Failed States and Failed Policies

HOW TO STOP THE DRUG WARS

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. Reviewing
the evidence again, 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.