War on Drugs: FAILURE
From the Guardian this morning:
“We consider the war on drugs a failure because the objectives have never been achieved,” said César Gaviria, Colombia‘s former president and co-chair of the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy.
“Prohibitionist policies based on eradication, interdiction and criminalisation have not yielded the expected results. We are today farther than ever from the goal of eradicating drugs.”
Why do we persist with wars on things? The war on terror has proved to be the best recruitment tool for terrorists, meaning that the war on terror has generated more terror while trying to eradicate it.
But the war on drugs is equally senseless. Prohibition should have taught us that illegalising something does not stop people using it, it just makes those people into criminals.
When will our attitude to drugs be based on dispassionate, rational analysis?