Failed states and failed policies: How to stop the drug wars
Mar 5th 2009
From The Economist
Prohibition has failed; legalisation is the least bad solution
A HUNDRED years ago a group of foreign diplomats gathered in Shanghai
for the first-ever international effort to ban trade in a narcotic drug.
On February 26th 1909 they agreed to set up the International Opium
Commission-just a few decades after Britain had fought a war with China
to assert its right to peddle the stuff. Many other bans of
mood-altering drugs have followed. In 1998 the UN General Assembly
committed member countries to achieving a "drug-free world" and to
"eliminating or significantly reducing" the production of opium, cocaine
and cannabis by 2008.
That is the kind of promise politicians love to make. It assuages the
sense of moral panic that has been the handmaiden of prohibition for a
century. It is intended to reassure the parents of teenagers across the
world. Yet it is a hugely irresponsible promise, because it cannot be
fulfilled.
Next week ministers from around the world gather in Vienna to set
international drug policy for the next decade. Like first-world-war
generals, many will claim that all that is needed is more of the same.
In fact the war on drugs has been a disaster, creating failed states in
the developing world even as addiction has flourished in the rich world.
By any sensible measure, this 100-year struggle has been illiberal,
murderous and pointless. That is why The Economist continues to believe
that the least bad policy is to legalise drugs.
"Least bad" does not mean good. Legalisation, though clearly better for
producer countries, would bring (different) risks to consumer countries.
As we outline below, many vulnerable drug-takers would suffer. But in
our view, more would gain.
The evidence of failure
Nowadays the UN Office on Drugs and Crime no longer talks about a
drug-free world. Its boast is that the drug market has "stabilised",
meaning that more than 200m people, or almost 5% of the world's adult
population, still take illegal drugs-roughly the same proportion as a
decade ago. (Like most purported drug facts, this one is just an
educated guess: evidential rigour is another casualty of illegality.)
The production of cocaine and opium is probably about the same as it was
a decade ago; that of cannabis is higher. Consumption of cocaine has
declined gradually in the United States from its peak in the early
1980s, but the path is uneven (it remains higher than in the mid-1990s),
and it is rising in many places, including Europe.
This is not for want of effort. The United States alone spends some $40
billion each year on trying to eliminate the supply of drugs. It arrests
1.5m of its citizens each year for drug offences, locking up half a
million of them; tougher drug laws are the main reason why one in five
black American men spend some time behind bars. In the developing world
blood is being shed at an astonishing rate. In Mexico more than 800
policemen and soldiers have been killed since December 2006 (and the
annual overall death toll is running at over 6,000). This week yet
another leader of a troubled drug-ridden country-Guinea Bissau-was
assassinated.
Yet prohibition itself vitiates the efforts of the drug warriors. The
price of an illegal substance is determined more by the cost of
distribution than of production. Take cocaine: the mark-up between coca
field and consumer is more than a hundredfold. Even if dumping
weedkiller on the crops of peasant farmers quadruples the local price of
coca leaves, this tends to have little impact on the street price, which
is set mainly by the risk of getting cocaine into Europe or the United
States.
Nowadays the drug warriors claim to seize close to half of all the
cocaine that is produced. The street price in the United States does
seem to have risen, and the purity seems to have fallen, over the past
year. But it is not clear that drug demand drops when prices rise. On
the other hand, there is plenty of evidence that the drug business
quickly adapts to market disruption. At best, effective repression
merely forces it to shift production sites. Thus opium has moved from
Turkey and Thailand to Myanmar and southern Afghanistan, where it
undermines the West's efforts to defeat the Taliban.
Al Capone, but on a global scale
Indeed, far from reducing crime, prohibition has fostered gangsterism on
a scale that the world has never seen before. According to the UN's
perhaps inflated estimate, the illegal drug industry is worth some $320
billion a year. In the West it makes criminals of otherwise law-abiding
citizens (the current American president could easily have ended up in
prison for his youthful experiments with "blow"). It also makes drugs
more dangerous: addicts buy heavily adulterated cocaine and heroin; many
use dirty needles to inject themselves, spreading HIV; the wretches who
succumb to "crack" or "meth" are outside the law, with only their
pushers to "treat" them. But it is countries in the emerging world that
pay most of the price. Even a relatively developed democracy such as
Mexico now finds itself in a life-or-death struggle against gangsters.
American officials, including a former drug tsar, have publicly worried
about having a "narco state" as their neighbour.
The failure of the drug war has led a few of its braver generals,
especially from Europe and Latin America, to suggest shifting the focus
from locking up people to public health and "harm reduction" (such as
encouraging addicts to use clean needles). This approach would put more
emphasis on public education and the treatment of addicts, and less on
the harassment of peasants who grow coca and the punishment of consumers
of "soft" drugs for personal use. That would be a step in the right
direction. But it is unlikely to be adequately funded, and it does
nothing to take organised crime out of the picture.
Legalisation would not only drive away the gangsters; it would transform
drugs from a law-and-order problem into a public-health problem, which
is how they ought to be treated. Governments would tax and regulate the
drug trade, and use the funds raised (and the billions saved on
law-enforcement) to educate the public about the risks of drug-taking
and to treat addiction. The sale of drugs to minors should remain
banned. Different drugs would command different levels of taxation and
regulation. This system would be fiddly and imperfect, requiring
constant monitoring and hard-to-measure trade-offs. Post-tax prices
should be set at a level that would strike a balance between damping
down use on the one hand, and discouraging a black market and the
desperate acts of theft and prostitution to which addicts now resort to
feed their habits.
Selling even this flawed system to people in producer countries, where
organised crime is the central political issue, is fairly easy. The
tough part comes in the consumer countries, where addiction is the main
political battle. Plenty of American parents might accept that
legalisation would be the right answer for the people of Latin America,
Asia and Africa; they might even see its usefulness in the fight against
terrorism. But their immediate fear would be for their own children.
That fear is based in large part on the presumption that more people
would take drugs under a legal regime. That presumption may be wrong.
There is no correlation between the harshness of drug laws and the
incidence of drug-taking: citizens living under tough regimes (notably
America but also Britain) take more drugs, not fewer. Embarrassed drug
warriors blame this on alleged cultural differences, but even in fairly
similar countries tough rules make little difference to the number of
addicts: harsh Sweden and more liberal Norway have precisely the same
addiction rates. Legalisation might reduce both supply (pushers by
definition push) and demand (part of that dangerous thrill would go).
Nobody knows for certain. But it is hard to argue that sales of any
product that is made cheaper, safer and more widely available would
fall. Any honest proponent of legalisation would be wise to assume that
drug-taking as a whole would rise.
There are two main reasons for arguing that prohibition should be
scrapped all the same. The first is one of liberal principle. Although
some illegal drugs are extremely dangerous to some people, most are not
especially harmful. (Tobacco is more addictive than virtually all of
them.) Most consumers of illegal drugs, including cocaine and even
heroin, take them only occasionally. They do so because they derive
enjoyment from them (as they do from whisky or a Marlboro Light). It is
not the state's job to stop them from doing so.
What about addiction? That is partly covered by this first argument, as
the harm involved is primarily visited upon the user. But addiction can
also inflict misery on the families and especially the children of any
addict, and involves wider social costs. That is why discouraging and
treating addiction should be the priority for drug policy. Hence the
second argument: legalisation offers the opportunity to deal with
addiction properly.
By providing honest information about the health risks of different
drugs, and pricing them accordingly, governments could steer consumers
towards the least harmful ones. Prohibition has failed to prevent the
proliferation of designer drugs, dreamed up in laboratories.
Legalisation might encourage legitimate drug companies to try to improve
the stuff that people take. The resources gained from tax and saved on
repression would allow governments to guarantee treatment to addicts-a
way of making legalisation more politically palatable. The success of
developed countries in stopping people smoking tobacco, which is
similarly subject to tax and regulation, provides grounds for hope.
A calculated gamble, or another century of failure?
This newspaper first argued for legalisation 20 years ago (see article).
Reviewing the evidence again (see article), prohibition seems even more
harmful, especially for the poor and weak of the world. Legalisation
would not drive gangsters completely out of drugs; as with alcohol and
cigarettes, there would be taxes to avoid and rules to subvert. Nor
would it automatically cure failed states like Afghanistan. Our solution
is a messy one; but a century of manifest failure argues for trying it.
From The Economist
Prohibition has failed; legalisation is the least bad solution
A HUNDRED years ago a group of foreign diplomats gathered in Shanghai
for the first-ever international effort to ban trade in a narcotic drug.
On February 26th 1909 they agreed to set up the International Opium
Commission-just a few decades after Britain had fought a war with China
to assert its right to peddle the stuff. Many other bans of
mood-altering drugs have followed. In 1998 the UN General Assembly
committed member countries to achieving a "drug-free world" and to
"eliminating or significantly reducing" the production of opium, cocaine
and cannabis by 2008.
That is the kind of promise politicians love to make. It assuages the
sense of moral panic that has been the handmaiden of prohibition for a
century. It is intended to reassure the parents of teenagers across the
world. Yet it is a hugely irresponsible promise, because it cannot be
fulfilled.
Next week ministers from around the world gather in Vienna to set
international drug policy for the next decade. Like first-world-war
generals, many will claim that all that is needed is more of the same.
In fact the war on drugs has been a disaster, creating failed states in
the developing world even as addiction has flourished in the rich world.
By any sensible measure, this 100-year struggle has been illiberal,
murderous and pointless. That is why The Economist continues to believe
that the least bad policy is to legalise drugs.
"Least bad" does not mean good. Legalisation, though clearly better for
producer countries, would bring (different) risks to consumer countries.
As we outline below, many vulnerable drug-takers would suffer. But in
our view, more would gain.
The evidence of failure
Nowadays the UN Office on Drugs and Crime no longer talks about a
drug-free world. Its boast is that the drug market has "stabilised",
meaning that more than 200m people, or almost 5% of the world's adult
population, still take illegal drugs-roughly the same proportion as a
decade ago. (Like most purported drug facts, this one is just an
educated guess: evidential rigour is another casualty of illegality.)
The production of cocaine and opium is probably about the same as it was
a decade ago; that of cannabis is higher. Consumption of cocaine has
declined gradually in the United States from its peak in the early
1980s, but the path is uneven (it remains higher than in the mid-1990s),
and it is rising in many places, including Europe.
This is not for want of effort. The United States alone spends some $40
billion each year on trying to eliminate the supply of drugs. It arrests
1.5m of its citizens each year for drug offences, locking up half a
million of them; tougher drug laws are the main reason why one in five
black American men spend some time behind bars. In the developing world
blood is being shed at an astonishing rate. In Mexico more than 800
policemen and soldiers have been killed since December 2006 (and the
annual overall death toll is running at over 6,000). This week yet
another leader of a troubled drug-ridden country-Guinea Bissau-was
assassinated.
Yet prohibition itself vitiates the efforts of the drug warriors. The
price of an illegal substance is determined more by the cost of
distribution than of production. Take cocaine: the mark-up between coca
field and consumer is more than a hundredfold. Even if dumping
weedkiller on the crops of peasant farmers quadruples the local price of
coca leaves, this tends to have little impact on the street price, which
is set mainly by the risk of getting cocaine into Europe or the United
States.
Nowadays the drug warriors claim to seize close to half of all the
cocaine that is produced. The street price in the United States does
seem to have risen, and the purity seems to have fallen, over the past
year. But it is not clear that drug demand drops when prices rise. On
the other hand, there is plenty of evidence that the drug business
quickly adapts to market disruption. At best, effective repression
merely forces it to shift production sites. Thus opium has moved from
Turkey and Thailand to Myanmar and southern Afghanistan, where it
undermines the West's efforts to defeat the Taliban.
Al Capone, but on a global scale
Indeed, far from reducing crime, prohibition has fostered gangsterism on
a scale that the world has never seen before. According to the UN's
perhaps inflated estimate, the illegal drug industry is worth some $320
billion a year. In the West it makes criminals of otherwise law-abiding
citizens (the current American president could easily have ended up in
prison for his youthful experiments with "blow"). It also makes drugs
more dangerous: addicts buy heavily adulterated cocaine and heroin; many
use dirty needles to inject themselves, spreading HIV; the wretches who
succumb to "crack" or "meth" are outside the law, with only their
pushers to "treat" them. But it is countries in the emerging world that
pay most of the price. Even a relatively developed democracy such as
Mexico now finds itself in a life-or-death struggle against gangsters.
American officials, including a former drug tsar, have publicly worried
about having a "narco state" as their neighbour.
The failure of the drug war has led a few of its braver generals,
especially from Europe and Latin America, to suggest shifting the focus
from locking up people to public health and "harm reduction" (such as
encouraging addicts to use clean needles). This approach would put more
emphasis on public education and the treatment of addicts, and less on
the harassment of peasants who grow coca and the punishment of consumers
of "soft" drugs for personal use. That would be a step in the right
direction. But it is unlikely to be adequately funded, and it does
nothing to take organised crime out of the picture.
Legalisation would not only drive away the gangsters; it would transform
drugs from a law-and-order problem into a public-health problem, which
is how they ought to be treated. Governments would tax and regulate the
drug trade, and use the funds raised (and the billions saved on
law-enforcement) to educate the public about the risks of drug-taking
and to treat addiction. The sale of drugs to minors should remain
banned. Different drugs would command different levels of taxation and
regulation. This system would be fiddly and imperfect, requiring
constant monitoring and hard-to-measure trade-offs. Post-tax prices
should be set at a level that would strike a balance between damping
down use on the one hand, and discouraging a black market and the
desperate acts of theft and prostitution to which addicts now resort to
feed their habits.
Selling even this flawed system to people in producer countries, where
organised crime is the central political issue, is fairly easy. The
tough part comes in the consumer countries, where addiction is the main
political battle. Plenty of American parents might accept that
legalisation would be the right answer for the people of Latin America,
Asia and Africa; they might even see its usefulness in the fight against
terrorism. But their immediate fear would be for their own children.
That fear is based in large part on the presumption that more people
would take drugs under a legal regime. That presumption may be wrong.
There is no correlation between the harshness of drug laws and the
incidence of drug-taking: citizens living under tough regimes (notably
America but also Britain) take more drugs, not fewer. Embarrassed drug
warriors blame this on alleged cultural differences, but even in fairly
similar countries tough rules make little difference to the number of
addicts: harsh Sweden and more liberal Norway have precisely the same
addiction rates. Legalisation might reduce both supply (pushers by
definition push) and demand (part of that dangerous thrill would go).
Nobody knows for certain. But it is hard to argue that sales of any
product that is made cheaper, safer and more widely available would
fall. Any honest proponent of legalisation would be wise to assume that
drug-taking as a whole would rise.
There are two main reasons for arguing that prohibition should be
scrapped all the same. The first is one of liberal principle. Although
some illegal drugs are extremely dangerous to some people, most are not
especially harmful. (Tobacco is more addictive than virtually all of
them.) Most consumers of illegal drugs, including cocaine and even
heroin, take them only occasionally. They do so because they derive
enjoyment from them (as they do from whisky or a Marlboro Light). It is
not the state's job to stop them from doing so.
What about addiction? That is partly covered by this first argument, as
the harm involved is primarily visited upon the user. But addiction can
also inflict misery on the families and especially the children of any
addict, and involves wider social costs. That is why discouraging and
treating addiction should be the priority for drug policy. Hence the
second argument: legalisation offers the opportunity to deal with
addiction properly.
By providing honest information about the health risks of different
drugs, and pricing them accordingly, governments could steer consumers
towards the least harmful ones. Prohibition has failed to prevent the
proliferation of designer drugs, dreamed up in laboratories.
Legalisation might encourage legitimate drug companies to try to improve
the stuff that people take. The resources gained from tax and saved on
repression would allow governments to guarantee treatment to addicts-a
way of making legalisation more politically palatable. The success of
developed countries in stopping people smoking tobacco, which is
similarly subject to tax and regulation, provides grounds for hope.
A calculated gamble, or another century of failure?
This newspaper first argued for legalisation 20 years ago (see article).
Reviewing the evidence again (see article), prohibition seems even more
harmful, especially for the poor and weak of the world. Legalisation
would not drive gangsters completely out of drugs; as with alcohol and
cigarettes, there would be taxes to avoid and rules to subvert. Nor
would it automatically cure failed states like Afghanistan. Our solution
is a messy one; but a century of manifest failure argues for trying it.
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