Mounting International Resistance to U.S. Drug War Strategy
Mounting International Resistance to U.S. Drug War Strategy
Ted Galen Carpenter
April 15, 2016
As little as a decade or two ago, the United States was the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the international policy arena when it came to determining how to deal with the problems of drug trafficking and illegal drug use. Woe be to any foreign official who dared challenge Washington’s views or policy preferences. At best, they would find themselves excluded from the forums in which crucial decisions were made. At worst, as in the case of Colombia’s Prosecutor General Gustavo de Greiff, who openly flirted with advocating ending the drug war through legalization, U.S. official smeared such dissidents as willing tools of the traffickers.
But that situation has been changing at an accelerating pace for several years, and foreign leaders, especially in Latin America, are openly defying Washington’s insistence on the prohibition model for dealing with the drug issue. Sentiment inside the United States itself also is shifting. That is most evident regarding marijuana, the mildest of the illegal drugs. Not only have a growing number of states approved medical marijuana initiatives, often with less than rigorous requirements to prevent recreational use, but Colorado, three other states and the District of Columbia have embraced legal marijuana outright, with more likely to follow suit in this fall’s elections.
Policy movement has been much slower with regard to cocaine, heroin and other “hard drugs,” but overall there is ferment in the Obama administration and an apparent drift away from the conventional prohibition strategy toward a harm reduction strategy. That is what has been happening internationally as well.
The extent of the change is likely to become evident later this month when the United Nations holds its once-per-decade conclave to assess international drug policy. Previous sessions have done little more than ratify policies drafted or strongly endorsed by Washington, and they have never deviated in any meaningful way from a staunchly prohibitionist course. Given the growing ambivalence among Obama administration officials and the increasingly vocal opposition of other governments, it is hard to imagine that result this time.
More:
http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-skeptics/mounting-international-resistance-us-drug-war-strategy-15807