Colombia drug eradication. Fernando Vergara/AP/Press Association Images. All rights reserved.More than 150,000 people have been murdered in Mexico since the government launched a ‘war on drugs’ in 2006, and 28,000 others remain disappeared or missing. In the United States, children are dying alone from drug-use because they are too ashamed to seek help. In Thailand, women at the bottom of the drug chain are being incarcerated at alarming levels. If you talk to academics, activists and people caught on the frontline of the ‘war on drugs’, one thing quickly becomes clear: after five decades of criminalisation and militarisation, it has failed, and its tragedies are countless. Here are just seven reasons why the cost of this failure affects us all.
1. If you live in the global north, then you are already implicated in the hypocrisy of the drug control system
The enforcement of global drug policy is overwhelmingly focused on the global south, and drugs such as cocaine and heroin. This is despite synthetic drugs such as methamphetamine dominating the market. In fact, it is the global north which is the primary space for manufacture and export of illicit substances. “Why are Colombia, Bolivia and Afghanistan acceptable theatres for violent, weaponised counter-narcotics operations, and not Poland or Canada,” asks professor Julia Buxton. Español
