Americas 30 year-old campaign against the supply of illegal drugs has failed, says Cato Institute scholar Ted Galen Carpenter in a new book, “Bad Neighbour Policy: Washingtons Futile War on Drugs in Latin America.”
Despite intense efforts to eliminate drugs at their source (including crop eradication programs, crop substitution, and persuading or coercing officials in Latin America to crack down on drug traffickers), drug production has increased, street prices have dropped, and the global market for illicit drugs is thriving. According to Carpenter:
Furthermore, the War on Drugs has aggravated political violence and increased corruption in countries like Colombia, and now Mexico is beginning to witness similar effects, says Carpenter.
The only way to reverse these negative trends, he explains, is for the United States to abandon its prohibitionist strategy and legalise illicit drugs, regulating them like alcohol and tobacco. Drug legalisation would reduce the profit motive for drug traffickers, eliminate drug-related inner city violence, lessen the burden on prisons, deprive terrorist organisations of an important source of revenue, and free up billions of tax dollars to fight terrorism.
Source: Ted Galen Carpenter, Bad Neighbour Policy: Washingtons Futile War on Drugs in Latin America, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, Cato Institute.
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FMF Policy Bulletin/22 July 2003
