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.
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
‘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
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
Armed with 4,000 eggs and a truckload of sugar and cream, French pastry chefs on Wednesday completed a 121.8m-long strawberry cake that they have claimed is the world’s longest ever made. Youssef El Gatou brought together 20 chefs to make the 1.2 tonne masterpiece that took a week to complete and was set out on tables in an ice rink in the Paris suburb town of Argenteuil for residents to inspect. The effort overtook a 100.48m-long strawberry cake made in the Italian town of San Mauro Torinese in 2019. El Gatou’s cake also used 350kg of strawberries, 150kg of sugar and 415kg of
RSS