The Never Ending Drug War

By David G. Eselius

To eliminate illegal drug trafficking, the illegal profits from illegal drug trafficking must be eliminated.  This would suggest government’s drug legalization and regulation requires the inclusion of production, distribution, and sales of drugs.  There are five categories of illicit drugs — narcotics, stimulants, depressants (sedatives), hallucinogens, and cannabis (aka, marijuana).

Although illegal drug trafficking is a multinational concern, any nation can establish its own nationwide law of drug decimalization that is inclusive of regulation of production, distribution, and sales of drugs. Within the U.S. it has become popular for some states to enact their own drug laws and promote illegal drug sales of political choosing.  There is little medical or scientific rational used to form U.S. illegal drug laws.  

The criminalization of illegal drugs ignores the actual problems, which are addiction, recreational use, social-economic concerns, and an economic benefit of billions of illegal dollars per year to the criminals who run the illegal drug industries.

"The lives and actions of people are their own responsibility, not the government's." --Ron Paul.  I (and Ron Paul) argue that it is not the responsibility of government to go to extraordinary efforts to prevent an individual from doing self-harm.

The example of this argument would be preventing suicides from the Golden Gate Bridge.  In hopes of preventing a bridge suicide, it is reasonable for government to provide mental help centers and install suicide watch video cameras on the Golden Gate Bridge.  However, it is extraordinary to modify the Bridge superstructure to eliminate all suicides from the Bridge.  Government has criminalized suicide by jumping from the Bridge; however, those people who are predisposed to suicide will just kill themselves some other place, by some other method.  Government's only basic responsibility is to maintain reasonable prevention mental-health resources, a means for mental and health recovery, education, and a guard rail so that innocent adults and minors do not accidentally fall from the Bridge walkway.

A rational assessment of a drug should identify three main factors, which together determine the harm associated with any drug of potential abuse:

• the physical harm to the individual user caused by the drug
• the tendency of the drug to induce individual dependence
• the effect of drug use on families, communities, and society  

Drugscience.org.uk offers impartial objective information on drugs and drug harms to the public, to educators and to academics.  The 'Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs' receives no government funding so is able to provide scientific findings free from the constraints of policy making and politics.  The Committee does not by any means condone the use of drugs but aims to reduce the likelihood of those who do use them of coming to harm.

For America, a system of drug “legalization” (or “decimalization”) is necessary.  Drug legalization becomes more beneficial when the government also provides informed safe and regulated access to drugs.

It is time for the President Obama and U.S. Congress to step back and put some common sense into our national drug laws.

The U.S. War on Drugs will not end because the U.S. war on drugs has never seriously addressed the real causes of drug consumption.  There has always been a political element that profited form continuing illegal drug production and sales. Instead of a logical suppression and drugs of potential abuse we have murder, robbery, political and judicial payoffs, and political interferences to long over due necessary changes of current illegal drug laws.

"End the War on Drugs"

By U.S. Congressman Ron Paul  

14th District of Texas

December 2011

We have recently heard many shocking stories of brutal killings and ruthless violence related to drug cartels warring with Mexican and US officials.  It is approaching the fever pitch of a full blown crisis.  Unfortunately, the administration is not likely to waste this opportunity to further expand government.  Hopefully, we can take a deep breath and look at history for the optimal way to deal with this dangerous situation, which is not unprecedented.

Alcohol prohibition in the 1920’s brought similar violence, gangs, lawlessness, corruption and brutality.  The reason for the violence was not that making and selling alcohol was inherently dangerous.  The violence came about because of the creation of a brutal black market which also drove profits through the roof.  These profits enabled criminals like Al Capone to become incredibly wealthy, and militantly defensive of that wealth.  Al Capone saw the repeal of Prohibition as a great threat, and indeed smuggling operations and gangland violence fell apart after repeal.  Today, picking up a bottle of wine for dinner is a relatively benign transaction, and beer trucks travel openly and peacefully along their distribution routes.

Similarly today, the best way to fight violent drug cartels would be to pull the rug out from under their profits by bringing these transactions out into the sunlight.  People who, unwisely, buy drugs would hardly opt for the back alley criminal dealer as a source, if a coffeehouse-style dispensary was an option.  Moreover, a law-abiding dispensary is likely to check ID’s and refuse sale to minors, as bars and ABC stores tend to do very diligently.  Think of all the time and resources law enforcement could save if they could instead focus on violent crimes, instead of this impossible nanny-state mandate of saving people from themselves!

If these reasons don’t convince the drug warriors, I would urge them to go back to the Constitution and consider where there is any authority to prohibit private personal choices like this.  All of our freedoms – the freedom of religion and assembly, the freedom of speech, the right to bear arms, the right to be free from unnecessary government searches and seizures – stem from the precept that you own yourself and are responsible for your own choices.  Prohibition laws negate self-ownership and are an absolute affront to the principles of freedom.  I disagree vehemently with the recreational use of drugs, but at the same time, if people are only free to make good decisions, they are not truly free.  In any case, states should decide for themselves how to handle these issues and the federal government should respect their choices.

My great concern is that instead of dealing deliberately with the actual problems, Congress will be pressed again to act quickly without much thought or debate.  I can’t think of a single problem we haven’t made worse that way.  The panic generated by the looming crisis in Mexico should not be redirected into curtailing more rights, especially our second amendment rights, as seems to be in the works.  Certainly, more gun laws in response to this violence will only serve to disarm lawful citizens.  This is something to watch out for and stand up against.  We have escalated the drug war enough to see it only escalates the violence and profits associated with drugs.  It is time to try freedom instead.

Fin

One of the main cash crops of criminals and drug cartels is U.S. “medical marijuana,” which forms about 60% of drug cartels profits.  There is no differences between “medical” and “street” marijuana -- marijuana is a Controlled Substance Act (CSA 1970) Schedule 1 drug, the same Schedule 1 as heroin. President Obama (and therefore U.S. Attorney General Holder) supports production, distribution, and sales of marijuana, which is a Federal felony.  It is the U.S. double political standards concerning illegal drugs that have resulted in needless overthrows national governments, societal decay, increased embedding of crime, murder, economic destruction, and increased political and Judaical crimes.       

"Mexico's days of the dead"  

By Paul McGeough

December 31, 2011

The Sydney Morning Herald

AT THE Church of Senor Del Perdom, sparrows swoop to scavenge on a slice of tomato and a bit of cheese squished into the brick paving. Untidy perhaps, but as the grimness of the church's forecourt is revealed, the birds become a welcome hint of the natural order in a party town that struggles to escape the unnerving and the unnatural.

In the past, a parade of bold-face names sallied to this resort city on Mexico's balmy Pacific coast. Frank Sinatra sang about it. The Kennedys honeymooned and the Nixons holidayed here. Howard Hughes ended his days here, Elvis Presley made a movie and John Wayne and Johnny ''Tarzan'' Weissmuller opened the fabled Hotel Los Flamingos, one of scores that now stand sentinel by Acapulco Bay's emerald waters.

But the party days of the '50s and '60s are furthest from the mind of the white-cassock Father Martin Reyna, as he tells matter-of-factual of how, after Mass on a recent morning, he stumbled upon an unidentified victim of the turf wars being waged by Mexico's drug cartels.

First - a bleeding torso. It had been dumped next to a makeshift flower stall, on the steps that separate the church from a choked intersection in the heart of Colonia La Garita, Reyna's parish that perches high on the slopes above the glittering tourist strip that drives 70 per cent of Acapulco's economy. Next - the head and limbs. A few metres down the hill towards the downtown area, these body parts were scattered on the pavement at the foot of a post on which a public telephone hangs.

''It's hell on earth,'' the priest says.

This was no isolated incident. Weeks earlier, two decapitated bodies were dumped in the night on the narrow overpass that spans the intersection, so that morning churchgoers were obliged to step around them. About the same time, another dismembered corpse dropped close to Reyna's church had a crude, unsigned note fixed to the chest: ''This is our place - we are here.''

Mexico's $US38 billion drug trade continues to defy the combined might of the country's authorities, including the military, and their US backers. Marking the fifth anniversary of a relentless counter-narcotics campaign, a threat assessment released by the US National Drug Intelligence Centre in August cut through the fog of political rhetoric on both sides of the border, to trumpet failure. ''Heroin, marijuana, MDMA [ecstasy] and methamphetamine are readily available throughout the US - and their availability is increasing in some markets,'' it states.

Most of that heroin and marijuana is smuggled into the US from Mexico and, increasingly, is distributed domestically by offshoots of the Mexican cartels. Despite the crackdown in Mexico, the cartels have surged on the global heroin-production ladder, jumping from fifth in 2005 to second, behind only Afghanistan, in 2009, the threat assessment says.

The nearest the American document comes to being upbeat is on the cocaine trade - availability in the US was back to pre-2007 levels as a result of decreased Colombian production and the diversion of some shipments to Europe. The classic signs of reduced supplies - higher street prices (up 69 per cent on 2007) and reduced purity (down 30 per cent) - were reported. But while cocaine supplies were at less than the levels of 2006 east of the Mississippi, the reverse was the case west of the river.

The hourglass geography of the Americas - with North and South America as the bulges and Mexico as the pinch - graphically explains the drug trade. To the south, there is massive drug production and, as Mexican President Felipe Calderon bitterly complains, to the north, an insatiable appetite for drugs. Mexico is the conduit through which supply satisfies demand.

But more disturbing than the resilience and inventiveness of the cartels is the pervasive, bestial violence by which their militias carve out territory - for local sales, but also for smuggling routes to the US market.

Equally disturbing is the line - put up by officials in Mexico City and tourism operators here in Acapulco - that 45,000 to 60,000 drug-related murders across the country in just five years is of little importance, because most of the victims are steeped in an illicit underworld and, so the argument implies, are deserving of their fate.

The cartels infiltrate government and the security forces. They recruit some of the military best soldiers to run their militias and to varying degrees, all levels of the police, local, state and federal, are in their pockets - how else to explain the recent seizure of $US15 million from a cartel convoy without a single arrest? How else to explain the discovery during a spot check on an Acapulco prison last month of two peacocks, 100 fighting cocks, dozens of TVs, two sacks of marijuana and 19 prostitutes?

The cartels are at war with one another, the authorities, or both. Since 2007, 310 mass graves have been uncovered across Mexico - they contained 1230 bodies. Most of the 200 bodies recovered in one of the pits were innocent would-be migrants to the US from Mexico and South America.  

Ironically, the cartels had paused to consider if all this bloodletting was in their own interests. When they decided in 2007 to attempt a negotiated carve-up of the Mexican drug turf, it was to Acapulco that the cartel capos repaired, convening in lavish surroundings at Las Brisas resort. The summit failed.

Acapulco - population 700,000-plus - is two cities in one. A narrow strip, between the Pacific sheen and the cockscomb peaks of the Sierra Madre del Sur, is reserved for tourists.

East of the ridge line are the slum quarters for ordinary Mexicans who wait on the tourists. But the resort city's status as Mexico's oldest draw card has become its Achilles heel.

''Thirty years ago there was no Cancun; 20 years ago there was no Los Cabos, no Puerto Vallarta,'' says Arturo Martinez Nunez, the public face of a new campaign to rid the city of its narcotics scourge.

Compared with these newer resorts, he explains, Acapulco is doubly disadvantaged. Almost totally dependent on tourism, it has little cushion to absorb the impact of any slump in tourism; and to the extent that the others are controlled by cartels, they are dominated by single organisations and so are spared the brutality of the inter-cartel turf wars.

That double whammy is in play in Acapulco. By night, restaurants and bars on what should be the teeming Boulevard La Costera are deserted - despite or because of a heavy police and military presence in the streets. By day, rows of umbrellas and plastic chairs on the beaches are empty. The seafront bungee jump seems to have been mothballed. Only thin crowds watch the storied divers, young men who walk spider-like up a near-vertical cliff to plunge 50 metres into a tiny ocean channel below the Hotel El Mirador. Most of the Mexicans brave enough to come to Acapulco stay hidden in their secured resorts.

Local drug sales, made through hundreds of tienditas, or little stores, are lucrative. But the real prize for the cartels is control of the port through which cargoes of cocaine from Colombia and Peru arrive, to be dispatched overland to the US and on to Canada.

Until 10 years ago, the most powerful cartel in the country - the northern-based Sinaloa - had exclusive control of Acapulco. Today, another two big cartels compete, the Gulf Cartel and La Familia Michoacana, which itself has ruptured since the death last year of its leader.

In 2008, the Beltran Leyva Organisation split bloodily from what had been a long-standing co-operative arrangement with Sinaloa, claiming Acapulco as their own. In a December 2009 shootout, the authorities killed BLO leader ''el Jefe de Jefes'' Arturo Beltran Leyva, and the cartel's ranks divided again. (But they still avenged their leader's death. After the funeral of a Mexican Army commando who died in the shootout, the dead soldier's family home was attacked and his mother, sister, aunt and a brother were murdered.)

Flamboyant BLO henchman Edgar Valdez Villarreal challenged Beltran Leyva's brother Hector for control of the cartel. An American dubbed ''La Barbie'' because of his shock of blond hair, Villarreal re badged his operation as the Independent Cartel of Acapulco.

He reportedly moved Colombian cocaine to the US at a rate of nearly two tonnes a month for an annual return of $US130 million. Hector Beltran Leyva attempted to reassert his family's authority as the South Pacific Cartel.

Another gang that emerged took a name that reflected its violent intent - La Barredora, or the street sweeper.

Villarreal's luck ran out when the authorities captured him in August last year, after deadly shootouts between the gangs and or the authorities up and down the beachfront. The deadly toll kept rising: April - six dead, including two schoolchildren; June - 3000 shots said to have been fired and dozens of grenades detonated, leaving 18 dead in the middle of the hotel zone; August - 14 bodies on a highway overpass.

A succession of gangsters who attempted to fill La Barbie's shoes did not last long. In August this year, Moises ''El Coreano'' Montero Alvarez was arrested and accused of ordering more than 40 deaths by decapitation and dismemberment.

His successor, ''El Comandante'' Gilberto Castrejon Morales, and five cronies were captured after a brief gunfight with federal agents in a suburb called Colonia Sabana earlier this month.

Endless infighting did in the BLO, but it was also assumed the bosses of the Sinaloa, Gulf and Familia cartels tipped off the authorities, who rounded up dozens of key figures in the remnants of Villarreal's cartel and Hector Beltran Leyva's operation.

This northern summer Acapulco seemed a hopeless case. The August tally of 150 murders put the resort city on course for an annual toll of 1000 killings, causing tourist numbers to plummet.

During a week-long visit this month The Saturday Age saw just a handful of foreign tourists. Occupancy rates for hotels and resorts last year reportedly were 48 per cent, compared with 70-plus per cent in the year before the government crackdown.

A glimmer of hope for Acapulco emerged in September, in an unlikely challenge to the cartels. It was not the city authorities, but its teachers who made a stand. Faced with threatened kidnappings and attacks on schools unless they paid half their salaries to the cartels in return for their ''protection'', the teachers shut more than 120 schools, saying they would return to work when authorities stood up to the cartels.

Sitting in his shoe-box sized office the secretary of the teachers' union, Nicholas Robels Pineda, brushes aside questions about the teachers' courage in being the first to stand up to the cartels, by reducing the equation to a simple economic argument - ''our teachers don't earn enough to be able to pay half to the Independent Cartel of Acapulco,'' he says. ''We couldn't pay a single peso.''

When The Saturday Age proposes taking his picture, the union secretary recoils. ''You publish my picture and tomorrow I could lose my head and this,'' he says, clutching a hand to what some American males describe as their ''package''.

The schools were a new target for the cartels, who eyed the teachers' government-funded salaries as easy pickings. Previously, their victims were those in the city and suburbs who could most easily monitor the movement of people - bar owners, petrol station and tyre service centre workers and taxi drivers, who hope that providing information to stand-over gangs might put a brake on the dollar amounts demanded by the cartels for ''protection''. But serving one cartel made them targets of the others, so much so that by August this year, a local newspaper had tallied the murder of more than 40 taxi drivers.

Understanding the courage of the teachers requires a sense of how the cartels punish any who cross them. In a bid to be seen to be more menacing than a regular gang of murderers, one of the cartels took to dismembering its victims, and then to leading the authorities on a macabre hunt by distributing as many as 27 parts of the same body across the city. A gunnysack found on a city footpath, near a school, contained five human heads.

Another cartel resorted to removing the faces of its victims and hanging them from posts. Later, the cartel took to cutting away the entire skin from some of its victims' bodies.

The city's chief forensic pathologist, who keeps a pistol in his desk drawer, seems to enjoy shocking visitors by flipping open a laptop filled with monstrous images of the cartels' knife work. Without warning during our interview, Dr Keynes Garcia Leguizamo clicked through some gruesome photos.

On a tour of the mortuary, the 29-year-old pathologist says that having just 25 bodies stored in his refrigerators is proof the tide of violence is turning. But he also reveals a shocking statistic - so far this year he and his team have reconstructed 50 bodies that had been delivered to the mortuary in varying stages of dismemberment. ''They come in garbage bags and we try to put them together before the families see them - but we can spend only two or three hours on each case.''

There are days when up to 100 families descend on the mortuary, demanding news about missing relatives. At the same time, many corpses go unclaimed, in some cases because the extent of the mutilation renders then unidentifiable. So far this year, more than 130 unidentified murder victims have been sent to a common grave about two hours' drive from the city.

By the time the teachers called ''enough!'' the murder tally for the year was about 900. Confronted by their refusal to return to the classroom, the authorities pledged a campaign for all of the state of Guerrero that would combine multiple forces under a single command - including almost 5000 members of the federal, state and local police, the military and the navy. Operation Secure Guerrero was launched in October.

''The idea was to retake control of the streets of Acapulco by reducing the violence,'' says Arturo Martinez Nunez, producing what he calls a heartbeat graphic - the murder data for 58 days before and after the start of the campaign. It shows the murder rate dropping from 3.6 a day to 1.6 a day.

''Two months ago the streets were empty. There was a collective psychosis, but now we are taking back the night - for locals and for tourists. We've got kidnappings and beheading down to zero and the goal is to have zero murders by the end of December.''

The Saturday Age has been advised to treat the data cautiously, because when the military has spearheaded campaigns in other parts of the country, the level of violence had dipped but only for as long as the military remained in the face of the cartels. So despite the local claims of success, it is too early to read the Acapulco tea leaves.

There is also speculation the all-powerful Sinaloa cartel, headed by Forbes magazine world's-richest list nominee Joaquin ''El Chapo'' Guzman, might have wrested back control of the city.

President Calderon has invested hugely in this war. The ranks of the federal police have tripled to more than 53,000 since 2005. More than 30,000 new or retrained federal police are deployed and prison capacity has doubled. In 2006, Calderon promised military intervention as a temporary solution and a US congressional research service report from early 2008 quotes the Mexican President's prediction that it would take at least two years ''to take back control of Mexico''.

Calderon, however, remains defiant. Marking the fifth anniversary of his campaign earlier this month, he declared: ''We're going to continue defending the citizens until the last day of my term. Those who say it would have been better not to confront the criminals are completely mistaken - if we hadn't done this, they would have advanced in our communities and our institutions.''

That, and other oblique statements, amount to an acknowledgment that the cartels have morphed into a Taliban-like insurgency.

With a surge in marijuana and heroin production even as the authorities engage the cartels in urban war, the conduct of Calderon's forces and their limited success has earned harsher critiques.

In a new 214-page report, the New York-based Human Rights Watch concludes: ''Since the outset of Calderon's 'war on drugs', violent crime has skyrocketed; abusive policing has undermined the investigation and prosecution of criminal suspects; and widespread abuse and corruption has antagonised civilians who otherwise could provide security forces with crucial information. Homicides tied to drug violence have increased every year since [Calderon] implemented his public security strategy. Moreover, claims by the government that public security operations have been effective in reducing crime … are not borne out by the data.''

The first five years of the President's war have caused the cartels only to fracture, not to disappear. And increasingly, those that fail to win control of the drug smuggling then resort to extortion, kidnapping and racketeering.

Last year, the government claimed to have captured or killed more than half of almost 40 kingpins on its most-wanted list, but the violence and the drug running continue unabated, amid speculation that the limited success of the authorities is more to do with treachery in the ranks of the cartels than with good intelligence and forensics by the authorities.

Speaking on the sidelines of an industry function at the spectacular Zebu Restaurant, the city's Tourism Secretary, Erika Lorena Luhrs, volunteered that occupancy rates varied in the different markets, but the current average was just 28 per cent. As guests sipped chocolate margaritas, with the glasses rimmed with lime-infused chilli, Luhrs brushed aside the foreigners who account for about 20 per cent of the market, predicting a Mexican-led recovery.

Insisting that Acapulco was as safe as many other international destinations, there was a glib touch: ''Drugs are not a problem, because most people in the cartels are dead or in jail. The people who now direct the cartels don't have the Colombian contacts to get the drugs.''

Halfway up the mountain, the priest at La Garita, Father Reyna, emerges from his church of slabbed concrete after morning Mass attended by a congregation that is almost entirely female.

''The drug mafias have weakened the power of the city,'' he says. ''Families in my parish lose parents and young boys. They refuse to leave their homes and they are made to pay protection. They are afraid. Personally I know 16 people who are paying protection and, I know the family and friends of almost 20 people who have been dismembered in the five years that I have been here.”

''You can say that we're holding our breath.''

Paul McGeough is chief correspondent.

Fin

Education, medical science, social science, and working with societal norms are to become the primary defenses against peoples' abuse of drugs, rather than criminalizing social habits.  To continue the War on Drugs is pointless.  The war was lost years ago, the drugs won when left Democrats’ funded the Mérida Initiative war funding (signed into U.S. law June 30, 2008).  The U.S. Congress authorized $1.6 USD billion for the three-year war on drugs initiative (2007–2010).

"Mexico's plea to Obama: Curb drug use"

With an internal war on narco-gangs, Mexico needs the US to reduce its drug addiction.

By The Monitor's Editorial Board

from the December 3, 2008 edition

For two years, Mexican President Felipe Calderón has waged war on powerful and violent drug cartels, deploying 20,000 troops and the full might of the state. Nearly 6,000 lives have been lost – more than all US casualties in Iraq. With no end in sight, Mr. Calderón now says he can't win if the US doesn't do more to curb its drug addiction.

He's not alone in this plea to deal with America's culpability.

The US ambassador to that country, Tony Garza, said recently that drug violence in Mexico would not be so high "were the United States not the largest consumer of illicit drugs and the main suppliers of weapons to the cartels."

Americans also need to worry about a spill-over of this war across the border and the reach of the cartels into dozens of US cities. The cartels sell $13.8 billion a year worth of marijuana, cocaine, amphetamines, and heroin to US users.

Under President Bush, the response to Mexico's war has largely been one of helping beef up law enforcement, which was sorely needed. In June, Congress passed a three-year, $1.6 billion aid program called the Mérida Initiative to assist both Mexico and Central American nations with fighting drug gangs. Dozens of Mexican narcotic kingpins are now being extradited to the US for trial – where they are less likely to escape, run their operations from prison, or further corrupt law officers.  

[NOTE: Although many thought they could win the War on Drugs by making the drug war a real war by spending a huge amount of money providing fire power and equipment, the final result was a failed Mérida Initiative and expansion in illegal drug trafficking within the U.S. and the purchase of the Mexican government by the drug cartels. Narco-crime is a complex, deeply rooted cancer that Mexican and U.S. politicians have allowed to grow — and that Mexicans themselves need to carve back, bloody as that process may be. This narco-crime feeds on Americans’ drug demand/consumption, illegal drug profits, and American gun sales to traffickers. --DGE]

Mexico's war became necessary since Colombia suppressed its cartels in the 1990s [however cocaine trafficking to U.S. has increased] and Mexican groups took over much of the trafficking. Also, the end of Mexico's one-party rule in 2000 ended unwritten agreements that allowed some drug gangs to control certain markets. An end to those pacts led to an eruption of battles for turf and even more corruption of officials.

Last month, Calderón's former "drug czar" was arrested on charges of selling secrets to a drug cartel. And with nearly half of all police considered either corrupt or incompetent – they earn about $5,000 a year – soldiers now patrol some cities where gruesome, drug-related murders are the norm. Sweeping out corrupt officials is as big a task as the campaign against narco-gangs.

With Mexico's governing institutions at risk, the US needs to do more. Calderón has hopes that an Obama administration can better tackle rampant US drug use.

Enforcement is still necessary but can be limited. A recent US report, for instance, found efforts to suppress cocaine growing in Colombia have faltered. Bolivia's leftist leader has thrown out US drug agents.

In his selection of a "drug czar," President-elect Obama needs to place more emphasis on addiction as a health problem. One name being circulated for that post is retiring congressman Jim Ramstad, a recovering alcoholic who helped pass a new law requiring health insurance to cover mental problems.

Mr. Obama should also set up a summit soon with Latin American leaders to focus on all aspects of the drug problem, which now pervades the hemisphere. A common front is needed, although each nation has its unique challenges.

For the US, the main challenge is to create better and more drug rehabilitation programs and provide other public services for addicts.

The US "war on drugs" should also be a "war on addiction." It is one more way to help Mexico.

Fin

The world’s population is growing and demanding to consume more and more drugs that continue to be produced and provided by criminals and drug cartels. Passive defense against drug trafficking does not work for the U.S. — full border security simply cannot be secured to the degree that would be required for national security.  To enhance U.S. and global security, national and international management of illegal drug laws and drug trafficking must be reformed.  

"Drug Decriminalization in Portugal: Lessons for Creating Fair and Successful Drug Policies"

By Glenn Greenwald

The Cato Institute

White Paper, April 2, 2009

LINK: Download the Cato Institute Full White Paper (PDF) (4 MB) http://www.cato.org/pubs/wtpapers/greenwald_whitepaper.pdf    

On July 1, 2001, a nationwide law in Portugal took effect that decriminalized all drugs, including cocaine and heroin. Under the new legal framework, all drugs were "decriminalized," not "legalized." Thus, drug possession for personal use and drug usage itself are still legally prohibited, but violations of those prohibitions are deemed exclusively administrative violations and are removed completely from the criminal realm. Drug trafficking continues to be prosecuted as a criminal offense.

While other states in the European Union have developed various forms of de facto decriminalization — whereby substances perceived to be less serious (such as cannabis) rarely lead to criminal prosecution — Portugal remains the only EU member state with a law explicitly declaring drugs to be "decriminalized." Because more than seven years have now elapsed since enactment of Portugal's decriminalization system, there are ample data enabling its effects to be assessed.

Notably, decriminalization has become increasingly popular in Portugal since 2001. Except for some far-right politicians, very few domestic political factions are agitating for a repeal of the 2001 law. And while there is a widespread perception that bureaucratic changes need to be made to Portugal's decriminalization framework to make it more efficient and effective, there is no real debate about whether drugs should once again be criminalized. More significantly, none of the nightmare scenarios touted by pre-enactment decriminalization opponents — from rampant increases in drug usage among the young to the transformation of Lisbon into a haven for "drug tourists" — has occurred.

The political consensus in favor of decriminalization is unsurprising in light of the relevant empirical data. Those data indicate that decriminalization has had no adverse effect on drug usage rates in Portugal, which, in numerous categories, are now among the lowest in the EU, particularly when compared with states with stringent criminalization regimes. Although post decriminalization usage rates have remained roughly the same or even decreased slightly when compared with other EU states, drug-related pathologies — such as sexually transmitted diseases and deaths due to drug usage — have decreased dramatically. Drug policy experts attribute those positive trends to the enhanced ability of the Portuguese government to offer treatment programs to its citizens — enhancements made possible, for numerous reasons, by decriminalization.

This report will begin with an examination of the Portuguese decriminalization framework as set forth in law and in terms of how it functions in practice. Also examined is the political climate in Portugal both pre- and post decriminalization with regard to drug policy, and the impetus that led that nation to adopt decriminalization.

The report then assesses Portuguese drug policy in the context of the EU's approach to drugs. The varying legal frameworks, as well as the overall trend toward liberalization, are examined to enable a meaningful comparative assessment between Portuguese data and data from other EU states.

The report also sets forth the data concerning drug-related trends in Portugal both pre- and post decriminalization. The effects of decriminalization in Portugal are examined both in absolute terms and in comparisons with other states that continue to criminalize drugs, particularly within the EU.

The data show that, judged by virtually every metric, the Portuguese decriminalization framework has been a resounding success. Within this success lie self-evident lessons that should guide drug policy debates around the world.

Glenn Greenwald is a constitutional lawyer and a contributing writer at Salon. He has authored several books, including A Tragic Legacy (2007) and How Would a Patriot Act? (2006).

Fin

Portugal took the approach to decriminalize all drugs, including cocaine and heroin. Under the new legal framework, all drugs were "decriminalized," not "legalized."  That is, drug possession for personal use and drug usage itself are still legally prohibited, but violations of those prohibitions are deemed exclusively administrative violations and are removed completely from the criminal realm.

Drug trafficking continues to be prosecuted as a criminal offense. The reason that drug trafficking continues to exist at all is that the demand for illegal drugs remains high while illegal drug trafficking continues to be extremely profitable. Portugal's system of drug “decriminalization” does not address “illegal drug” production, trafficking, and criminal profit motives.  “Legalizing” drugs of potential abuse includes government regulation of drug production, distribution, sales, and consumption. “Regulation” of drugs is primarily administrative economic-violation “legalization” enforcement.   

With an adaption of a Portugal-like drug “legalization” system within the U.S. — the elimination of illegal drug trafficking would greatly enhance reductions in crime, improvements in individual health/education/welfare, and shifts of large economic resources resulting from criminal activities (to the increased funding of productive societal needs).

As with global warming temperature increase ending human races this century, expect the non-responsive (and evasive) President Obama and U.S. Congress to not soon reform U.S. illegal drug laws for reasons of public health and national security.