The
war on drugs in the United States has been a failure that has ruined
lives, filled prisons and cost a fortune. It started during the Nixon
administration with the idea that, because drugs are bad for people,
they should be difficult to obtain. As a result, it became a war on
supply.
As
first lady during the crack epidemic, Nancy Reagan tried to change this
approach in the 1980s. But her “Just Say No” campaign to reduce demand
received limited support.
Over the objections of the supply-focused bureaucracy, she told a United Nations audience
on Oct. 25, 1988: “If we cannot stem the American demand for drugs,
then there will be little hope of preventing foreign drug producers from
fulfilling that demand. We will not get anywhere if we place a heavier
burden of action on foreign governments than on America’s own mayors,
judges and legislators. You see, the cocaine cartel does not begin in
Medellín, Colombia. It begins in the streets of New York, Miami, Los
Angeles and every American city where crack is bought and sold.”
Her
warning was prescient, but not heeded. Studies show that the United
States has among the highest rates of drug use in the world. But even as
restricting supply has failed to curb abuse, aggressive policing has
led to thousands of young drug users filling American prisons, where
they learn how to become real criminals.
The
prohibitions on drugs have also created perverse economic incentives
that make combating drug producers and distributors extremely difficult.
The high black-market price for illegal drugs has generated huge
profits for the groups that produce and sell them, income that is
invested in buying state-of-the-art weapons, hiring gangs to defend
their trade, paying off public officials and making drugs easily
available to children, to get them addicted.
Drug
gangs, armed with money and guns from the United States, are causing
bloody mayhem in Mexico, El Salvador and other Central American
countries. In Mexico alone, drug-related violence has resulted in over 100,000 deaths since 2006. This violence is one of the reasons people leave these countries to come to the United States.
Add
it all up and one can see that focusing on supply has done little to
curtail drug abuse while causing a host of terrible side effects. What,
then, can we do?
First
the United States and Mexican governments must acknowledge the failure
of this strategy. Only then can we engage in rigorous and countrywide
education campaigns to persuade people not to use drugs.
The
current opioid crisis underlines the importance of curbing demand. This
approach, with sufficient resources and the right message, could have a
major impact similar to the campaign to reduce tobacco use.
We
should also decriminalize the small-scale possession of drugs for
personal use, to end the flow of nonviolent drug addicts into the
criminal justice system. Several states have taken a step in this
direction by decriminalizing possession of certain amounts of marijuana.
Mexico’s Supreme Court
has also declared that individuals should have the right to grow and
distribute marijuana for their personal use. At the same time, we should
continue to make it illegal to possess large quantities of drugs so
that pushers can be prosecuted and some control over supply maintained.
Finally,
we must create well-staffed and first-class treatment centers where
people are willing to go without fear of being prosecuted and with the
confidence that they will receive effective care. The experience of Portugal
suggests that younger people who use drugs but are not yet addicted can
very often be turned around. Even though it is difficult to get older
addicted people off drugs, treatment programs can still offer them
helpful services.
With
such a complicated problem, we should be willing to experiment with
solutions. Which advertising messages are most effective? How can
treatment be made effective for different kinds of drugs and different
degrees of addiction? We should have the patience to evaluate what works
and what doesn’t. But we must get started now.
As
these efforts progress, profits from the drug trade will diminish
greatly even as the dangers of engaging in it will remain high. The
result will be a gradual lessening of violence in Mexico and Central
American countries.
We
have a crisis on our hands — and for the past half-century, we have
been failing to solve it. But there are alternatives. Both the United
States and Mexico need to look beyond the idea that drug abuse is simply
a law-enforcement problem, solvable through arrests, prosecution and
restrictions on supply. We must together attack it with public health
policies and education.
We still have time to persuade our young people not to ruin their lives.
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