I don’t know whether this will have any effect on an intractable situation, but a group of Nobel Prize winning economists — along with Reagan’s former Secretary of State George Shultz — have warned that the war on drugs has failed big time:
The global “war on drugs” has been a catastrophic failure and world leaders must rethink their approach, a group including five Nobel Prize-winning economists, Britain’s deputy prime minister and a former U.S. secretary of state said Tuesday.
An academic report published by the London School of Economics (LSE) called “Ending the Drug Wars” pointed to violence in Afghanistan, Latin America and other regions as evidence of the need for a new approach.
“It is time to end the ‘war on drugs’ and massively redirect resources towards effective evidence-based policies underpinned by rigorous economic analysis,” they said in a foreword to the report.
“The pursuit of a militarised and enforcement-led global ‘war on drugs’ strategy has produced enormous negative outcomes and collateral damage.”
The report said “rigorously monitored” experiments with legalisation and a focus on public health, minimising the impact of the illegal drug trade, were key ways of tackling the problem instead.
The report was signed by George Shultz, the U.S. secretary of state under Ronald Reagan, British Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, and former NATO and E.U. foreign policy chief Javier Solana.
It was also signed by Nobel economics prize winners Kenneth Arrow (1972), Christopher Pissarides (2010), Thomas Schelling (2005) Vernon Smith (2002) and Oliver Williamson (2009).
That’s quite a broad spectrum of distinguished people.
If only more people could look at the drug war from an economic perspective, they would see that it mainly provides a huge incentive for drug cartels by artificially inflating the price of low-value substances. When a pill with a fair market value measured in pennies can be sold for fifty dollars in the street because of insane laws, the result is a huge government-created market. The laws create and fuel the very problem they are supposed to eradicate.
And that’s without even considering the worldwide assault on personal liberty.
That so many people continue to support this insanity is something that never ceases to amaze me.
(Especially those who claim to be against big government and for personal freedom….)
Comments
4 responses to “#DRUGWARFAIL”
If Milton Friedman was alive he would have signed. He did a major anti-Drug War rant in 1972 and never stopped.
Funny how so much “settled science” — sodium intake, saturated fat, drug wars, carb-based food pyramid — is starting to be proven wrong. It’s almost like maybe we should stop rushing to massive and expensive policy “solutions” to supposedly settled science…
Caradoc,
You didn’t mention “global warming” explicitly so I will.
It is nice to see public figures coming out on this issue.
But I think it is important to note that from the perspective of the goals of those who promote the drug war, it hasn’t been a failure. If the purpose of the drug war is to enforce the monopoly of the medical drug companies and protect them from unpatentable, cheaper and better drugs than they produce, then it has been quite successful.
As with almost everything in politics, you have to understand the hidden agenda to understand the issue and how to fight it.