The Economist

Drug policy; Supply and demand
The argument over treatment is being won. Now for the battle over supply
Jun 2nd 2011 | MEXICO CITY | from the print edition

NARCOTICS liberalisation was once the cause of freethinkers and hippies. Now a more sober bunch is criticising the “war on drugs”. On June 2nd the Global Commission on Drug Policy, a group including ex-presidents of Brazil, Mexico, Colombia and Switzerland; the prime minister of Greece; a former secretary-general of the United Nations; and, from America, an ex-secretary of state and ex-chairman of the Federal Reserve, called for the decriminalisation of all drug taking, and for experiments in the legal regulation of the sale of drugs, starting with cannabis.

Calls for a rethink of the 50-year-old policy of prohibition have been growing. As the report pointed out, drug consumption has continued to rise, even as billions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives have been spent trying to stamp it out. In the ten years to 2008, the most recent data available, the number taking cannabis worldwide increased by 8.5%, of cocaine by 27%, and of opiates by 34.5%. America’s federal government alone spent $15 billion in 2010 on drug control; perhaps $25 billion more went in other public spending.

Prohibition has brought many short-term wins but no lasting ones. The authorities drove cocaine smugglers out of the Caribbean in the 1980s. But they then popped up in Mexico. A campaign against “narcos” there has cost at least 35,000 lives in the past five years—and is driving them into the chaotic countries of Central America. Guatemalan officers found 27 headless bodies near the Mexican border last month, and blamed the Mexican Zetas “cartel”.

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A similar merry-go-round is spinning in the Andes, where production driven out of Peru and Bolivia and into Colombia in the 1990s is now being swept back in the other direction. As cocaine taking has fallen in America it has risen in Europe: Latin American “cartels” have diversified their export strategy (wrecking parts of West Africa, a convenient staging post, along the way).

The Global Commission backs basic measures to protect drug takers and save money: providing clean needles, for instance, does not stop people taking the drug, but does stop them getting infected. In Britain, Germany, Switzerland and Australia—which all got on the clean-needle bandwagon early—HIV rates among injecting drug takers are lower than 4%. But they are more than 12% in France, and over 15% in America and Portugal, which came late to the idea. Thailand and Russia, still not keen, have rates of around 40%.

Prescribing heroin, as Switzerland and the Netherlands do, seems to cut the number of users a lot, as dealer-addicts are taken out of the equation, breaking the link between wholesalers and casual customers. Decriminalising the possession of cannabis in Western Australia and Portugal (which decriminalised possession of all drugs in 2001) had no impact on consumption, but saved a lot of money. A study of American states found no link between the diligence of enforcement and changes in user numbers. When Britain reclassified cannabis as a less serious drug in 2004, consumption slumped. (Despite that, the government backtracked five years later.)

Going easy on users may save money and lives. But many in Latin America worry that decriminalising only consumption will increase demand but do nothing to take the trade away from criminals. The Global Commission had much less to say on the question of legalising supply, calling only for more “experimentation” with models of legal regulation, and lighter sentences for small-scale dealers. That would do nothing to deter outfits like the Zetas.

Debates on legalisation are vetoed by consumer countries, which fear an increase in addiction were drugs to be made more freely available. For embattled transit countries such as Mexico, where a former president, Vicente Fox, has called for supply and distribution to be legalised, that is a gamble worth taking.

The gulf in opinion may narrow. The traditional distinction between producer and consumer countries is blurring, as drug use grows among producers and domestic output grows among the consumers. Cocaine use has been rising in South America, where average rates of lifetime use are now about the same as in Europe. In Mexico the rate doubled between 2002 and 2008 (though it is still well below America’s). At the same time, cannabis cultivation is big business in America and parts of Europe, and crystal meth can be cooked up anywhere (though it is easier where law enforcement is weak). As the drug problems of the rich and poor world converge, governments may be more likely to see eye to eye.