Pubdate: Sat, 21 Apr 2012
Source: New Zealand Herald (New Zealand)
Copyright: 2012 New Zealand Herald
Contact:  http://www.nzherald.co.nz/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/300
Author: Paul Thomas

WAR THE WHOLE WORLD IS LOSING

It seems even the generals no longer have much stomach for the 
international War on Drugs.

A former state premier, director of public prosecutions, federal 
health minister and federal police chief were among those who 
contributed to a recent Australian study urging a re-think. This 
week, the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London went 
further, recommending an immediate ceasefire.

IISS director Nigel Inkster, former deputy chief of MI6, pointed out 
that the problem is not so much that the War on Drugs isn't working, 
it's that it's making things worse. The drugs trade has spread to 
Africa and eastern Europe and is entrenching its standing in its 
traditional strongholds of Asia and the Americas, while the corrosive 
effects of narco-economies are undermining international security.

Long-standing and perhaps long-suffering readers of this column will 
be aware of my views. I believe future generations will see the War 
on Drugs as a monumental folly and struggle to understand how 
supposedly rational, intelligent people, leaders and led, could 
persist with an approach based on wilful ignorance, wishful thinking 
and an unwavering refusal to be swayed by the mountain of objective evidence.

What happened? There's a clue in the title of a book by German 
economist Hans-Hermann Hoppe: Democracy - The God that Failed.

Electoral politics have become overwhelmingly negative. Rather than 
challenge the status quo and offer new ideas that might give their 
opponents material for a scare campaign, parties keep their policy 
powder dry and concentrate on presenting the other mob as unfit for 
office. Any thinking outside the square is portrayed as a wildly 
radical, alien notion that would turn our little world upside down.

Thus President Barack Obama's push to extend affordable health care 
to most Americans has been recast as a totalitarian juggernaut. The 
hard right's pin-up girl, Sarah Palin, evoked Nazism, declaring that 
Obamacare would mean government "death panels" deciding whether 
elderly people and children with Down syndrome were worth keeping alive.

Much of the international community long ago concluded that domestic 
political considerations prevent the US forging a Middle East policy 
that's in its own interests, let alone those of the region and rest 
of the world. That conviction will only have been hardened by 
Republican candidate-presumptive Mitt Romney's charge that Obama 
"threw Israel under a bus" by suggesting the pathway to peace lay 
with a two-state solution roughly based on pre-1967 borders.

Because he thought there was something in it for him, Romney 
rubbished a widely touted formula, strengthened the hand of the most 
intransigent elements in Israel and reduced his own room for 
manoeuvre should he make it to the White House.

The Australian study urged politicians to "face the taboo subject". 
It might as well have urged them to attend the state opening of 
Parliament in koala skin mankinis.

This was Prime Minister Julia Gillard's response: "Tough policing is 
necessary to prevent the devastating consequences of drug use. Drugs 
kill people, they rip families apart, they destroy lives and we want 
to see less harm done through drug usage. We need to keep policing so 
we are tackling those who are seeking to make a profit out of what 
really is a trade in incredible misery."

Leaving aside the implication that the report's authors, who include 
her Foreign Minister, Bob Carr, don't know and don't care about the 
devastating consequences of drug use, what's the basis for Gillard's 
assertion that tough policing prevents them?

According to former police chief Mick Palmer, the police contribution 
to the War on Drugs has made "only marginal, if any, difference".

The IISS report refers to research indicating that to make a 
difference, authorities need to stop 70 per cent of all drug 
shipments. Anyone who thinks they get within cooee of that threshold 
obviously spends too much time watching re-runs of Miami Vice.

Or take this, from Obama speaking at last week's presidential summit 
in Colombia where he was pressed by Latin American leaders 
increasingly angered by the severe consequences for their countries 
of America's voracious appetite for illicit drugs and refusal even to 
discuss alternative strategies: "I think it wouldn't make sense for 
us not to examine what works and what doesn't, and to constantly try 
to refine and ask ourselves is there something we can do to prevent 
violence, to weaken these drug traffickers, to make sure they're not 
peddling the stuff to our kids and not perpetrating violence and 
corrupting institutions."

Good to hear. Well, now that you mention it, there is something ... 
Oh, you hadn't finished? I'm sorry, carry on.

"But I'm not someone who believes legalisation is a path to solving 
this problem."

In other words: Get real, it's election year.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom