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InvisibleSimplepowa
In Pursuit of Knowledge


Registered: 03/06/09
Posts: 4,310
Supply and demand: The changing war on drugs
    #19030328 - 10/25/13 10:08 AM (10 years, 3 months ago)

The United Nations has recently announced that Peru has taken over Colombia as the largest producer of illegal coca leaves, the base for the drug cocaine. This comes as Brazil becomes the second biggest cocaine market behind the US, and in front of Britain, Italy and Spain.

This supply-side shift back to Peru has not come as a surprise. The brutal, US-funded War on Drugs in Colombia continues to force production back to neighbouring countries, which before the 1990s were the highest cocaine producers. Nor is the demand-side shift to Brazil surprising, as the past decade has seen growth in mass consumerism in combination with an increasing crack cocaine problem.

According to the 2011 Report of the Global Commission on Drug Policy:
…apparent victories in eliminating one source or trafficking organisation are negated almost instantly by the emergence of other sources and traffickers.

On the demand side, the report stated that:
…repressive efforts directed at consumers impede public health measures to reduce HIV/AIDS, overdose fatalities and other harmful consequences of drug use.

What can be observed in the global drug trade is the “balloon effect”, suggesting that the decline in production and consumption in one region causes it to bulge somewhere else. It is also known better as the efecto cucaracha, or cockroach effect. You can chase the pests out of one corner of your house, but they have an irritating habit of popping up somewhere else. As Ronaldo Laranjerira, a Brazilian drug researcher, told local media: “drugs follow money”.

The consuming shift to Brazil coincides with an era that has supposedly seen greatly increased living conditions, but many of the middle and lower sectors are unable to take part in the “Brazilian dream”, as I have previously observed. This is in combination with the growth of mass consumerism, rising lower-middle class sectors and the growing problem of crack cocaine in the favelas (or shanty towns).

Anthropologist and author Philippe Bourgeois also comes to this conclusion in his book In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio. High drug consumption is an internalised reflection of the fact that modern society has totally rejected and dehumanised those who live in the ghettos in the US, and have been refused access to the “American dream”.

Imperial commodity

It is the poorer Latin American nations suffering the gang violence, political corruption and high murder rates associated with cocaine, while the consumer, western nations and Brazil have abuse problems – especially within marginalised groups. In some ways, it is like colonialism has not left us.

Cocaine also functions as an “imperial commodity”. It is a commodity for which there exists a lucrative market and profit-making opportunity where much of the profit ends up in western coffers, as well as the upper and criminal classes of Latin America.

Global drug policy therefore tends to reproduce these relations, with drug consumption becoming the object of a crusade. The evil is projected onto the producer nations and not onto the consumer nations – onto the “other”, and not onto oneself.

Much of the harm from drugs is not necessarily to do with the taking of the drugs themselves, but rather the way in which they are prohibited. This has created a huge black market that is worth tens of billions of dollars annually. It is run by violent drug runners outside of the reach of the law and connected to its cousin, the illegal arms trade.

Diverging solutions

A fix is not something that will come easily. Legalisation has the strong possibility of solving many of the violence and corruption issues in the producer and trafficking nations.

Yet for some, legalisation is an irreversible gamble. If dependence rose sharply, that increased dependence would remain – even if drugs were re-prohibited.

However, this gamble looks very different within Latin America. Cocaine consumption is a growing but still modest problem, and most trafficked drugs are destined for consumption elsewhere. The key problems in Latin America are the violence and corruption associated with illicit trafficking. The US problem is drug abuse and domestic drug trafficking.

Therefore, US and Latin American interests are not aligned when it comes to the question of legalisation. Latin America should not pin its hopes on waiting for the US to legalise, or be dependent on US-style drug wars as witnessed in Colombia, or a one-size-fits-all drug policy.

In the consumer nations, questions need to be asked about why there is such a huge cocaine and crack market. This is a societal, not a law enforcement question. Humans are guided and restricted by their social conditions and as some studies have shown, drug addiction is connected with our social conditions.

Many of the problems in which drug abuse is symptomatic of are problems of late capitalist society, alienation, reification, individualisation and the destruction of social and cultural structures which could provide support. One viewing of the well-researched television program The Wire, showing the conditions of the urban precariat class in Baltimore US and their relation to drugs, will lay testament to this.

This is also evidenced in how increasing enforcement in order to make drugs harder to get and more expensive has been tried, and failed. In fact, over the last 40 years, the number of drug dealers in prison in the United States has increased by a factor of 15. The prices of heroin and cocaine have fallen by 90%.

Drug policies and strategies at all levels too often continue to be driven by ideological perspectives or political convenience, and pay too little attention to the complexities of the drug market, drug use and drug addiction.

Problems in key consumer nations (US, Brazil, Europe and Australia) diverge from those in the producing and trafficking nations (Latin America), and as a result each should be tackled differently.

A country like Mexico could step up and further decriminalise cocaine in attempt to stem the bloody violence, and once again Latin America could lead the way in progressive drug policy away from colonial like relations that the war on drugs has created. In the meantime, consuming nations need to look past heavy-handed prohibition as the only option.

The real test could come out of Brazil, where there is a combination of the violence and corruption along with the consumption and addiction problems.

Article by Andrew Self, Postgraduate Associate at the Institute of Latin American Studies at La Trobe University
October 24, 2013
http://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2013/10/supply-and-demand-the-changing-war-on-drugs/


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Carl Sagan - "Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people."

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Robert Pirsig - "When one person suffers from a delusion it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called religion."

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Brian Cox - "[One] problem with today’s world is that everyone believes they have the right to express their opinion AND have others listen to it. The correct statement of individual rights is that everyone has the right to an opinion, but crucially, that opinion can be roundly ignored and even made fun of, particularly if it is demonstrably nonsense."


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InvisibleDebuteMachine

Registered: 09/29/06
Posts: 6,457
Re: Supply and demand: The changing war on drugs [Re: Simplepowa]
    #19033800 - 10/26/13 12:05 AM (10 years, 3 months ago)

Quote:


A fix is not something that will come easily. Legalisation has the strong possibility of solving many of the violence and corruption issues in the producer and trafficking nations.

Yet for some, legalisation is an irreversible gamble. If dependence rose sharply, that increased dependence would remain – even if drugs were re-prohibited.

However, this gamble looks very different within Latin America. Cocaine consumption is a growing but still modest problem, and most trafficked drugs are destined for consumption elsewhere. The key problems in Latin America are the violence and corruption associated with illicit trafficking. The US problem is drug abuse and domestic drug trafficking.

Therefore, US and Latin American interests are not aligned when it comes to the question of legalisation. Latin America should not pin its hopes on waiting for the US to legalise, or be dependent on US-style drug wars as witnessed in Colombia, or a one-size-fits-all drug policy.





Good point.


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OfflineEywa_devotee
Goddess Worshiper
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Registered: 10/04/10
Posts: 1,088
Loc: State of Confusion, Arkan... Flag
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Re: Supply and demand: The changing war on drugs [Re: DebuteMachine]
    #19039165 - 10/27/13 02:24 AM (10 years, 3 months ago)

What happens when people in Colombia, Brazil, and elsewhere realize they are addicted to the US dollar, and the dope is no longer making them high enough and switch to something stronger like the Chinese yuan? The bottom line is they are considering outright legalization only because the governments have so extended their credit that they are drawing at straws to generate revenue.

Sorry too little too late for the US, the last good vein closed up in 2008 and you are already dying of aids (unpayable debt) and hep B (fake derivitives and bonds). You get to kick it cold turkey and die without that last high. Might as well go for the jugular and shoot it all in and drift off to sleep (no limit on federal spending till February 2014).

What will happen after this will make the war on drugs the least of your worries.


--------------------
"Love one another." "To Love is to know me." "Love is the Law, Love under Will." "In Compassion, all sorrows end." Regardless of the Master, the message is the same- Choose love and you shall live, Choose Fear and you shall die. Help bring peace to this Earth: Love one another, and serve others before yourself.


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