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Every year, close to
2 million people worldwide are imprisoned because of
anti-drug laws, including 1 million in the USA alone.
The clandestine behaviour that these laws impose on drug
users also makes them run greater safety risks by, for example,
sharing needles, or taking drugs without knowing what they
really contain.
Opponents of today’s anti-drug laws point out that when alcohol was
prohibited in the U.S. in the early 20th century, consumption
of adulterated alcohol (alcohol that was distilled improperly,
or that contained methanol) resulted in over 10,000 deaths
and over 30,000 cases of blindness in less than
10 years.
While today’s anti-prohibitionists stress the perverse
effects of making drugs illegal, they are also pursuing another,
perhaps even more difficult goal: to teach people to make conscious
choices about their sources of pleasure and their methods of
escapism. From this perspective, the only way to evolve a truly
meaningful policy for preventing drug use is through dispassionate,
non-moralistic debate based on scientific information. |
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The international market in illegal
drugs is said to account for about half of all flows of money
worldwide. According to the April 2000 edition of the authoritative
French weekly Le Monde diplomatique, this market has more
financial power than the central banks!
If the drug trade persists despite all the
so-called wars on drugs, the reason is that it serves the purposes
not only of various rebel movements and terrorist groups, but also
of sovereign states and their intelligence services, who use it
to finance their arms purchases and clandestine activities.
The most typical example is the drug trade
in Central Asia, which is closely linked with the secret activities
of the CIA. Before the Soviet war in Afghanistan, scarcely any heroin was
produced in this region. But within just a few years, the territories
along the Afghani-Pakistani border became the main supplier of
heroin to the world market, accounting for 60% of all heroin consumed
in the United States. Meanwhile, in Pakistan, the number of people
with heroin dependencies rose from close to zero in 1979 to 1.2
million in 1985.
Many dictatorships and many multinational
firms also derive their funding from the drug trade, because its
illicit status makes for incomparable profit margins. The laws
prohibiting drugs thus represent one of the primary factors in
the success of the drug trade, on which these protagonists have
grown rich.
Given the interests at stake, the drug trade
thus serves as a pretext for undermining the political institutions
of poor countries and colonizing them economically. Hence the “war
against drugs” does not look like it is going to be won any
time soon.
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