By Shaun Fitl (CUP)

When the war on drugs is doling out more death than the drugs themselves, is it time to re-evalute decriminalization?

WATERLOO (CUP) — At a regional summit of Latin American leaders on March 25, Guatemalan president Otto Perez Molina announced his desire to end the taboo surrounding drug decriminalization and legalization. He said the past 40 years of war against drugs in his country has been a failure. Guatemala’s domestic drug production and consumption is relatively low, but it is a checkpoint for cocaine and other narcotics being smuggled northwards from producers like Columbia and Peru.

Although Molina, a former army general, came into power last November advocating an “iron fist” against criminal enterprise, he has since moderated his position because of the high price of human life that the war on drugs has imposed on Central America. Rather than focus on supply reduction, which often entails direct military involvement against rebel groups and peasant coca farmers in South American countries, he’s asking policymakers to consider more demand-reduction plans such as regulation, education, or rehabilitation.

The shortcomings of prohibition, and other aggressive means of assaulting drug production, have been known since the 1920s and ‘30s during the alcohol prohibition era. Many believe that if the legislation had not been reversed, alcohol consumption would have risen above the levels recorded before prohibition because of the extensive marketing networks of criminal enterprise. Without a legal, regulated market for narcotics, the business becomes lucrative as demand skyrockets and supply dwindles.

Regardless of law enforcement efforts, nearly one-third of Canadians reported having consumed illicit drugs in 1994, with that proportion increasing to nearly half by 2004. Similarly, since 1975, at least 80 per cent of U.S. secondary school seniors have consistently said marijuana is “easy to obtain”. When polled about the war on drugs in 2008, about 75 per cent of Americans had the impression that it was failing.

This disparity has been officially recognized but barely discussed.

During the Clinton administration, a study called the RAND Drug Policy Research Center concluded that a demand-side “war on drugs” would be more successful (23 times more) than the past legacy of supply-side warfare, and that $3 billion ought to be shifted from law enforcement to treatment. A similar study done by RAND in 1986 evaluated the effects of using armed forces to intercept smuggling runs and found that there is little to no influence on overall traffic.

In The Pursuit of Oblivion: A Global History of Drugs, author Richard Davenport-Hines notes that “at least” 75 per cent of illegal shipments would have to be sabotaged to damage the traffickers’ profits at all, because most of them have profit margins reaching up to 300 per cent. So far, the U.S. has never been able to damage more than 15 per cent of the heroin trade, or 30 per cent of the cocaine trade. This is not even close to enough and, rather than having a real, long-term effect on drug trafficking, the U.S. role in eradicating the South American coca leaf has only exacerbated radical inequalities between indigenous farming communities, left-wing rebel groups, and U.S.-aided paramilitaries and police forces.

For example, the $4.7 billion invested in Plan Colombia from 2000 to 2006 only shifted cocaine production further and further away from urban zones and more into remote communities that are increasingly hard to police, as government infrastructure lags behind in the Andes. There was no overall change in the number of acres used to cultivate the drug, and some of the production actually moved to neighbouring Peru and Bolivia.

With the vast majority of its drug-fighting budget being allocated primarily to law enforcement and military supply-side strategies, the U.S. has only exacerbated the profitability of drug trafficking and the intensity of rebel fury. The battle plan for the war on drugs must be subject to more criticism.