Change Drug Control Policy Now

As the social and human devastation of the U.S. “war” on drugs in Latin America grows, skeptical voices have risen in tone and in scope.

At the next Summit of the Americas, President Santos has proposed openly debating this theme: “We have shed the greatest amount of blood and paid the highest cost, and after 40 years one must stop and reflect.” After publishing the book “Políticas antidroga en Colombia: exítos, fracasos y extravíos,”* the University of the Andes created an institute that will dedicate itself to the study of this thorny issue. The president of Guatemala, Otto Pérez Molina, urged his Central American counterparts this week to sign a security plan that would include the legalization of drugs.

Six months ago, the Global Commission on Drug Policy, on which sit people ranging from Fernando Enrique Cardoso and César Gaviria to the former president of the U.S. Federal Reserve, Paul Volker, released a report that encouraged “experimentation by governments with models of legal regulation of drugs to undermine the power of organized crime and safeguard the health and security of their citizens.”

At last, the powerful are acknowledging that, through either excessive submission to northern power or a lack of imagination, we have been misled into a suicidal policy that has drowned our weak democracies in blood and corruption. The challenge for us now is not to wait for Washington to give us the green light for legalization, continuing all the while with [our] quasi-military repression of the drug trade, worsening the “narcos”’ violent responses.

We are urged to reduce immediately the collateral damage of prohibitionism as well as that of narco-trafficking. Mark Kleiman, a clear-minded professor at the University of California, has for years been speaking about concentrating on protecting populations instead of reducing the flow of drugs. He proposed, for example, that if the Obama administration seriously wished to help Mexico in its fatal hour, it should launch a fierce police campaign in order to ruin the U.S. market for Mexico’s most violent cartel. The message would be to punish most strongly the most brutal, not those exporting the most drugs.

A similar philosophy lies behind the Police Peacekeeping Units in Rio de Janeiro, which have reduced killings by 27 percent in three years. According to an official quoted in the Mexican magazine Proceso, the key is “having changed the focus; the objective is for the state to recover territories controlled by ‘narcos’ instead of dedicating itself to fighting drug traffic.” And he explained how the prior policy of undertaking war-like police operations to seize drugs and weapons was useless, as these were quickly replaced, while the lives of policemen, neighbors and young gang members were, in exchange, lost forever.

It takes daring to speak publicly about revising drug-control policy when one is president of a stigmatized country such as Colombia or Guatemala. But more courage would be required to change the focus of the current criminal policy. And instead of dedicating billions of pesos and much of the strength of the armed forces and the judiciary in pursuit of the “cursed drug,” the priority must shift to lessening the brutal effects of narco-trafficking.

Today, the opposite takes place. And so, if somebody who has committed crimes against humanity in Colombia were to confess to having exported cocaine to the United States and were to reveal the supply route, he could go free in a few years, and with a visa. The lesson is clear: It’s not important how many people you kill; the only thing that matters is that you don’t traffic drugs. It should be exactly the reverse.

* Translator’s Note: The title of the book, which is not yet published in English, might be rendered as “Anti-Drug Policies in Colombia: Successes, Failures and Diversions.”