“Unable to reach the high notes that made her famous … the critics described her performance as ‘horrendous’ and her fans ended up booing her.” So reads one of the articles announcing the pop singer’s death Feb. 11 this year. Her name is added to a long list of deaths by drug overdose, once again demonstrating the fiasco that is the prohibitionist experiment. The United States keeps imposing a failed exercise in social engineering on the rest of the world, in which cause and effect are confused and drugs themselves blamed for problems that derive from their illegality. Such a posture would seem unaware of the reasoning of Thomas Aquinas in the 8th century: “Those that govern in the human sphere will reasonably tolerate some evils, so that other goods are not impeded, or to avoid worse evils.”
Prohibition has clearly failed to halt growth in consumption, much less tame the maelstrom surrounding production. According to the UN, this clandestine business generates $400 billion annually (8 percent of world trade) and wherever it is established leads to spiraling violence. Drug trafficking is the source of finance for irregular groups in the Colombian conflict, besides extending its colossal tentacles throughout the political life of the country. Prohibition encourages corruption: Police officers, judges and customs officials are victims of the bribery and extortion of this illicit drugs business. Nor does it help check the growth of the prison population (many are jailed for minor drug crimes), the parallel activity of money laundering, or the vicious circle within the no-less-lucrative trade in chemical precursors.
As in the case of Whitney Houston, along with her 18-year-old daughter Bobbi Kristina, and according to a study realized by James Ostrowski of the Cato Institute, 80 percent of drug-related deaths result from lack of access to standard doses. The scarcity of both preventative intelligence and rehabilitation centers is another contradiction of this social engineering program based in interdiction. Apart from the successful Chinese result in the 1950s, Portugal is another cardinal reference in the decriminalization of drugs. The Portuguese government, having legalized the possession and consumption of various psychoactive substances in 2001 and providing treatment and recuperation services, managed in one decade to considerably reduce the consumption of those substances while reducing in less than half the legal, administrative and prison costs.
The “war on drugs” turns children into criminals and unscrupulous men into millionaires. Long live capitalism!
About 10 years ago I read that the U.S., with 5 percent of the world’s population, consumes 50 percent of the world’s illicit drugs. For several years I wondered what it is about American society that makes Americans so uniquely vulnerable to mind-altering substances.
Then I watched HBO’s “The Wire” and learnt what the U.S., with its meagre social safety net and its obsession with “rugged individualism” does with its surplus people. It either throws them in prison or demands that they exercise “personal responsibility” and work for a living.
Since it’s a shortage of jobs that creates surplus people, they have to invent their own industry — preferably one that can actually support them and their families. So they sell drugs (or sell their bodies, often through an agent, a.k.a. a pimp).
If there are currently 25 million people unemployed in the U.S. and meagre job creation over the next decade, there are currently 25 million potential drug dealers (and prostitutes, and/or pimps).
There’s nothing uniquely wrong with Americans. Rather, supply creates demand.