from YES! Magazine:
A Peaceful End to the War on Drugs?
The international war on drugs isn't stopping drug use or trafficking—but it is ruining lives. Drug policy expert Sanho Tree on what we can do differently.by Rebecca Leisher
posted May 27, 2011
Earlier this month tens of thousands of people marched in Mexico City to protest a war that has left more than 35,000 people dead in the last four and a half years. When elected president of Mexico in 2006, Felipe Calderón vowed to crack down on drug trafficking in his country. With the support of U.S. policies like the Merida Initiative
, he executed a military crackdown that has only increased drug-related violence.
In Colombia, campesino farmers continue to be displaced by a U.S.-backed civil war that has gone on for decades. The pending U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement threatens to further displace these farmers by making it impossible to compete with large agricultural producers receiving U.S. subsidies. Cocaine production has become one of very few options for farmers merely trying to feed their families. The Colombian and U.S. governments deal with this by sending military forces to eradicate coca crops by spraying toxic herbicides from helicopters—an imprecise practice that has also eradicated many legal crops and caused health problems in the communities they hit. In spite of the crackdowns, the percentage of cocaine imported to the United States that comes from Colombia has increased from 90 to 97 percent in the last decade.
......(snip)......
Rebecca Leisher: Recently you've said the drug war in Latin America is rivaling the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. What’s going on here—in what sense is this a war, and whose interests are being served?
Sanho Tree: Not many people's interests are served by this. It's not good for the cartels that are fighting each other, it's not good for the state, it's not good for the people. It's not even good for the drug warriors because this is not success, this is not something we can be proud of. But what you have is something driven by the economics of drug prohibition, and it all descends from that. The traffickers are doing what's in their self-interest to do—their bottom line is to maximize profits. ...............(more)
The complete piece is at: http://www.yesmagazine.org/peace-justice/beyond-the-war-on-drugs
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
