UNITED NATIONS: Critics Say Drug War Has Failed

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Jun 3 1998 (IPS) - When world leaders meet in New York next week to discuss ways of combatting drug use worldwide, at least some activists are ready to confront them with an alternate proposal: Call off the “drug war.”

Dozens of groups from the Lindesmith Centre, a New York-based research group, to the Transnational Radical Party, a largely European political coalition – are pushing for an end to the drug war on the eve of the Jun. 8-10 U.N. General Assembly Special Session on drugs.

The critics have a simple argument: that, as billionaire financier George Soros put it recently, “the war on drugs is doing more harm to our society than drug abuse itself.”

A wide array of leaders – from conservative economist Milton Friedman to liberal European Humanitarian Commissioner Emma Bonino – blame the drug war for a variety of social ills, including repressive police tactics, rising rates of imprisonment and economic damage to developing nations.

“Repressive drug policy is turning into a worldwide crisis,” says Oliver Dupuis, the Radical Party’s secretary and a member of the European Parliament. In its meeting next week, “the United Nations aims to escalate drug repression tactics in a misguided quest toward a drug-free society.”

That quest is an illusion, argues Ethan Nadelmann, director of the Lindesmith Centre. By 1997, he observes, the number of people imprisoned in the United States on drug charges had increased eight-fold from 1980, to 400,000 detainees; the federal budget spent on drug control rose during the same period from one billion dollars in 1980 to 16 billion dollars in 1989.

Yet, Nadelmann wrote in a recent issue of ‘Foreign Affairs’, a country that partially decriminalises “soft” drugs like marijuana – such as the Netherlands – has far lower rates of teenage drug use than the United States, despite the latter’s hardline approach. In fact, recent surveys suggest that far fewer Dutch youths experiment with either marijuana or “harder” drugs like cocaine that U.S. teenagers.

What the drug war has brought, Friedman wrote in a newspaper column earlier this year, is an increase in government repression, particularly among groups – such as African Americans and inner-city residents – who are most linked with selling drugs.

The growth in the prison population, Freidman added, can be tracecd largely to U.S. drug prohibitions. “How many of our citizens do we want to turn into criminals before we yell ‘enough’?” he asked.

Nor is the repression linked to the drug wars solely a U.S. matter, critics say. The Radical Party, in a recent statement, deplored the praise given to China by the U.N. Drug Control Programme – for policies, the Radicals contended, that included human rights violations against suspected drug users.

For all the tough efforts by world governments to crack down on drug trafficking, studies by the U.N. Economic and Social Council and other bodies suggest that coca cultivation has doubled since 1985, while global opium production has nearly doubled since 1987.

Pro-legalisation politicians like Bonino have suggested decriminalising soft drugs altogether – a policy which has been viewed more favourably in Europe than in the United States, where Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke and former Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders were attacked for advocating similar ideas.

For some officials, however, the main problem is not one of whether to clamp down on drug use, but which tactics to follow. As Carl-Dieter Spranger, Germany’s federal minister for economic cooperation and development, argues, governments seeking to eradicate drugs must be able to deal with poverty and the need for alternative employment in the countries that produce them.

“Development measures are often more sustainable, more promising, and more readily accepted than are strategies based on repression alone,” Spranger says. But he adds that crop substitutions and other policies need to be well-planned, noting that “more is involved than just substituting strawberries for opium poppies, or cocoa for coca.”