The American media’s coverage of Colombia’s supposedly new drug policy has been odd. As I argue in my recent piece in Foreign Policy, left-winger Gustavo Petro, who became president last August, has been offering the same old prohibitionist formulas despite claims to the contrary in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other traditional media outlets.

Take, for instance, the Colombian government’s claim that a change to regional drug policy is imminent because, as Petro’s “drug czar” stated, this is “a rare moment in which many key governments in the region — including the cocaine-producing countries Colombia, Peru and Bolivia — are led by leftists.” This is a strange line of reasoning. After all, communist Cuba and Nicaragua, a de facto left-wing dictatorship, have ruthlessly applied some of Latin America’s most draconian drug laws. In Peru, President Pedro Castillo, who belongs to a Marxist-Leninist party, was elected on an authoritarian platform that included his opposition to legal marijuana, and he frequently boasts of his “frontal assault” against drug traffickers.

Castillo’s traditional drug warrior stance undermines Petro’s hopes that, as Samantha Schmidt and Diana Durán write in The Washington Post, “a unified regional bloc can renegotiate international drug conventions at the United Nations.” Nevertheless, Latin American countries are not the main obstacle to UN-level drug reform as much as the world’s most powerful authoritarian regimes are. China’s ruling Communist Party, which ruthlessly eradicated all opium consumption and production in the mid-20^th century, still executes drug traffickers. For his part, Russia’s Vladimir Putin stated in 2013 that “the legalization of so-called ‘soft drugs’” in Western countries was “a very dangerous path.”

Putin also made clear that there should be no change to “the current international legal framework in this area, which rests above all on the three basic UN conventions” on narcotics (those of 1961, 1971, and 1988). At the 2016 UN General Assembly’s Special Session on Drugs, the Kremlin sabotaged the attempt to make “harm reduction” the centerpiece of a new global approach to drugs. This should beg the question of why an unaccountable transnational bureaucracy was allowed to set the framework for a global drug policy in the first place. Petro, however, insists on the need for “a new international convention that accepts that the war on drugs has failed,” receiving much fanfare in the global press.

This claim, however, is hardly a novelty as far as rhetorical flourishes from sitting Colombian presidents go. During a 2011 speech at Brown University, former President Santos called for “a new global discussion” on drug policy, which required “new strategies, new visions, and new methods.” Like Petro, Santos sought to leverage Colombia’s victim status in the drug war, but his efforts to change the terms of the global drug debate came to naught. Then as now, it was clear that the moral outrage of Colombian politicians, however justified, was unlikely to alter drug policies in the developed world.

Of all the available possibilities to end the country’s decades-long drug war, unilateral legalization is Colombia’s least-worst option. Under a far leftist government that is oblivious to the drug trade’s market dynamics, however, the best bet is not even on the table.