There's a war going on for decades all over the world that has caused thousands of deaths without getting the slightest result. It's the war of the world's governments against drugs. An illegal drug is a substance that governments have decided to prohibit quite arbitrarily. Alcohol and pharmaceutical drugs have stronger effects on the human body than many illegal drugs, yet they are legal. The reason why certain drugs have been banned and others not it's only cultural.
Marijuana, opiates and cocaine were banned because they came from countries outside Europe and have been linked to cultures that Western racism considered inferior, to anti-social behaviors or to social groups who rejected the "normal" bourgeois morality. The war on drugs, however, has produced disastrous effects because the illicit trade in these substances has enriched strengthened and funded criminal organizations around the world, from mafia to terrorism, and increased violence and killings between rival gangs for control of this trade. The money produced by this huge illegal economy also contaminates the legal economy in which profits are systematically reinvested. The world consumption of drugs, at least 200 million people, in all this is in no way diminished, even if sometimes changes the distribution of a given substance in certain countries, while prices of many drugs have fallen.
The propaganda of Western governments against drugs started for racists reasons and was for years a battle cry for conservative parties, until it became too effective. Now a large part of public opinion is strongly against drugs because many believe it is the right thing to do, and they fear that the legalization of drugs would increase their circulation. In fact, if the drug trade was controlled by the governments criminal organizations will be greatly weakened and the risks to the health of consumers would decrease. Also we could stop the steady increase in prison population in Western countries and avoid putting in prison so many people whose social danger is very low. The police could focus on more serious crimes, improving both the efficiency of the judicial system and the overall security.
Plus the drug war is often a war against farmers in poor countries who grow these substances simply because far more profitable than other crops. The war on drugs is also ultimately a war against the symptom and not the disease. The reason so many people use drugs has to be found in deep social problems of our fragmented, individualistic, competitive and inhuman society. The drug is not the problem, is only one way in which people seek a solution to their problems. No different from alcohol. But like alcohol, drugs become a problem only when someone become addicted. Moderate consumption of these substances is not really different from drinking a couple of glasses of wine or take legal drugs.
To really solve the problem of drug abuse a society should limit and reduce demand by addressing the social problems that drug addiction hides. But today even the possible successes of the war on drugs are in fact failures: each time governments limit production or trafficking without a decrease in demand the only result is to increase prices and therefore profit margins for traffickers. So the UN and many governments have now accepted that the repression has been a complete disaster.
Perhaps most serious is that now the drug trade has also become a sort of social safety net. In the world there are millions of people who make a living by trafficking in drugs, small or large, and often live in places where the social fabric is more degraded. Legalize drugs and remove this trade from criminal organizations would also mean that a series of economic and social actions would be needed to bring back entire neighborhoods to legal economy. And we wonder whether many governments would be able to do something like that. Continue to fight a senseless and unwinnable war may be much easier than addressing the real problems.
Perhaps most serious is that now the drug trade has also become a sort of social safety net. In the world there are millions of people who make a living by trafficking in drugs, small or large, and often live in places where the social fabric is more degraded. Legalize drugs and remove this trade from criminal organizations would also mean that a series of economic and social actions would be needed to bring back entire neighborhoods to legal economy. And we wonder whether many governments would be able to do something like that. Continue to fight a senseless and unwinnable war may be much easier than addressing the real problems.
Francesco Defferrari
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