The War on Drugs is Lost

[Derechos]

by Fernando Henrique Cardoso

SAO PAULO—The war on drugs is a lost war, and 2011 is the time to move away from a punitive approach in order to pursue a new set of policies based on public health, human rights and common sense. These are the core findings of the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy <1> that I convened, together with former presidents Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico and César Gaviria of Colombia.

We became involved with this issue for a compelling reason: the violence and corruption associated with drug trafficking represents a major threat to democracy in our region. This sense of urgency led us to evaluate current policies and look for viable alternatives. The evidence is overwhelming that the prohibitionist approach, based on repression of production and criminalization of consumption, has clearly failed.

After 30 years of massive effort, all prohibitionism has achieved is to shift areas of cultivation and drug cartels from one country to another (the so-called balloon effect). Latin America remains the world’s largest exporter of cocaine and marijuana. Thousands of young people continue to lose their lives in gang wars. Drug lords rule by fear over entire communities.

We ended our report with a call for a paradigm shift. The illicit drug trade will continue as long as there is demand for drugs. Instead of sticking to failed policies, that do not reduce the profitability of the drug trade — and thus its power — we must redirect our efforts to the harm caused by drugs to people and societies, and to reducing consumption.

To read the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy Report (Spanish), see - http://www.drogasedemocracia.org/Arquivos/livro_espanhol_04.pdf.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/01/23-11

[Judi Lynn]

1. Very civilized statement from former Brazilian President Cardoso. Thank you. n/t

[inna]

2. most excellent; i wish my Spanish was better!

[Peace Patriot]

3. I will put it less elegantly. Shoot a drug lord with 20 bullets and what have you done...

...besides...

--shown children that the solution to problems is shooting people

--denied him a trial, as well as the chance at recompense and redemption

--given his rival or his 2nd lieutenant a career boost

--sparked a gang war

--made the bullet makers more profit

--made the gunmakers more profit

--made the armored vehicle makers, gunship helicopter makers, and makers of all police/military equipment, including, not incidentally, high tech surveillance system makers, more profit

--made the gangs buy bigger and better weapons and other equipment

--inured the soldier or police officer to the value of human life and/or tempted him/her to become corrupt

--deprived poor people, elsewhere, of education, health care, drug rehab and other help needed NOT to choose a life of crime.

Could be that the drug lord or his soldiers were shooting back. Can't fault soldiers or police officers for defending themselves. But what were they doing there? Were they obeying commands to initiate violence that would not have otherwise occurred? With billions of dollars at issue, drug lords can be as trigger-happy as, oh, Bush-Cheney smelling oil. Why put soldiers/police officers in this position, in a spiral of violence that never ends?

It was not meant to end. It was meant to keep all the bullet makers, gun makers, makers of all police/military equipment, makers of all the criminals' arsenals, makers of chemical herbicides, all the war profiteers and all the "prison-industrial complex" profiteers, fat with our tax money, while otherwise "drowning government in the bathtub."

$7 BILLION for the "war on drugs" in Colombia alone--from which the cocaine just keeps flowing--and we can't afford education any more, or libraries, or pensions for our public service workers, or Social Security, or real policing of our communities, or fire departments....or, you name it.

The "war on drugs" is a trillion dollar U.S. government project that has yielded NO BENEFIT at the same time that it has created bloodshed, mayhem and grave loss of human and civil rights.

The cost in human life in Colombia is staggering--thousands of people murdered, and guess what? Most of the dead were trade unionists, human rights workers, teachers, community activists, journalists, political leftists and peasant farmers.

The INNOCENT are being targeted with OUR money! That's what you do when you militarize a social problem. It ain't just the "bad guys" that are being murdered. It's everybody else that the government doesn't like.

The U.S. "war on drugs" is now turning Honduras and Mexico into Colombia. And I will not put this in the polite terms that the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy uses. The U.S. "war on drugs" means innocent people being eviscerated, while alive, and their body parts dumped into mass graves. It means whole villages being murdered. It means peasant farmers and numerous other innocent people being murdered. It means five MILLION peasant farmers being driven from their lands, by state terror. It means young men lured by the Colombian military with offers of jobs, murdered and their bodies dressed up like FARC guerrillas, in order to up the military "body counts" and earn bonuses, and to impress U.S. senators. It means the murder, often accompanied by torture, of hundreds of trade unionists in Colombia. Amnesty International has attributed half the murders of trade unionists in Colombia to the U.S.-funded Colombian military itself, and the other half to its closely tied rightwing paramilitary death squads.

It is a horror almost beyond description. And now the same thing is happening in Honduras, since the U.S.-supported rightwing coup d'etat--U.S.-funded police and military forces torturing, raping, beating and imprisoning trade unionists, teachers, human rights workers, community activists, political leftists and other innocent people, and rightwing death squads picking them off, with one teacher shot to death right in front of his students and another activist decapitated and and his body left where all could see the price of dissent. Where do the Honduran military and police get their funding from? The U.S. "war on drugs." Where do the Honduran fascists get their death squads from? Colombia. The background: U.S.-supported removal of the elected leftist president, Mel Zelaya, at gunpoint and exiling him from his own country with a re-fueling stop at the U.S. air base in Honduras. What is that U.S. air base doing there? The U.S. "war on drugs."

Mexico came within a hairsbreath (0.05%) of electing a leftist government in 2005. THAT is WHY the Bush Junta larded billions of dollars in "war on drugs" money (our money) on Mexico. The Bush Junta couldn't have cared less about the drug lords in Mexico. In fact, they probably have Swiss bank accounts stuffed with drug profits. They wanted murder and mayhem, to destabilize Mexican society and bolster fascist, militarist forces, to prevent a truly representative, social-justice minded government from ever being elected. They want Mexico's constitutionally protect oil privatized. They want peasant farmers further stripped of their land and their ability to grow food--so Monsanto can grow Frankenfood and biofuels, and Burger King and MacDonald's can destroy peoples' health. They want slave labor--people who used to be able to feed themselves driven into urban squalor, desperate for jobs. They want public services and "common good" programs looted. Same sort of things they want in Honduras and Colombia.

This is what the "war on drugs" is FOR. It not about drugs. It's about war profiteering and fascism. The problem is NOT that the "war in drugs" failed. The problem is that it was never meant to succeed!

I have called it "insane," as have others. But that's really not the right word for it. It is pre-meditated, cold-blooded EVIL.

I am NOT condemning anyone caught up in it, who might be well-intentioned. I have a lot of sympathy for soldiers and police officers caught in this evil vise. And, to their credit, quite a few police leaders have cried foul. They would rather be doing their true jobs--keeping people safe--rather than policing a trade that should never have been criminalized, and that adds significantly, and unnecessarily, to their danger. It is a waste of their courage, their skills and their lives. It is a "war" that cannot be won, and they know it.

It encourages abuse by police forces. It encourages corruption. And for the abusers and the corrupt, I have no sympathy. But they are not really the problem. The problem is who put them there on the front lines of a "war" that benefits only cynical, greedy war profiteers.

And don't tell me "the American people" because I don't believe it. We have been colossally lied to and propagandized, on this and so many other matters, and in fact we have now been deprived of our right to vote, with the "TRADE SECRET" voting machines, because the lies are so big. The profiteers fear us more than ever, if we should ever get our democracy back (which has to start with restoring the counting of our votes to the PUBLIC venue). With honest media and real vote counts, we would get rid of the "war on drugs" tomorrow. It is one of the things that the "TRADE SECRET" voting machines--spread like a cancer all over the country during the 2002 to 2004 period, and now a completed system of vote rigging--were intended to prevent us from doing.

[roody]

4. + 1000