Call Off the Global Drug War - NYTimes.com
Call Off the Global Drug War
By JIMMY CARTER
Published: June 16, 2011
Atlanta
IN an extraordinary new initiative announced earlier this month, the Global
Commission on Drug Policy has made some courageous and profoundly important
recommendations in a report on how to bring more effective control over the illicit
drug trade. The commission includes the former presidents or prime ministers of five
countries, a former secretary general of the United Nations, human rights leaders,
and business and government leaders, including Richard Branson, George P. Shultz
and Paul A. Volcker.
The report describes the total failure of the present global antidrug effort, and in
particular America’s “war on drugs,” which was declared 40 years ago today. It notes
that the global consumption of opiates has increased 34.5 percent, cocaine 27
percent and cannabis 8.5 percent from 1998 to 2008. Its primary recommendations
are to substitute treatment for imprisonment for people who use drugs but do no
harm to others, and to concentrate more coordinated international effort on
combating violent criminal organizations rather than nonviolent, low-level offenders.
These recommendations are compatible with United States drug policy from three
decades ago. In a message to Congress in 1977, I said the country should
decriminalize the possession of less than an ounce of marijuana, with a full program
of treatment for addicts. I also cautioned against filling our prisons with young people
who were no threat to society, and summarized by saying: “Penalties against
possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of
the drug itself.”
These ideas were widely accepted at the time. But in the 1980s President Ronald
Reagan and Congress began to shift from balanced drug policies, including the
treatment and rehabilitation of addicts, toward futile efforts to control drug imports
from foreign countries.
This approach entailed an enormous expenditure of resources and the dependence
on police and military forces to reduce the foreign cultivation of marijuana, coca and
opium poppy and the production of cocaine and heroin. One result has been a
terrible escalation in drug-related violence, corruption and gross violations of human
rights in a growing number of Latin American countries.
The commission’s facts and arguments are persuasive. It recommends that
governments be encouraged to experiment “with models of legal regulation of drugs
... that are designed to undermine the power of organized crime and safeguard the
health and security of their citizens.” For effective examples, they can look to policies
that have shown promising results in Europe, Australia and other places.
But they probably won’t turn to the United States for advice. Drug policies here are
more punitive and counterproductive than in other democracies, and have brought
about an explosion in prison populations. At the end of 1980, just before I left office,
500,000 people were incarcerated in America; at the end of 2009 the number was
nearly 2.3 million. There are 743 people in prison for every 100,000 Americans, a
higher portion than in any other country and seven times as great as in Europe.
Some 7.2 million people are either in prison or on probation or parole — more than 3
percent of all American adults!
Some of this increase has been caused by mandatory minimum sentencing and
“three strikes you’re out” laws. But about three-quarters of new admissions to state
prisons are for nonviolent crimes. And the single greatest cause of prison population
growth has been the war on drugs, with the number of people incarcerated for
nonviolent drug offenses increasing more than twelvefold since 1980.
Not only has this excessive punishment destroyed the lives of millions of young people
and their families (disproportionately minorities), but it is wreaking havoc on state
and local budgets. Former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger pointed out that,
in 1980, 10 percent of his state’s budget went to higher education and 3 percent to
prisons; in 2010, almost 11 percent went to prisons and only 7.5 percent to higher
education.
Maybe the increased tax burden on wealthy citizens necessary to pay for the war on
drugs will help to bring about a reform of America’s drug policies. At least the
recommendations of the Global Commission will give some cover to political leaders
who wish to do what is right.
A few years ago I worked side by side for four months with a group of prison
inmates, who were learning the building trade, to renovate some public buildings in
my hometown of Plains, Ga. They were intelligent and dedicated young men, each
preparing for a productive life after the completion of his sentence. More than half of
them were in prison for drug-related crimes, and would have been better off in
college or trade school.
To help such men remain valuable members of society, and to make drug policies
more humane and more effective, the American government should support and
enact the reforms laid out by the Global Commission on Drug Policy.
Jimmy Carter, the 39th president, is the founder of the Carter Center and the winner
of the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize.