The global war on drugs is the cause of some of the biggest public health and social justice disasters of our time, from violent, billion-dollar cartels to mass incarceration targeting communities of color and locking people up for profit.
On top of everything, the drug war is shockingly expensive according to
a groundbreaking report released May 7 by the London School of
Economics.
The report exposes the
injustices of the drug war by examining its true costs. Five Nobel
Prize economists, as well as national leaders and professors, weighed
in, reaching the overall conclusion that policies need to move away from
heavy law enforcement to public health and humanitarian-based efforts.
The forward of the report states, “It is time to end the ‘war on drugs’ and massively redirect resources towards effective evidence-based policies underpinned by rigorous economic analysis.”
It also notes, “Continuing to spend vast resources on
punitive enforcement-led policies, generally at the expense of proven
public health policies, can no longer be justified.”
The report calls for a shift in global drug enforcement
strategy. It suggests that new drug policies should be based on harm
reduction. It also calls for “expanded access to essential medicines,”
and “an unwavering commitment to principles of human rights.”
Below are five of the most important findings from the report.
1. Law Enforcement Paradox: Crackdowns Bolster Violent Dealers
Drug prices on the blackmarket are decreasing while drug
doses are becoming more and more potent. This is happening “despite
drastic increases in global enforcement spending,” according to the LSE
report. This trend alone is evidence enough to argue that the current
system of drug enforcement isn’t working.
This is because there is a paradox happening in which enforcing drug laws actually increases the profitability of illegal drugs,
according to the LSE report. Since countries can’t realistically expect
to eradicate any drug completely, the best they can hope for is to make
it hard to sell illegal drugs so the prices increase, and that drug eventually becomes unaffordable to users and unprofitable to dealers.
The problem governments have run into is one of diminishing
returns. After a certain level of drug enforcement spending, additional
spending does little to mitigate the illegal market. If anything, all
it does is create “interventions which are unpredictable and potentially
violence-inducing,” or increased costs to society “in the form of
incarceration and negative public health outcomes.”
The report explains that a “drastic overemphasis on
policies aimed at suppressing the supply of illicit substances” has a
short -term impact on the supply of a particular drug, but an adverse
effect in the long run because there are so many different, shifting
suppliers in the illegal market.
Cracking down on specific substances drives the price of
those substances up as they become harder to find. This increases
incentive for a new rise in supply. Over time, this trend feeds into
lower prices, so crackdowns are a temporary solution at best.
The report notes that this effect is even stronger when it
comes to addictive substances. Someone addicted to heroin, for example,
is more likely to skip spending on other living expenses in order to
cover new heroin expenses (to all the economists out there, yes, this is
basic price elasticity).
2. Costs of Global Counternarcotics Efforts Far Outweigh Benefits
The US has led counternarcotics efforts—activities aimed at
dismantling the narcotic drug trade—abroad for three decades based on
incorrect assumptions, states the report. They assume that drug
suppression policies reduce drug consumption by reducing the number of drugs
that make it into the states. They also assume their efforts foster the
US goals of taking down terrorists and militant groups involved in the
drug trade. But these assumptions have been wrong as each effort on the
part of US counternarcotics has had serious side effects.
According to the report, the unintended consequences of these efforts have been “extensive human rights
violations; further political, economic and social marginalization of
illicit crop farmers; destabilization of local governments; alienation
of local populations; strengthening of bonds between militant groups and
local populations; and increases in violence perpetrated by [drug
trafficking organizations] and other criminal groups.”
3. Displaced Populations in Colombia and Mexico
As drug-related violence has increased in Mexico and Columbia as a result of the war on drugs, thousands of families have been forced to leave home and flee the violence.
This displacement is an expensive humanitarian crisis.
“In Colombia, [displaced populations] have arrived in the
big cities and have become homeless, begging for money at traffic
intersections. In Mexico, they generally do not receive humanitarian
assistance from the government, and when they do, it is under deplorable
conditions.
“According to testimonies of displaced families from Ciudad
Juárez, they were placed in warehouses (often without air
conditioning) by the city government in Mexico City, where they had to
stay 24 hours per day for several months while fighting for every inch
of space.”
In addition to the humanitarian costs are the costs of
returning people to their homes after they have been displaced, the
report notes. Even if legislation were to guarantee a safe return home,
it’s easier said than done.
“The creation of new rebel groups, the perpetuation of
violence and the absence of state presence are just a few of the many
obstacles to ensuring security for the returning [displaced peoples].”
The report notes that the problem has been, at least,
recognized in Colombia and the government has enacted legislation to
provide humanitarian assistance to displaced people. However, in Mexico
there are no such policies and the government has yet to recognize its
responsibility for the problem.
“Currently, the discussions about the failure of the ‘war on drugs’
are taking place at various national and international levels,” the
report states. “Experts have argued that new drug policies should be
focused more on addiction treatments, consumption prevention and health
programs. However, some important questions should be kept in mind while
discussing these new policies. What would happen to peasants in
Colombia who abandoned their land and to civilians in Mexico who moved
to safer places because their lives were threatened?”
4. Mass Incarceration
There are over 9 million people in prison worldwide (25
percent of them are in the US). The report explains how “large scale
systems of punishment,” or mass incarceration, are a public health
disaster.
Worldwide, individuals are punished for drug use via “hard
labour, severe mental and physical conditions, long periods of punitive
isolation, bodily mutilation and execution. These all have profound
effects on the trajectory of individual drug use, the social
construction of addiction and the human rights of drug users.”
The report notes that as penal systems expand, families and communities of those incarcerated experience collateral damage.
The report concludes that the “expansive reach of ‘mass
incarceration’ and its collateral effects” is often paired with
increased contact between citizens and law enforcement. This increases
time and money spent on people awaiting trial and crowded prisons and
jails lead to “a decline in the quality of correctional health care and a
reduction in available services for formerly incarcerated individuals.”
5. Constitutional Costs
On top of increased violence, human rights violations and direct economic costs, the report adds another cost: the cost to the constitutional commitments of countries.
“Constitutional texts, interpretations and practices have been transformed in order to, in theory, better tackle drugs.
Many of these changes undermine long-standing commitments to specific
constitutional principles, values and rights,” it states.
“These are not problems of unconstitutional behaviour on
the part of authorities, but rather an alteration in what is deemed
constitutional so as to accommodate the policies and practices deployed
by authorities in order to better enforce prohibition. This contribution
will make this phenomenon visible and offer an initial analytical
framework through which to explore it.
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