[Viva] Fwd: [dnc-board] Let's talk terms of surrender

Tue Apr 17 18:49:51 PDT 2012

FYI

The war on drugs is a class/religious war - one based on mass ignorance of
people in positions of power.
Mostly MEN.

And with all wars, the first victims are women and children!

Tami Starlight
https://www.facebook.com/events/321953677859266/

The War is over- We win!  Reparations,amnesty for all!

 What comes after the war on drugs

BY DAN GARDNER, THE OTTAWA CITIZEN APRIL 17, 2012 6:02 PM

 <http://www.ottawacitizen.com/opinion/What+comes+after+drugs/6474264/story.html>
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   - STORY<http://www.ottawacitizen.com/opinion/What+comes+after+drugs/6474264/story.html>
   - PHOTOS ( 1
)<http://www.ottawacitizen.com/opinion/What+comes+after+drugs/6474264/story.html>

 [image: A forensic technician films the body of a man at a crime scene in
the municipality of Guadalupe in Monterrey. Kingpins are jailed or killed
and dozens of would-be kingpins open fire — precisely the sort of
‘success’ that has created more than 50,000 corpses in Mexico
since 2006.]<http://www.ottawacitizen.com/opinion/What+comes+after+drugs/6474264/story.html>

A forensic technician films the body of a man at a crime scene in the
municipality of Guadalupe in Monterrey. Kingpins are jailed or killed and
dozens of would-be kingpins open fire — precisely the sort of ‘success’
that has created more than 50,000 corpses in Mexico since 2006. *Photograph
by: *STRINGER/MEXICO , REUTERS

On the weekend, at the Summit of the Americas, Prime Minister Stephen
Harper expressed doubt about the war on drugs. “I think what everybody
believes and agrees with, and to be frank myself, is that the current
approach is not working, but it is not clear what we should do.”

It’s admirable for a politician to admit uncertainty. And rare. Especially
for a politician who has never expressed anything less than unshakable
conviction in the Reaganite nostrums of drug prohibition. But Harper had
good reason to be a little shaken.

The summit was held in Cartagena, Colombia, and the host, Colombian
president Juan Manuel Santos, put the war on drugs at the top of the
agenda. It was the only topic of discussion at the final meeting. And
although we don’t know in detail what was said — it was a closed-door
discussion — the broad outlines are clear.

The war on drugs isn’t working. Santos and other Latin American leader have
said so, in public, repeatedly. Drug production is suppressed in one
country so it surges in another. Trade routes are cut off so more are
created. Kingpins are jailed or killed and dozens of would-be kingpins open
fire — precisely the sort of “success” that has created more than 50,000
corpses in Mexico since 2006.

And all the while, corruption rots institutions from within as traffickers
give politicians, judges, and police officers the awful choice of “silver
or lead.”

And for what? The standard metrics for measuring success are price and
purity: When drug supply is successfully restricted, the price of drugs
goes up while the purity goes down. But over the last 30 years — as Canada
and other nations poured literally hundreds of billions of dollars into
suppression, interdiction, and enforcement — the price of cocaine and other
illicit drugs plummeted while purity soared.

In 1998, the world’s leaders gathered for a United Nations General Assembly
Special Session, at which they pledged to “eliminate or significantly
reduce” the production of illicit drugs by 2008. “There are naysayers who
believe a global fight against illegal drugs is unwinnable,” said the UN’s
top drug cop. “I say emphatically they are wrong.” By 2008, illicit drug
production was bigger than ever.

But even that doesn’t capture the full scale of the failure. Consider that
in 1971, the year U.S. president Richard Nixon coined the term “war on
drugs,” the vast majority of Canadians and Americans had never seen or
smelled marijuana, let alone smoked it, and only a determined effort could
locate drugs like heroin and cocaine in shady parts of a few major cities.
Today, after 41 years of global war, the illicit drug trade’s distribution
and retail network puts FedEx and Walmart to shame.

In Latin America, where “war on drugs” is not a metaphor, a leader would
have to be completely ignorant to think the current approach is anything
but a catastrophic failure. But only retired officials said so in the past.
The former president of Colombia. The former president of Brazil. The
former secretary general of the United Nations (Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, a
Peruvian). Current officials never seriously questioned the status quo.
They couldn’t. The U.S. government would blackball them if they did.

The fact that Santos and others are speaking out is a historic change. So
far, the United States has been respectful, with President Barack Obama
saying that while he opposes legalization it’s a legitimate discussion to
have.

Something has changed. And Santos has caught the moment perfectly.

At the Summit of the Americas, Santos got the leaders to ask the
Organization of American States to undertake a comprehensive review of drug
policies and options for change. The outcome of that review, a Santos
adviser told the Guardian, “could mean anything from blanket legalization
to a new and different war on drugs. We just do not know until we have the
data, investigate every option with open minds, and have the full picture
drawn up by experts who know the terrain, and are not motivated by
interest, ideology, or emotion. Whatever it is, it must be real change,
based upon new paradigms.”

That review may not sound like much but it could be a big deal if done
right.

As crazy as it sounds, governments have poured spectacular amounts of money
into drug prohibition with little or no analysis of what good it’s doing.
That was the basic conclusion of a 2001 National Academy of Sciences report
that looked at the $30 billion a year the U.S. was spending.

A report the same year from Canada’s auditor general was even more
scathing. The federal government didn’t have defined goals, or any way to
determine if they were being met. It didn’t even know how much it was
spending. (The AG guesstimated the feds alone spent half a billion dollars
a year. The provinces and cities spent much more, although how much more
“is not known.”)

The word that best sums up the whole mess cannot be printed in this
newspaper. Let’s just say that this is, as the British might put it, a
cock-up of colossal proportions.

And let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that we have seriously discussed
this. We haven’t. Marijuana decriminalization is a worthy subject but it’s
trivial in the big scheme. Same with supervised injection sites and the one
or two other drug-related items that have received some media attention and
political debate.

In reality, drug policy is enormously complex and entangled with major
problems — organized crime, terrorism, insurgency, corruption, disease,
social deprivation, inequality — that span the globe. It also has a long
history that few people know, which explains why so many politicians
propose “changes” that are actually very old ideas that failed in the
forgotten past.

Colombia’s president has the right idea. We must, first, accept that the
status quo is a mess. That doesn’t mean committing to any particular
change. It just means acknowledging what is obviously true.

Then we need research. We need the history of how we got here. We need
myths to be swept away. We need the essential statistics and the best
available research. And then we need to lay out the options for change.

Drug policy is routinely presented as a choice between the war on drugs and
corner stores selling heroin to kids. That’s nonsense. There is a vast
array of regulatory options between these two extremes. We need to lay them
out.

With luck, the OAS report will do all that. But even if it does it will be
missing much of what Canadians need to know.

Which is why we need our own royal commission.

Yes, we had the Le Dain Commission of 1972. But that was before AIDS and
globalization and the modern war on drugs. It was another world.

We need a royal commission. Tom Mulcair is in favour. And the prime
minister? If what he said was sincere, he should be, too. And act
accordingly.

Dan Gardner’s column appears Wednesday and Friday in the Citizen and
National Post. E-mail: dgardner at ottawacitizen.com

Read more:
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/What+comes+after+drugs/6474264/story.html#ixzz1sLchFhwN
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