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London School of Economics Report Calls for New Approaches to Drug Policy

Submitted by Phillip Smith on (Issue #833)
Politics & Advocacy

A report from the London School of Economics released Monday night outlines the enormous negative outcomes and collateral damage from the war on drugs and calls for new, evidence-based approaches to drug use and the drug trade.

The report, Ending the Drug Wars: Report of the LSE Expert Group on the Economics of Drug Policy, has chapters authored by leading drug policy experts from around the world and has been signed onto by five Nobel Prize-winning economists, as well as political figures including British Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, Guatemalan Foreign Minister Luis Fernando Carrera Castro, former Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski, former US Secretary of State George Schultz, and former European Union High Representative for Common Foreign and Security Policy Dr. Javier Solana, among other luminaries.

"It is time to end the 'war on drugs' and massively redirect resources towards effective evidence-based policies underpinned by rigorous economic analysis," the report says forthrightly. "The pursuit of a militarized and enforcement-led global 'war on drugs' strategy has produced enormous negative outcomes and collateral damage. These include mass incarceration in the US, highly repressive policies in Asia, vast corruption and political destabilization in Afghanistan and West Africa, immense violence in Latin America, an HIV epidemic in Russia, an acute global shortage of pain medication and the propagation of systematic human rights abuses around the world."

The stark prohibitionist approach to drug control has been a flop even by its own measures, the report found.

"The strategy has failed based on its own terms," it noted. "Evidence shows that drug prices have been declining while purity has been increasing. This has been despite drastic increases in global enforcement spending. 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 chided the United Nations for its continued adherence to such failed policies and urged it to accept experimentation while emphasizing public health and human rights.

"The United Nations has for too long tried to enforce a repressive, 'one-size-fits-all' approach," the report concluded. "It must now take the lead in advocating a new cooperative international framework based on the fundamental acceptance that different policies will work for different countries and regions. This new global drug strategy should be based on principles of public health, harm reduction, illicit market impact reduction, expanded access to essential medicines, minimization of problematic consumption, rigorously monitored regulatory experimentation and an unwavering commitment to principles of human rights."

"The drug war's failure has been recognized by public health professionals, security experts, human rights authorities and now some of the world's most respected economists," said John Collins, coordinator of LSE IDEAS International Drug Policy Project. "Leaders need to recognize that toeing the line on current drug control strategies comes with extraordinary human and financial costs to their citizens and economies."

"Repressive drug laws cost governments billions of dollars and result in horrible epidemics of infectious diseases and serious human rights abuses," said Dr. Kasia Malinowska-Sempruch, the director of the Open Society Global Drug Policy Program, which hosted a launch event for the report at the LSE Monday night. "We know the terrible costs of failed strategies and what can be gained from smarter approaches."

More fuel for the fire as an increasingly broad-based global movement for drug reform takes aim at the UN and its 2016 General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) on Drugs.

Permission to Reprint: This content is licensed under a modified Creative Commons Attribution license. Content of a purely educational nature in Drug War Chronicle appear courtesy of DRCNet Foundation, unless otherwise noted.

Comments

a mckee (not verified)

But the War on Drugs has become a huge cash cow for certain powerful entities.  Thus, logic will not prevail until the corruption of the current system is thoroughly exposed.  Good luck.  

Sat, 05/10/2014 - 11:24am Permalink
Blair T. Longley (not verified)

In reply to by a mckee (not verified)

YES!

Follow the money to its SOURCE. The international bankers are the biggest gangsters, the banksters, which dominated the political processes, and therefore, were calling the shots when their puppet politicians enacted drug prohibitions. Failures to understand political economy inside of human ecology lead to proposing "solutions" to these problems that continue to be too superficial do to anything really worthwhile. Unfortunately one can quite rightly say "good luck" with that, since our society appears to already be terminally sick and insane, because it is almost totally controlled by systems of legalized lies, backed by legalized violence, in the development of which the "drug wars" were merely another phase.

Without deeper understanding of the ways that the death controls back up the debt controls, and therefore, wars based on deceits were deliberately designed to advance the overall social pyramid systems of debt slavery, then one can not understand the banksters' agenda enough to meaningfully counter-act it, or go beyond it. The mainstream morons who analyze the "drug wars" on the superficial levels that this report has done are practically political dead ends, because there are chronic political problems which are inherent in the nature of life, and our civilization has developed to resolve those problems through systems based on the maximum possible deceits and frauds.

To propose viable solutions to ending the drug wars requires understanding war in general, which has manifested in the form of the combined money/murder systems. Viable solutions require using enough evidence, and enough of a scientific approach, to understand how and why governments became the biggest form of organized crime, controlled by the best organized gangs of criminals, which currently happen to be the banksters. The only genuine solutions require better organized crime, operating better death controls, to back up better debt controls. Anything less is based on deliberately ignoring the evidence and logical arguments about how human civilizations actually operate as energy systems, controlled by the methods of organized crime.

The "drug wars" were NOT a "failure" from the point of view of the banksters, that controlled the governments, in order to deliberately create vicious spirals of wars based on deceits, which backed up the basic social pyramid of debt slavery, through the almost inconceivably crazy and corrupt monetary and taxation systems. To propose genuinely better ways to "end the drug wars" requires the first level of evidence regarding how civilization is actually controlled by the methods of organized crime, and then the second level of evidence regarding the chronic political problems inherent in the nature of life. However, after assimilating the factual evidence and logical arguments regarding that bigger picture, one returns to the problems of practical politics, and must conclude that: "logic will not prevail until the corruption of the current system is thoroughly exposed.  Good luck."

Reports produced by mainstream morons, who superficially analyze the "failures" of the drug wars are annoyingly useless, and lead to nothing but compromises with the same old lies, in the form of some neoprohibitionist regime, that is not really better, because that does not address the causes of what the real problems were, but only some superficial symptoms.

Sun, 05/11/2014 - 1:53am Permalink

I get annoyed by the mainstream moron reports that
were supposed to be "evidence-based," BUT which
deliberately ignore the evidence that drug wars were
NOT failures, but rather accomplished the real goals,
of vicious spirals of debt slavery, backed by various
wars based on deceits, that the ruling classes have
deliberately promoted, over & over, in various forms!

These sorts of superficial analyzes do not understand the problems
enough to come up with other "solutions," than neoprohibitionisms!

Sun, 05/11/2014 - 1:30am Permalink

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