You can't fight drugs with guns

You can't fight drugs with guns
Published: 27 May 2007

The worldwide "war on drugs" that relies on armies and police to destroy crops and arrest traffickers has failed. The attempt to suppress the Latin American drugs trade at source, first decreed by Richard Nixon in the 1970s, has achieved nothing. Despite the spending of $25bn(£13bn) of US taxpayers' money, cocaine production in Colombia, Peru and Bolivia has increased, as has cocaine consumption in the US and the rest of the rich world.

As Hugh O'Shaughnessy argues today, the world is finally beginning to realise that you can't beat narcotics with machine guns and policemen's truncheons. As this newspaper reported last month, in parts of the world where the US is not the sole decider of the policy of the international community, more hopeful approaches are being tried. In Afghanistan, the British Government, responsible for security in the poppy-growing areas in the south, may be prepared to allow opium to be produced legally for medical purposes. If the price can be set at the right level, Afghan farmers would prefer the lower but more certain returns of growing a legal crop to those of an illegal one. It would bring a large sector of the Afghan economy within the law and make diversification and development more likely.

This is an increasingly urgent issue. As our sister newspaper, The Independent, reported last week, poppy-growing is spreading in the lawless badlands of Iraq. This reversal of the direction of causality from that found in Latin America, where illegal drug production leads to instability and lawlordism, only reinforces the argument against a punitive approach to tackling the sources of narcotics supply. Once illegal drug production is in the hands of gangsters it becomes difficult to prise open their grip.

Of course, the legalisation of part of the supply chain of narcotics is not an easy, cheap or complete answer to the psychological problems of drug dependence of a tiny minority of Westerners. But, accompanied by expensive programmes of education and treatment, it must be more successful than the policy of suppression that has so signally failed over the past 30 years.