Who won’t join the conversation?

Via Reason, I just learned that a number of Central and South American leaders have had it with the war on drugs, and want to call it quits.

Nice snarky headline too!

You Are Now (Almost) Free to Discuss Ending the War on DrugsLatin American leaders talk drug legalization. Will Obama join in?

On Friday in Cartagena, Colombia, leaders from North, South, and Central America and the Caribbean will gather for the Summit of the Americas. There’s no official agenda, nor is there much word as to what definitely will be discussed beyond freer trade and “civil security.” But a flurry of editorials and articles stressing the need to acknowledge the elephant-in-the-room issue of the drug war have suddenly appeared. From The Guardian to The Miami Herald to The Huffington Post there are refrains from Latin American leaders (or articles weighty with references to their new views), all saying that it’s time we talk about this issue. Finally, the violence-spawning elephant is under discussion. Will President Barack Obama join the conversation?

I doubt it. As the article points out (and as we have pointed out in this blog ad nauseam) the man not only displays a business-as-usual attitude towards the WoD, but he even betrayed his campaign promises to allow states to set their own marijuana policies. Statists of all stripes love the drug war. But it is getting more and more costly.

And while Barack Obama might not be willing to join the conversation, George F. Will is willing, and in his latest column he puts the question bluntly:

Should the U.S. legalize hard drugs?

Draconian law enforcement has not only failed to stop the problem, it is in fact creating fueling the problem by locking in a high profit motive system:

Dealers, a.k.a. “pushers,” have almost nothing to do with initiating drug use by future addicts; almost every user starts when given drugs by a friend, sibling or acquaintance. There is a staggering disparity between the trivial sums earned by dealers who connect the cartels to the cartels’ customers and the huge sums trying to slow the flow of drugs to those street-level dealers. Kleiman, Caulkins and Hawken say that, in developed nations, cocaine sells for about $3,000 per ounce — almost twice the price of gold. And the supply of cocaine, unlike that of gold, can be cheaply and quickly expanded. But in the countries where cocaine and heroin are produced, they sell for about 1 percent of their retail price in the United States. If cocaine were legalized, a $2,000 kilogram could be FedExed from Colombia for less than $50 and sold profitably here for a small markup from its price in Colombia, and a $5 rock of crack might cost 25 cents. Criminalization drives the cost of the smuggled kilogram in the United States up to $20,000. But then it retails for more than $100,000.

And,

…cartels have oceans of money for corrupting enforcement because drugs are so cheap to produce and easy to renew. So it is not unreasonable to consider modifying a policy that gives hundreds of billions of dollars a year to violent organized crime.

It would not be unreasonable at all if we assumed the goal was to eliminate the high profits that drive the cartels. But when we consider that our own Secretary of State has said we can’t legalize drugs because there “is too much money in it,” then I guess it is unreasonable.

I can only draw one very cynical conclusion.

Illegal drugs remain illegal because the people who keep them illegal want them to remain profitable.

Will concludes,

Would the public health problems resulting from legalization be a price worth paying for injuring the cartels and reducing the costs of enforcement? We probably are going to find out.

It’s interesting that our neighbors to the south are wising up to the true nature of the problem:

Part of the credit for this recent (rhetorical) progress goes to Guatemalan President Otto Pérez Molina, who recently became “the first sitting head of state to propose ending the war on drugs.” Molina ran for president in 2011 as a former right-wing military general, but almost immediately upon assuming office in January switched gears on his country’s $200 million a year drug war.

Molina is no libertarian, but he is interested in solving the problem. On April 10th, in anticipation of the Americas summit, Molina suggested to the The Washington Post, “It could be a partial decriminalization or a complete decriminalization that would apply to the whole chain of production, transit and consumption.”

Other Latin American leaders have also dipped their toes into the waters of legalization. Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos said in November 2011, “A new approach should try and take away the violent profit that comes with drug trafficking… If that means legalising, and the world thinks that’s the solution, I will welcome it. I’m not against it.” He has also stressed that a solution requires more than one or two countries legalizing drugs. Similarly, Mexican President Felipe Calderon, the man whose unofficial declaration of war against the cartels lead to a six-year reign of misery that has killed 40,000, has agreed that it’s time to talk legalization. In Costa Rica, where marijuana is legal for personal use in small amounts, but other drugs are illegal, drug war violence is spreading. President Laura Chinchilla told Bloomberg in March, “If we keep doing what we have been when the results today are worse than 10 years ago, we’ll never get anywhere and could wind up like Mexico or Colombia.” Salvadoran President Mauricio Funes is debating legalization as well.

Perhaps they can see the problem more clearly because the cartels are right there in front of them, and they can clearly see that the artificial price differential is what keeps them in business.

Meanwhile, the big consumer country to the north whose citizens willingly pay wildly inflated prices for low-value substances continues to insist upon the same delusional policies that do little more than subsidize the market.

Too much money indeed.