The war on drugs has been a failure

One achievement of the U.S. war in Afghanistan, which overthrew a regime that cracked down on opium production and profited from it, was an enormous increase in drug seizures. Since the war started according to a study published by the online medical journal BMJ Open, "seizures of raw and prepared opium increased by more than 12,000%." To put it another way, the amount of opium seized in 2012, 57,023 kilograms, was 126 times the amount seized in 1990. Since Afghanistan produces the raw material for something like 90 percent of the world"s heroin, you might expect such a dramatic crackdown to produce noticeable results. But the authors of the BMJ study found that heroin purity in the United States rose by 60 percent in the same period, while heroin prices in Europe fell by 74 percent. This is what success looks like in the war on drugs. The story is similar for cocaine and marijuana. "With few exceptions and despite increasing investments in supply reduction efforts aimed at disrupting global drug supply," Werb and his colleagues write, "illegal drug prices have generally decreased while drug purity has generally increased since 1990. These findings suggest that expanding efforts at controlling the global illegal drug market through law enforcement are failing." That"s because supply reduction tactics such as ripping up poppies, spraying coca crops, and intercepting marijuana shipments are doomed to fail by the economics of the black market. Prohibition plants the seeds of its own defeat by enabling traffickers to earn a premium for undertaking the risks involved in supplying an illegal product. That means they are highly motivated to find ways around whatever roadblocks the government throws up between them and their customers. Given all the places where drugs can be produced and all the ways they can be transported to people who want them, the idea that the government could "cut off the flow" if only it made a more determined effort is a fantasy. As critics of prohibition often point out, the government cannot keep drugs out of correctional facilities, so even turning the entire country into a prison camp would not do the trick. The basic problem with that strategy is that illegal drugs acquire most of their value close to the consumer. The cost of replacing destroyed crops and seized shipments is therefore relatively small, a tiny fraction of the "street value" trumpeted by law enforcement agencies. As you get closer to the retail level, the replacement cost rises, but the amount that can be seized at one time falls. That dilemma helps explain why throwing more money at source control and interdiction never seems to have a substantial, lasting effect on drug consumption. Between 1990 and 2012, Werb and his collaborators report, the amount of marijuana seized by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration rose more than fivefold. During the same period, the average price of cannabis, adjusted for inflation and potency, fell by 86 percent. A specific example of a supply-side victory is a two-thirds reduction in Colombian coca acreage from 2000 to 2012. Meanwhile, cocaine production has picked up in Peru and Bolivia. When you push it down in one spot, it pops up somewhere else. There exists a global pattern of falling drugs prices and increasing drug purity and potency, alongside a relative consistent pattern of increasing seizures of illegal drugs. We need drug policies to be grounded in science, health and human rights rather than prohibition. The prohibitionist approach to global drug control has proved remarkably costly and ineffective. The un intended consequences of the war on drugs has generated extraordinary levels of violence, crime and corruption while failing to reduce the availability and use of illegal drugs.