social welfare workers and psychiatric personnel. This program enhances drug-related deaths. It enhances the use of dirty needles. It enhances the spread of HIV. All of this creates more demand for government services. This program enhances local corruption. It places pressures on local systems, creating demands for national coordination, national efforts and national police forces. This program creates ever-growing demands for new prisons, supporting prison builders and designers, prison companies, corrections officers, and the many supporting prison services. This program satisfies the moralistic urges of many voters. It caters to those who identify every law with morality, who deify the State or mix it with their own religion, and those who identify with upholding authority, for better or worse, in sickness or in health. This program provides a ready source of news items, a steady stream of arrests and raids that are always making the streets of our cities and communities safe due to the unfailing and unflinching efforts of our law enforcement authorities. For the State, for politicians, for government bureaucracies, and for many others, the War on Drugs is a big success, a program for other government programs to emulate. For all these reasons, it is not hard to understand why in 2005, the U.S. continues its War on Drugs, even though it inflicts ever-rising harm on many U.S. citizens with no countervailing good to the public at large. For all these reasons, it's not hard to understand that when the authorities totally fail at the futile aim of preventing individuals from using selected molecules, when they inflict enormous damage on citizens of the United States, they are succeeding in the War on Drugs. They are accomplishing their aims. The War on Drugs exemplifies the State strangling the society it governs. It is government of the State's minions, by the State's minions, and for the State's minions. For them, the War on Drugs is a winner.

[achilles]

The economy of many countries depends on drug export and well, its shameful that there is demand to match the supply too.

[Sachinism]

When there isn't supply to meet the demand that's when the 'criminals' start mixing crap into drugs which would be a lot more harmful to the user.

[Ram]

I met Mary last weekend after a long time. :woot: What a special re-union! :icflove:

[achilles]

When there isn't supply to meet the demand that's when the 'criminals' start mixing crap into drugs which would be a lot more harmful to the user.

Yeah. We must end the cause... drugs.

I met Mary last weekend after a long time. :woot: What a special re-union! :icflove:

Never had it. I advice you against it to. Go healthy