Assessing US Drug Policy in the Americas
Time to Revisit Goals and Strategies
October 15, 2009
The growing realization that we and our neighbors in the Americas are not well-served by the status quo U.S. policies presents the opportunity to re-examine old premises and modernize our goals and strategies. Better to make real progress in reducing drug-related harms than to persist with policies that have failed to meet their own basic goals even as they have generated immense collateral damage.
The U.S. drug policy debate has long been paralyzed by a discourse that highlights two extremes – no-holds-barred “drug war” and nothing-less-than “legalization” – as if they were the only options. As a consequence, U.S. drug policy has largely been on auto-pilot for nearly three decades, without ever revisiting the basic assumptions behind our goals and strategies. Beyond waging a “war on drugs” by trying to suppress production in Latin America, the United States has also promoted aggressive drug enforcement and incarceration as the model for the region. But even as incarceration rates have climbed – up 40 percent on average in Mexico and South America over the last decade – illicit drug markets have not only persisted, they have thrived, and the havoc they wreak has been spreading, in the Americas as much as anywhere.
The growing realization that we and our neighbors in the Americas are not well-served by the status quo U.S. policies presents the opportunity to re-examine old premises and modernize our goals and strategies, so that our aims are at once worthwhile and achievable. In the past, the evident failures of our traditional drug control strategies prompted the escalation of essentially the same approaches. Set against the evidence, our goals have increasingly come to resemble wishful thinking, not serious policymaking. We cannot afford to repeat the same mistakes now.
Fortunately, the drug policy debate itself is becoming more open and more interesting, with promising approaches like harm reduction helping to frame our drug policy choices. Similar debates are also developing in other countries across the Americas, where drug trafficking and the “war on drugs” are both exacting an enormous toll in human suffering and weakening of democratic institutions.
This is not to say there will be easy answers, much less perfect solutions; drug policy is generally a matter of choosing the least bad options, and trade-offs abound. But better to make real progress in reducing drug-related harms than to persist with policies that have failed to meet their own basic goals even as they have generated immense collateral damage.
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DateOctober 15, 2009
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EditionStatement before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere
