The war on drugs has failed and should make way for a global shift toward decriminalizing cannabis use and promoting harm reduction, former Brazilian president Fernando Henrique Cardoso wrote in the Observer yesterday.
Cardoso said the hardline approach has brought “disastrous” consequences for Latin America, which has been the frontline in the war on drug cultivation for decades, while failing to change the continent’s position as the largest exporter of cocaine and marijuana.
His intervention, which will reignite growing debate in Europe about how to tackle drugs, was welcomed on Saturday by campaigners for drug law reform who increasingly see the impact on developing countries where drugs are produced as critical to the argument.
“After decades of overflights, interdictions, spraying and raids on jungle drug factories, Latin America remains the world’s largest exporter of cocaine and marijuana,” Cardoso wrote. “It is producing more and more opium and heroin. It is developing the capacity to mass produce synthetic drugs. Continuing the drugs war with more of the same is ludicrous.”
PRECEDENTS
Cardoso, a sociologist, said Argentina, Mexico, Colombia, Bolivia and Ecuador had all now taken steps toward drug law liberalization and that change was “imminent” in Brazil.
The way forward worldwide would involve a “strategy of reaching out, patiently and persistently, to the users and not the continued waging of a misguided and counterproductive war that makes the users, rather than the drug lords, the primary victims,” he said.
Danny Kushlick of Transform, which campaigns for drug liberalization, said Cardoso’s intervention illustrated the human cost of efforts to combat the drugs trade on often poor and underdeveloped producer countries.
“Until this problem is taken up as a development issue it’s not going to move anywhere. The default position is that this is a problem of addiction, but people have completely missed the point of the war on drugs, that the vastly detrimental effects are largely in production and transit,” he said.
“If you look at a nation state like Guinea Bissau, which was a fragile state before and now is a fragile narco-state, that is a prime example of the vulnerability of developing countries to the fact that these drugs are incredibly expensive,” Kushlick said.
COMMISSION
Cardoso’s article follows the conclusions published earlier this year of a commission on drugs composed of three former Latin American leaders, who had been lobbying Washington for a change in its conduct of the war on drugs.
US President Barack Obama’s election to the White House last year is viewed as an opportunity for fresh thinking, with Cardoso among guests invited to a discussion on drugs policy with him before Obama became president.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
RSS