Yesterday, the international aid organization Health Poverty Action released a new study on the effects of the global drug war. The report is entitled, “Casualties of War: How the War on Drugs Is Harming the World’s Poorest.”
From its introduction:
Since the mid-twentieth century, global drug policy has been dominated by strict prohibition, which tries to force people to stop possessing, using and producing drugs by making them illegal.
This approach, which has come to be known as the ‘War on Drugs’, has not only failed to achieve its goals—it is fuelling poverty, undermining health, and failing some of the poorest and most marginalised communities worldwide.
Both in the United States and around the world, the War on Drugs has been a humanitarian catastrophe and a financial money pit. Interdiction often harms indigent farmers who grow the coca and poppy plants for meager financial return while the global drug marketplace continues to meet high demand. Prohibition-fueled violence among rival cartels and gangs invariably spills over to claim innocent lives. For those reasons, it is no exaggeration to say that the $100 billion spent on global drug prohibition annually takes food off the tables of the poor and leaves many more dead from violence.
Well-meaning people can disagree about what is best to spend that $100 billion on—vaccines, food aid, micro-loans, infrastructure, clean water projects, drug treatment, etc.—but a growing number of people would say it would be better spent not fighting the Drug War.
Read the whole report here.
