Op-ed by former prime minister of NZ: Another decade lost to the global war on drugs

[S.J.B.]

Another decade lost to the global war on drugs
Helen Clark
The Hill
November 20th, 2018

In my experience as head of my country's government and previously a health minister, as a former senior official at the United Nations, and more recently as a member of the Global Commission on Drug Policy, I've found debates on drug policy tend to be divisive and passionately ideological. On one point, however, there is a clear and growing consensus: Around the world, the so-called "war on drugs" is failing.

It has been estimated that globally more than $100 billion a year is spent waging this silent war, with over $40 billion of that spent in the United States alone. Yet, despite the huge amount of funding invested in drug control, the challenges are rising, not reducing, and the core objectives in the United Nations charter of promoting human rights, peace and security and development are being dramatically undermined by global drug policies. Unfortunately, there is even less consensus on the question of where we go from here.

This is all the more concerning as we rapidly approach a key inflexion point in the global debate, with the contours of the next United Nations strategy being negotiated before the crucial ministerial meeting in Vienna next March. As the situation stands, avoiding these critical questions no longer is tenable, and the first step to recovery from the collective "addiction to the war on drugs" is to accept that there is a problem.

A starting point for understanding better the political context is a new landmark report by the International Drug Policy Consortium -- a global civil society network of over 170 non-governmental organizations focusing on drug policy -- which has laid bare the drug war's failures in the starkest terms. The 2009 10-year U.N. drug strategy committed governments worldwide to creating a world free of drugs by 2019. But with each passing year, the world has moved further and further from this fantastical goal.

As the report highlights, drug use has not disappeared but instead has risen by 31 percent between 2011 and 2016. Illegal drug markets have expanded relentlessly to meet this growing demand, with opium and coca production rising respectively by 130 percent and 34 percent between 2009 and 2018.

Read the full story here.

 

[neversickanymore]

Logic has nothing to do with the drug policy.

 

[cj]

I find it hard to believe anyone in politics actually thinks the war on drugs is designed to succeed. It's a vast money laundering scheme. A way for governments to obtain and spend money with no public oversight. Everyone knows the CIA is balls deep in the whole enterprise. Im sure most other credible intelligence agencies are as well.

 

[Limpet_Chicken]

This corrupt, money-scamming filthy little war isn't failing.

It died in-utero, failing the very Planck-time the first pen took to the surface of the first paper and the first letter of the first piece of vile statute was set to print.

It can succeed in two, and only two things.

1-inflicting suffering, misery, poverty, violence, destitution and death, casualties of war fought by armed troops against civilian noncombatants, and all too often, IMO, murdered.

And 2-a money tree for noxious shady spook sons of whores under slimy little rocks everywhere, a poisoned teat to suckle green pus, marked with the sigil of the dollar, the pound and currencies the world over.

Those responsible are a disease, that needs curing. A crawling, slithering coagulation of blasphemous foulness the world has scarcely set eyes upon since the ravages of leprosy before the days of curative medicaments, elephantitis of the scrotum, phaeochromocytomas, and fatal familial insomnia.

Oh, and vectored by the bite of poli-ticks. Horrid bloated. and glutted upon the shrieks of the poorest and the most vulnerable, whilst the street gangs and cartels flourish like rats in sewers, feasting on misery-shit and spreading violence, savagery, and sated upon murder.