Who’s Afraid of Legalizing Drugs?

The threats that grip us today come in many forms. The many illnesses of our world are not unjustified: The grand majority are humanity’s fault. Climate change, the Islamic State, AIDS in Africa, the armed conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine, malnutrition, the Ebola virus epidemic, and the growing number of refugees are just a few of many problems that are cause for concern.

Drugs are a part of this tangle. They are not legal for lack of will; they are not accepted because publicizing “the truth” would affect too many interests. Obstinacy is not an attribute of animals; it is inherent in human beings. Drugs remain illegal because of the stubbornness of those who should advance their legalization.

Seven former presidents and 14 international leaders, including former Secretary General of the United Nations Kofi Annan, presented a report this month that proposes changing the situation of the drug world.

Decriminalizing drug use and promoting limited legal access to drugs are the leitmotiv of the proposal. No wonder — the U.N. estimates that the value of the world’s illicit drug trade is more than $350 billion annually, a number that, needless to say, is greater than the gross domestic product of many countries.

The spiral of disasters began during the Reagan era. It is to his administration that we owe the obscure term “war on drugs.” In 1982, the president launched the “war on drugs” instead of focusing his efforts on investigating the motives behind drug use.

Reagan supported the initiative of his drug czar, Carlton Turner, who assured the public that marijuana was the reason for “the present young-adult generation’s involvement in anti-military, anti-nuclear power, anti-big business, anti-authority demonstrations.” The czar also said that marijuana use contributed to adolescents becoming gay. Although there are multiple origins of “Say no to drugs,” the foolishness of the United States, largely responsible for the current situation, started with Reagan and his collaborators.

The prohibition of drug use makes for unbelievable mistakes that are extensively interlinked. The mistakes feed off of each other and drive themselves in a circle. Instead of supporting prevention, politicians are supporting criminalization. Their choice has been costly: It punishes the poor and needy, blacks and Hispanics, and not the big players. Criminalization has increased the prison population of the United States: Since 1980, the number of prisoners has risen by 800 percent. The economic cost has been enormous. A large percentage of these prisoners are drug addicts; the grand majority are users or small distributors. Very few bosses, in the United States or elsewhere, are imprisoned.

Upon leaving, most prisoners are stigmatized and do not receive adequate treatment, neither in nor outside of prison. The authorities don’t understand that the problem should be dealt with as a pairing between health and human rights. People who use drugs have a health problem and should be treated as such; people who use drugs a lot are victims of poverty and/or narco-traffickers, and by extension victims of abuse — human rights are not frequently respected. Instead of backing prevention measures, authorities back the penalization of users, not the punishment of politicians and narco-traffickers, an often inseparable team — maybe that’s why only seven former presidents signed the document.

The question has to be asked: Why pursue individual users and not focus on arresting the big bosses, above all, if we know where they are? The case of our Tuta illustrates the situation: He goes to interviews all over, including on the BBC and other networks, but here in Mexico, we don’t know his whereabouts.

Instead of facilitating controlled access and treating addicts as people with an illness, politics today makes them into criminals. Instead of pursuing the bosses in order to reduce the bloody economy and loss of life, instead of regulating some drugs — marijuana, coca leaves, certain psychoactive drugs — the effort is put into penalizing. It doesn’t surprise me that only seven former presidents signed the report. The many who don’t sign must know too much. They know — it’s impossible not to know — that regulating the production, distribution and sale of some drugs would cause many to lose a lot.

Legalizing marijuana and other drugs would be an attack on current powers. Legalizing it would reduce violence, curb the erosion of governments, and stem the losses of current prison spending. It’s annoying that this injustice must wait until 2016, the date when the U.N. will convene to debate the issue. It’s worrying because drug use is a health and human rights issue.