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Prominent people speak out
Some prominent people speak out Former USA Secretary of State George P Shultz is one of many prominent people who have called for a new approach to fighting problems caused by drugs. This address appeared in the Wall Street Journal of 27 October 1990. It was reported as being slightly adapted from an address he made on October 7 to an alumni gathering at the Stanford Business School. I welcome the emphasis that is now being put on the drug problem.
The efforts - to get to the people who are addicted, try to rehabilitate them; if they
cannot be rehabilitated, at least to contain them; to educate people, to strongly
discourage use of drugs by people who are casual users and first users, to stop this
process among the young - all of these things I think are extremely important. What we have before us now is essentially the same program but with more resources ploughed into all of the efforts to enforce and control. These efforts wind up creating a market where the price vastly exceeds the cost. With these incentives, demand creates its own supply and a criminal network along with it. It seems to me we're not really going to get anywhere until we can take the criminality out of the drug business and the incentives for criminality out of it. Frankly, the only way I can think of to accomplish this is to make it possible for addicts to buy drugs at some regulated place at a price that approximates their cost. When you do that you wipe out the criminal incentive, including, I might say, the incentive that the drug pushers have to go around and get kids addicted, so that they create a market for themselves. They won't have that incentive because they won't have that market. So I think the conceptual base needs to be thought out in a different way. We need at least to consider and examine forms of controlled legalization of drugs. Professor Alfred McCoy, lecturer in South East Asian History at the University of Wisconsin USA was asked to respond to the following statement. "The war against drugs is like the war against Vietnam. With more men, resources and power we would have won it?" It is your obligation (as Australians) to save us (the United States) from ourselves. As you tried to do in Vietnam. It is my feeling that the drug war is becoming increasingly irrational in the face of changes in the global opiates market. There is a very real possibility that a complex of changing economic and geopolitical policies that arose in the wake of the cold war will drive an explosive increase in Asian opium production. I think we can look forward to at least a doubling of world supply within the decade, maybe within five years, and a sustained increase of the proportions in the foreseeable future. This increase in supply is going to make a mockery of the drug war that we're now fighting. Even with the proportions of the drug supply we now have, the US drug war is not working. Let me explain. Implicit in the logic of drug war is the idea that law enforcement will reduce the supply by working up the distribution chains to the top - the Mr Bigs. Let's look at Khun Sa, the biggest of the Mr Bigs. The epithet king of heroin. The emperor of heroin. Throughout his period of dominance in Burma from 1981 to 1989, he increased Burma's heroin production by 500%. He had an army of 20,000 men. He had declared the secession of a state of ten million people. He was a truly powerful individual. When he fell from power, there was not a ripple. His fall was of absolutely no consequence whatsoever. It made no difference. So, if bringing down the biggest of the big makes no difference, how can the drug war possibly work? Commissioner John Johnson, Commissioner of Tasmanian Police. The criminal justice system in Australia spends about half a billion dollars a year attempting to control the use of illicit drugs throughout Australia using the police department, the courts and jails. Our experience has been that the policy has failed and that police officers and other people involved in the system who think about harm minimisation are asking the community, the thinking people, to think about the problems and look at some other techniques that the community might be able to use to reduce the dependence on drugs, particularly amongst the young in our community. Raymond Kendall, General Secretary of Interpol, when asked if he could win the war from a policing point of view; I certainly don't think we're winning and I'm not sure that we can win. |
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