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Futility of the War on Drugs
Criminalization punishes abuse rather than dealing with its causes
Luis Peaze | OhmyNews.com | 2006-09-02

As of Aug. 23, drug addicts and drug dealers in Brazil face new treatment under a new law. Drug addicts will be arrested as criminals but treated as victims, in accordance with principles of human rights. Drug dealers, who faced a sentence of 5 to 15 years imprisonment under the old law, will now face a sentence of 8 to 20 years imprisonment.

The new law is more in line with the hardline policies of U.S. President George W. Bush and America's "war on drugs." It represents a victory for Bush over Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who was one of the signatories nearly a decade ago of an open letter to U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan against the global war on drugs.

The new law also puts drug policies under a system of justice called SISNAD -- Sistema Nacional de Politicas Publicas sobre Drogas (National System of Public Policies on Drugs).

Several aspects of this episode will puzzle anyone who carefully analyzes the social scenario in Brazil. Apparently very few people saw this legal move coming, including the press, which gave it little attention.

Another press opportunity has been missed. As I am writing this article, it is simply impossible to find on the Internet the status of two Brazilians who were convicted and condemned to death in Indonesia last year. Marco Archer and Rodrigo Gularte were arrested by the Indonesian police as they carried cocaine into the country. How are they doing? Did they escape from Indonesian barbarism?

Receiving the death penalty for illegal drug use or trafficking should be important enough to be broadly addressed by the media especially with the inauguration of this new law and the SISNAD.

Unfortunately, there are yet deeper layers that give this complex matter an unbearable density. This non-journalistic phrase shall be considered tentative to justify the impossibility of a summary with unanimous conclusions and broad solutions for the short, medium, and long term.

Still, it is possible to ask questions and this is what I want to do right now.

Legal or Illegal

The natural organic narcotic marijuana and synthetic illegal drugs like cocaine and ecstasy (to name only a few) have defenders who proclaim that these substances can occasionally be helpful as painkillers and for certain psychological disturbances. Accordingly, there are those who believe that legalizing drugs is the best way of controlling it.

No one has gone to jail or been sentenced to death for prescribing or selling aspirin. Yet millions of people are said to have died in the United States of stomach problems caused by continuous use of the oldest synthetic legal drug ever made. High blood pressure pills, too, have their percentage of deaths from misuse related to wrong diagnoses. Cigarettes kill more people than any war, traffic accident, or natural disaster. Yet, they are all legal.

The United Nations worked to establish an international system of drug control in which countries are obliged to criminalize all non-medical use, manufacture, and sale of illegal drugs. The U.S. pushes hard for international cooperation and direct effective action against drug production and trafficking.

Again, pay attention to the subtle meanings of certain words (i.e. illegal, non-medical, criminalize, manufacture, possession, and sale). Although Lula sanctioned a new law on illegal drugs, he has followed the tendency of many South American and European countries where addicts receive non-criminal treatment. But he favored Bush by avoiding a paragraph from the original text, approved by the Brazilian Senate, and maintained as a crime the possession and use of drugs.

Put simply, anyone arrested with a gram of marijuana or cocaine will be considered a criminal but will be treated as a non-criminal (i.e. the Judge will send the arrested person to a social program for assistance). The dealer will be judged and penalized accordingly.

Who Will Pay the Bill?

The futility of the drug war lies in the fact that it targets neither the demand nor the effect. It simply proscribes punishment.

According to a report in The Economist one kilo of cocaine can buy a Rolls Royce. The average middle class teenager in any given country can make more money selling a gram per week at a mall than his father makes. In the U.S. alone, the market for illegal drugs is about of $60 billion a year.

In a country like Brazil, where the majority of more than 50 million people live on less than $100 a month, where organized crime is said to have its headquarters inside the prison system from which it coordinates heavy gun fights against the police and often wins, where a prisoner costs more to the taxpayer than a public school teacher, where attention is given to the market for goods over education, safety, and health, there are a great many heavy drug users.

How do we fight the illegal drug market in such an unfair world? Especially now that Lula is about to be elected for another four-year term?
--
Luis Peaze is a Brazilian writer, journalist and translator.

 

Tokamak

I understand that this article came from a Korean news site, but shouldn't the headline say Brazil?

Peace.

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"He who knows does not speak. He who speaks does not know."
- Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

Buzzby

The attribution location in each headline is supposed to represent the state or country of the periodical from which the article was taken.

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