MARIJUANA AND COCAINE SHOULD BE LEGALISED, SAYS LATIN AMERICAN DRUGS COMMISSION

Marijuana and cocaine for personal use should be decriminalised
because the "war on drugs" has been a disaster, according to some of
Latin America's most powerful politicians and writers.

The current international policy on drugs encourages corruption and
violence that is threatening democracy throughout the continent,
according to the former president of Brazil, Fernando Enrique
Cardoso, who is a co-president of the Latin American commission on
drugs and democracy. As well as politicians, the commission includes
the writers Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru, and Paulo Coelho of Brazil.

The election of Barack Obama has opened up the best opportunity for
decades to address the failure of the "so-called drugs war", Cardoso
told the Guardian today on a visit to London. He said he was hopeful
that the international community would acknowledge that the time had
come for a "paradigm shift" in the debate on drugs. "The war on drugs
has failed in spite of enormous efforts in places like Colombia - the
area of coca crops is not reducing," he said.

The current system of prohibition encouraged corruption among police
officers, politicians and even judges. "It poisons the whole system,
it undermines democracy," Cardoso said. "The war on drugs is based on
repression . How can people believe in democracy if the rule of law
doesn't work?" Users should be offered treatment rather than jail, he said.

"The starting point has to be the United States," he said. "Now we
have a new American administration, which is much more open-minded
than before." He said he had held talks with the US state department
in the later years of the Bush administration and found that,
privately, many of the officials there shared his views.

Cardoso said that the changes would have to be co-ordinated. "We need
an international convention, otherwise you will have different
countries doing different things," he said. "But the climate is
changing for the first time for many years. Even in the US, they
recognise we are in deadlock now." Obama had already made it clear
that the idea of a "war on drugs" was not workable. The need for
change is urgent, said Cardoso, because of what is happening in Latin
America. "There is a very grave situation in Mexico," he said. "More
people are being killed there (through the drugs war) than in Iraq."
He said that it was easier for former presidents who were no longer
in office or running for election to speak out on such a
controversial issue. He added that ending the war on drugs would be
not be a signal that drugs were acceptable but a recognition that
current policies had failed.

"You have to show that drugs are harmful, even light drugs, like
marijuana - it is better not to use drugs - but tobacco is harmful
also yet its use is being reduced by education," said Cardoso. He
added that the vast quantities of money being used to enforce
"repressive" policies on drugs could be put into treatment and
education. Hundreds of thousands of people were being unnecessarily
criminalised and sent to prison, "which are schools of crime."

The previous UN drugs policy that aimed to eliminate all drug use by
this year was ill-conceived, he said. "You can never stop drugs use,"
he said, likening it to some of the failed policies in the past over
HIV/Aids. "You can't have zero drugs any more than you can have a
zero sex policy but you can have a safe sex policy." He said that
Brazil's success in halting the HIV/Aids epidemic, which meant
promoting the use of condoms in a Catholic country, was an example of
how people's behaviour could be changed by education rather than repression.