Pubdate: Mon, 03 Jun 2013
Source: Pocono Record, The (Stroudsburg, PA)
Copyright: 2013 Pocono Mountains Media Group
Contact: http://drugsense.org/url/PEKmDRjJ
Website: http://www.poconorecord.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/4529
Author: Jess Hunter-Bowman

CHARTING A NEW COURSE ON ILLEGAL DRUGS

As Manuel, a Colombian farmer, showed me his peppercorn crops ravaged
by the defoliant sprayed in a futile effort to kill his neighbor's
drug crops, he explained why the Drug War could never be won. No
matter how much money or chemicals drug warriors threw at eradication
efforts, he told me, the crops always reappeared.

After 40 years of failing to stem the drug trade, there's a global
conversation about new approaches. That debate is particularly vibrant
south of the Rio Grande.

"Human rights abuses in the war on drugs are widespread and
systematic," wrote former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique
Cardoso, in a recent New York Times op-ed. "A systemic problem demands
systemic change"&it is time for the human rights movement to take a
leading role in calling for an end to the war on drugs."

Even Guatemala's hard-line president has called for regulating instead
of outlawing drugs as an option to deal with the scourge of the drug
trade.

"The struggle against drugs, in the way it has been conducted, has
failed," said Otto Perez Molina, who served as the head of military
intelligence during that country's brutal civil war.

"There is going to be a change away from the paradigm of
prohibitionism and the war against drugs."

And that's exactly what is happening across the hemisphere.

Uruguay is in the final stages of passing legislation that makes way
for a fully regulated and legal marijuana market. And even our
government's closest Drug War partners, Colombia and Mexico, have
signaled their openness to new approaches.

The Organization of American States has just released an unprecedented
report on drug policy calling for a dramatic departure from the status
quo. While the report stops just short of calling for decriminalizing
marijuana, it endorses national experiments with new regulation and
decriminalization approaches.

When this report came out, OAS Secretary General Jose Miguel Insulza
took dead aim at Washington's approach to drug control, particularly
our addiction to imprisoning nonviolent drug offenders. He echoed one
of the report's central findings: that drug abusers should be treated
by medical professionals rather than sent to prison for drug possession.

"We do not consider that sending serious addicts to prison is an
appropriate treatment," Insulza said. "Indeed, we think it can
aggravate their condition even beyond the point of no return."

The estimated 330,000 drug offenders imprisoned in the United States
alone constitute a larger prison population than any other country in
the world, save the inmates of China, Russia, Brazil and India.

There are more drug offenders in U.S. prisons than the entire prison
populations of Iran and Saudi Arabia combined.

And despite voters in states across the country approving medical
marijuana with some even fully decriminalizing the drug, the federal
government fights tooth and nail at every turn to hold back the
changing tide. Our federal budget includes $24.5 billion for the fight
on drugs this year, with 58 percent of that spent on law enforcement
and the international war on drugs. Add to that the billions spent by
cities, states and counties on law enforcement and it's easy to see
how we've spent over $1 trillion on the futile Drug War over the past
four decades.

Our government's approach to drug policy -- treating it as a question
of criminal justice at home and a military challenge abroad -- has
left deep scars across the Americas.

Millions across our country struggle to find work because of the
stigma of being a convicted felon, having served time for a nonviolent
drug offense. Nearly 100,000 people have been killed in Mexico's
U.S.-backed drug war with little to no impact on drug trafficking.
Colombian farmers such as Manuel have seen their farms and surrounding
forests destroyed after spray planes dumped defoliant in the heart of
the Amazon basin.

That's why we should warmly welcome the new ideas emerging in the drug
policy debate that leave behind the ineffective and inhumane
approaches so entrenched in Washington.

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Jess Hunter-Bowman is associate director of Witness for Peace, a
nonprofit organization with a 30-year history analyzing U.S. economic
and military policy in Latin America. See www.witnessforpeace.org
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