WAR ON REASON

Today in New York City, an act of almost indescribable stupidity will be
committed. Eighteen years after Ronald Reagan announced he would stamp out
drugs, the "War on Drugs" will be declared once again.

This time the United Nations will play the fool, with an announcement of
the most ambitious international anti-drug program ever. Representatives
from 130 nations, plus 30 heads of state, including US president Bill
Clinton, will be there to applaud.

The cornerstone of the UN plan will be a program to get farmers in the nine
major drug-producing nations -- Afghanistan, Burma, Laos, Colombia, India,
Mexico, Pakistan, and Vietnam -- to switch from growing plants that produce
illegal drugs to other crops. The stated goal of the UN plan: To eradicate
the world's entire production of heroin, cocaine, and marijuana in 10 years.

Bonne chance, nos amis. The nations being targeted range from merely
corrupt to tyrannical to anarchic. Authority, where it exists, is often
intimately involved in the production and transportation of drugs. Unless
the UN is prepared to pay every farmer to grow soybeans and send
peacekeepers to fight off the guerrillas, police, and soldiers who will be
displeased that their cash-cow has dried up, its war will be lost.

But assume the UN could manage the impossible and turn the nations now
producing the bulk of the world's drugs into exporters of soybeans. Would
that mean victory in the War on Drugs?

Not at all. Cutting the supply of drugs does nothing to reduce the demand
for them. It would mean, however, that some of that demand wouldn't be met,
which would push the value of drugs skyward. That in turn would tempt
criminals, soldiers, police, guerrillas, and farmers in nations elsewhere
in the world to produce their own supply. If it's not Afghanistan and Burma
supplying the drug markets, it will be Nigeria, or Peru, or somewhere else.
Unless the UN can afford to put every farmer in the world on the anti-drug
dole, crop substitution won't work.

Nor will it work even if it is coupled with new programs to lessen the
demand for drugs. Every Western nation, particularly the U.S., has tried to
stifle demand using every imaginable carrot and stick, and met with no more
success than King Canute when he ordered the tides to halt. Demand for
drugs rises and falls largely according to social factors which are
impervious to the efforts of governments.

For all its futility, the UN's quixotic quest will not come cheaply. By one
estimate, the new plan will require $3 to $4 billion US. To put that in
perspective: 2.2 million children under the age of five die in developing
countries each year from diarrhoeal dehydration because they don't have
safe drinking water. How much clean water $3 to $4 billion US could buy can
only be imagined.

There will be other facets to the UN's anti-drug drive, most of which will
be decided over the course of three days of deliberations in the UN General
Assembly. The UN will not, however, discuss alternatives to the War on
Drugs. Mexico, a nation that bears the worst scars of the drug war, first
proposed this conference as a way of assessing what has been done, and
learning from that experience, but other nations, particularly the U.S.,
used the planning stages of the conference to push discussion of
alternatives off the agenda. Non-governmental organizations that asked to
hold a short, small seminar to discuss alternatives to the War on Drugs
were refused permission.

What about Canada? As always, the federal government is clambering onto the
bandwagon and cheering on the war. Since the Trudeau years, it has seldom
given serious thought to drug policy, preferring instead to follow whatever
variation on failure is being proposed.

That, sadly, is true of most of the world's nations. Sense and experience
are ignored, folly is repeated, and the War on Drugs becomes a war on
reason itself.

Checked-by: Richard Lake