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PDF | COUNT THE COSYS | 50 Years of the War on Drugs

Summary/Abstract

Count the Costs - 50 Years of the War on Drug examines the human, economic and societal impact of the War on Drugs.

Content

The War on Drugs: Are we paying too high a price?

 

The global ‘war on drugs’ has been fought for 50 years, without preventing the long-term trend of increasing drug supply and use. Beyond this failure, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has also identified the drug war’s many serious ‘unintended negative consequences’. These result not from drug use itself, but from choosing a punitive enforcement-led approach that, by its nature places control of the trade in the hands of organised crime, and criminalises many users. In the process this:

• undermines international development and security, and fuels conflict
• threatens public health, spreads disease and causes death
• undermines human rights
• promotes stigma and discrimination
• creates crime and enriches criminals
• causes deforestation and pollution
• wastes billions on ineffective law enforcement

The war on drugs is a policy choice. There are other options that, at the very least, should be debated and explored using the best possible evidence and analysis. We all share the same goals – a safer, healthier, and more just world. It is time for all sectors whose work is affected by our approach to drugs to call on governments and the UN to properly Count the Costs of the War on Drugs, and explore the alternatives.

Politicians are shying away from the phrase ‘war on drugs’ because of its increasingly obvious failures. Yet the description is more appropriate today than ever before, as the illicit trade continues to grow, while vast resources are poured into increasingly militarised and punitive enforcement responses. In Afghanistan and Mexico for example, the term ‘drug war’ is far from mere rhetoric.

Yet the idea that this is somehow a war on certain substances or plants is absurd. This is a war on people, and not just people who use drugs.

The failure of this policy is creating a range of terrible social and economic costs affecting all our communities, and targeting the most vulnerable members of society – the poor, the young, and the socially marginalised – while producing few, if any, meaningful benefits.

1. Undermining development and security, fuelling conflict

The war on drugs is actively undermining development and security in many of the world’s most fragile regions and states.

Drug traffickers can be more confident of a reliable, cheap supply of coca leaf, poppy or cannabis if government employees, honest politicians and armies can be kept at bay, and if farmers have few alternatives to drug production because they have little access to alternative sources of credit, and have to pay high prices to transport fertilizer or ship bulkier non-drug crops to market.

As a result, traffickers prefer it if there is little economic infrastructure or governance in producing and transit areas. So they target weak states through equipping private armies, financing or merging with separatist and insurgent groups, and simultaneously corrupting politicians, police, judiciary, armed forces and customs officers. Key examples include the internal armed conflicts in Colombia and Afghanistan.

Once an area is sufficiently destabilised, it deters investment by indigenous or external businesses and restricts the activities of international development NGOs and other bodies. It also diverts large amounts of valuable aid and other resources from health or development efforts into enforcement – often through the military, which can undermine accountability.

The same corrosive consequences for health, governance, public authority, and democracy are replicated as traffickers trans-ship heroin, cocaine and cannabis through the Caribbean, Central America, Central Asia and West Africa.

In short, the profitability of illegal drugs encourages traffickers to lock producing or transit areas into multi­dimensional underdevelopment.

• There has been an explosion of violence in Mexico, with over 30,000 deaths since 2006., as the government has tried to use military force to crush the drug cartels. Instead, they have become sufficiently empowered and enriched to corrupt or outgun state enforcement efforts
• Over a quarter of all cocaine consumed in Europe in 2007 (more than 140 tons, with a wholesale value of about $1.8 billion) was transited through West Africa, Guinea-Bissau has become a narco-state in just five years, with the value of the drugs trade now much greater than its national income (1)

2. Undermining human rights

The human rights of drug users and local farming communities growing drug crops are rarely even mentioned in political discussions, whether at the domestic or UN level. Yet in many countries, drug control efforts result in serious human rights abuses: torture and ill treatment by police, mass incarceration, executions, extrajudicial killings, arbitrary detention, and denial of basic health services.

Poorly scrutinised drug control policies and enforcement practices often entrench and exacerbate systematic discrimination against people who use drugs, impede access to essential medicines, and prevent access to harm reduction and HIV treatment services for marginalised high-risk populations.

Young people in particular, as both a key using group, and vulnerable population more broadly, have suffered a disproportionate burden of these human rights costs.

Local communities in drug-producing countries also face violations of their human rights as a result of campaigns to eradicate illicit crops, and related criminalisation of certain indigenous cultural practices.

• Up to 1000 people are executed for drug offences each year, in direct violation of international law ⁽²⁾
• Between February and April 2003 there were 2,819 extrajudicial killings under the banner of the Thailand Government’s ‘War on Drugs’ crackdown ⁽³⁾
• Over 500,000 people are arbitrarily detained in drug detention centres in China – frequently subject to forced labour, and other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment {4}

3. Promoting stigma and discrimination

As with wars throughout history, the negative consequences of the drug war fall heaviest on the most vulnerable, excluded and marginalised.

Being positioned on the frontline, children and young people in particular have borne the brunt of the war on drugs, whether forced by poverty and desperation into becoming drug growers or foot soldiers of the cartels; as casualties of the drug war through prison time or criminal records for youthful experimentation; or by being orphaned as a result of the incarceration of parents on drug-related convictions.

Women have similarly suffered through exploitation by the trade itself (female drug mules are notably over-represented in prison populations), while drug-using mothers experience children being removed and denial of social services on release from prison.

Drug law enforcement can also become a conduit for institutionalised racial prejudice. Traditional practices and indigenous cultures have been criminalised and persecuted, while racial minority groups have frequently been disproportionately targeted and punished by enforcement and sentencing.

• Despite similar rates of drug usage, African-American men in the US are sent to prison on drug charges at 13.4 times the rate of white men, resulting in one in nine 20 to 34-year-olds being incarcerated on any given day, primarily as a result of drug law enforcement
• Entire Andean populations that continue the traditional cultural practices of coca leaf chewing and drinking coca tea continue to be criminalised ⁽⁵⁾

4. Threatening public health, spreading disease and causing death

The global war on drugs has historically been promoted as a policy that protects public health, on the basis that it can restrict or eliminate drug availability and use. Research shows it has failed to achieve either, with global trends in drug use – particularly high risk use – rising consistently over the past half century, and illegal drugs cheaper and more available than ever.

Worse, the policy has increased the risks associated with drug use, tilting the market towards ever more potent and risky products often cut with contaminants, and encouraging high risk behaviours (such as injecting) in unsupervised and unhygienic environments. As a result, users suffer avoidable neonatal problems, overdoses and poisonings, and contract blood-borne diseases – such as HIV

5. Creating crime, enriching criminals

Conclusion