Drugs Are Winning the War on Drugs

It’s been forty years since US President Richard Milhous Nixon first declared war on drugs, famously stating: “You’re either with us, or you’re with the drugs.” Yet today, the world is facing defeat at the hands of drugs – mankind’s greatest, and most seductive, adversary.

The United States has led the world in the long campaign against drugs. A major offensive began in 1988 with the adoption of the United Nations Convention against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances, which 184 countries have ratified. This convention requires its members to criminalise drug trafficking and possession, and remains in force today. The move, coupled with “Say no to drugs!” and “I learned it by watching you!” public awareness campaigns, must have been successful, as it prompted drugs to strike back. In the 1990s, drugs targeted and killed prominent celebrities, including Kurt Cobain, River Phoenix, and Chris Farley. Refusing to be deterred by these terrorist tactics, the world soldiered on in the war.

In 1998, the UN General Assembly Special Session on Illicit Drugs was held. The session concluded with the adoption of a political declaration, which included commitments to achieving “significant and measurable results in the field of demand reduction,” and to “eliminating or significantly reducing the illicit cultivation of the coca bush, the cannabis plant and the opium poppy” by the year 2008. That these goals have not been met is an understatement. According to a 2009 report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), global opium production doubled between 1998 and 2008, from 4000 metric tonnes to 8000, while cocaine production remained steady at around 800 metric tonnes. But even worse has been the loss of allies in the war.

The Netherlands was of course the first country to fall to the enemy. In 1976 the Dutch began a new policy of distinguishing between “hard” and “soft” drugs, and no longer enforcing the laws against personal possession of the latter – though leaving them on the books in order to comply with the 1988 convention. Drugs took Portugal next, via the 2001 decriminalisation of all personal drug possession. According to this regime, there remain administrative penalties for possession, and trafficking is still a criminal offense. Similar approaches have been adopted in Spain, Italy, the Czech Republic, and the Baltic states – each falling one after another to our relentless foe.

More recently, Latin America has been on the brink of capture. In August Mexico decriminalised the possession of small amounts of any drug. Enemy agents or fellow travellers on Argentina’s Supreme Court next ruled it unconstitutional to prosecute individuals for personal possession of marijuana, and other traitors on Columbia’s Supreme Court followed suit. Brazil and Ecuador could be lost any day now. Canada has not escaped unscathed; drugs took the city of Vancouver – already sympathetic to the enemy cause – in September 2003 with the opening of a safe injection site for drug users.

The International Narcotics Control Board (INCB), the independent and quasi-judicial control organ that monitors the implementation of the United Nations drug control conventions, has not given up on those countries lost to drugs. It maintains that the 1988 convention requires countries to actually enforce, and not just have, criminal laws against possession. In its 2008 report, the INCB continued to recommend that no government treat cannabis as a “soft drug”, and urged that all safe injection programs be terminated. UNODC, however, is wavering. Although in its 2009 report (cited above) it insisted that repealing controls on drugs was not the correct response to failure in the war, it also acknowledged that drug users should be treated with medical help, rather than criminal retribution.

Throughout the war, the United States has remained steadfast against the enemy. In 1999 the US and the government of Colombia unveiled “Plan Columbia”, based on the creative idea that a “war” against an abstract concept can in fact be waged using conventional military force. Under this agreement, the US provided hundreds of millions of dollars to Colombia in (almost exclusively) military aid, to allow the Colombian government to carry out aggressive operations against drug-trafficking rebel groups. The Merida Initiative, unveiled in 2007, is a similar arrangement between the US and Mexico whereby significant funding will be provided for Mexican anti-drug security forces.

Yet even the United States, with its famed stomach for costly, never-ending wars, may be losing its resolve. In October the US federal government directed its prosecutors to stop pursuing actions against medical marijuana users and suppliers, focusing instead on higher-level drug traffickers. Perhaps this signals the beginning of an acknowledgement by America of the growing international consensus that aggressively criminalising drug use merely strengthens large criminal drug cartels. Or perhaps there was more to President Obama’s youthful flirtation with the enemy than meets the eye. This certainly never would have happened under Obama’s predecessor, who had merely been an alcoholic in his youth.

We now find ourselves on the defensive in our war against drugs, reeling from ever-stronger attacks from our cunning foe. But we must not surrender. To do so would be to fall into a terrible world where drug use runs rampant – a horrifying alternate universe where even our own university campus could be saturated with drugs and drug paraphernalia, and where student views on drug use could run from indifference to outright enthusiasm. To avoid this nightmare scenario, we must not let drugs win the war on drugs.

Our diabolical enemy

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