Presently, the War on Drugs faces crisis. The United States has thrown more money at restricting drug flows than any other nation, and yet continues to suffer high drug use rates. Despite the Obama administration’s rhetorical efforts to adjust the U.S. approach on drugs, our primary focus remains on interdiction and law enforcement. These strategies have been disastrous, leading to excessive violence and wasteful spending, while doing little to combat drug use.
Upon reflection, the solutions cannot be found in good old-fashioned American stubbornness and commitment to values because the problem is strategic, not tactical. America’s failure stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of appropriate policy. The U.S. needs to import other nations’ ideas for its drug program instead of expending money and weapons for more law enforcement.
European Leadership
A leading innovator of progressive drug policy is the Netherlands. The precedent for the Netherlands’ drug policy is the Opium Act of 1919, which criminalized the possession, cultivation, trafficking, import and export of drugs, including marijuana. In 1976 an amendment was passed in response to the Hulsmann and Baan commissions, whose purposes were to “clarify the factors associated with the use of drugs.” The amendment reorganized drugs into two schedules for the Netherlands. Schedule 1 is composed of drugs deemed unacceptable in terms of the risk they impose on society, including heroin, cocaine, and amphetamines. Schedule 2 includes soft drugs, chiefly among them marijuana.
The schedule system was designed so that drugs are criminalized only when their use poses a threat to society. Given that marijuana use is distinct from hard drug use in its perceived addictive and socially destructive properties, the Dutch legal framework called for its decriminalization. Moreover, the commissions believed that any connection between marijuana and hard drugs could be severed by creating clear distinctions in the drug market through decriminalization.
Portugal followed the Netherlands in 2001 when it eliminated jail sentences for all drugs. This decision included hard drugs, a step significantly further than the Netherlands had gone. This ultra-progressive policy resulted from a study undertaken by the Commission for a National Anti-Drug Strategy. It decriminalized all drug use, but maintained penalties for production and trafficking. Fees and treatments for drug use were decided by three member panels, which included law and medical experts. Portugal prioritized reducing societal harm in its national drug policy and realized that minimizing drug abuse and death especially entailed eliminating barriers to treatment. By effectively decriminalizing all drugs, they eliminated disincentives to seeking treatment, emphasizing rehabilitation.
Brendan Hughes, a legal expert at the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, says that the concept of decriminalization is a “red herring.” He explains that other European nations have implemented forms of decriminalization, which include eliminating prison sentences and greater rehabilitation. But Portugal’s innovation is that drug use does not fall under the jurisdiction of law enforcement. Instead, the Ministry of Health administers all drug policy, as rather drug use is treated exclusively as a health problem.
The Portuguese experiment’s results have been generally positive. Examining basic statistics for cannabis, cocaine, and opiates, Portugal and the Netherlands have significantly lower usage rates than the U.S. and are below the European average. Drug-related HIV cases remain elevated, but have steadily declined in recent years, and the evidence shows that society has improved since the new policy. The key take away is that while decriminalization and putting drug policy under the purview of medical professionals are not panaceas for Portugal’s drug problems, they have not opened the floodgates to uncontrolled outbreaks of drug abuse.
The national policies of both Portugal and the Netherlands reflect progressive global thinking on drug policy. But even their decriminalization strategies pale when compared with Uruguay’s new proposal. Uruguay already has decriminalized use and possession for all drugs, but to respond to the heavy toll that the drug war has taken on Latin America, Uruguay is considering full marijuana legalization. The government would control the growth, sale, and transport of marijuana, with every citizen being allotted a 40 joint limit per month. Uruguay’s marijuana usage contributes somewhere between 35 and 75 million dollars into the illegal drug trade every month. Removing that money would cause more damage to drug lords than continued attempts at interdiction. The government hopes that by providing a safer, more reliable legal product, it will also rupture the connection between marijuana and hard drug users. There have also been strong calls for national conversations about drug legalization in both Guatemala and Costa Rica, and Argentina and Brazil are seriously considering decriminalizing all drugs.
Meanwhile, incarceration for drug use is declining across Europe, as courts prescribe rehabilitative measures. This evolution is guided by an EU wide, integrated, multidisciplinary, and balanced approach that disposes of existing moral baggage and embraces scientific decision-making. The EU supports a harm reduction approach to drug control, representing an ideological shift away from criminal prosecution that is spreading globally. The common thread linking the South American and EU countries is recognition that aggressive interdiction policies and harsh criminal penalties for drug use have not been effective.
American Drug Policy
The United States remains an exception to this trend. Despite the Obama administration’s efforts to increase federal funding for drug treatment, federal expenditures for 2012 totaled $15.1 billion towards interdiction and $10.1 billion for rehabilitation. While rehabilitation efforts are increasing, the essence of U.S. drug philosophy is still defined by stiff prison sentences. Marijuana is considered a Schedule 1 drug under the Controlled Substances Act, and the federal government has maintained that it belongs there. Therefore, the law demands that users, distributors, and growers be prosecuted. This law stands even though many experts maintain that marijuana poses little threat of abuse, addiction, overdose, or progression towards harder drugs. One must note that the American debate concerning practical approaches to drug use has taken a sharply different track from other western nations.
Generally, there are three main international alternate approaches. The Netherlands and most European countries have largely decreased the severity of punishments associated with drug use. Meanwhile, in Portugal, drug policy has been completely removed from the criminal system and is now exclusively a medical issue. Finally, Uruguay, disenchanted by years of drug violence and crime, is trying to extricate itself altogether from the drug market.
These approaches vary in practicality for the U.S. The Uruguayan model is unrealistic, because the United States still has a dedicated interest in reducing drug use and its associated health risks. Also, members of the United Nations must adhere to the UN 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, which prohibits the production and supply of narcotic drugs. This effectively eliminates the possibility of U.S. national legalization. While some states like Washington and Colorado passed laws to legalize marijuana, possession of cannabis on American soil violates federal law.
The fact that so many countries have moved toward reducing punishments for drug use indicates a vastly different understanding of the drug problem. Criminal prosecution should be limited to actions which harm society, and many who try drugs, especially cannabis, do not become addicted. Those who do become addicted are suffering from a disease, becoming physically dependent on drugs.
The development of black markets, violence over distribution, and aversion to treatment due to the threat of punishment harms society. Portugal, the Netherlands, and other EU nations have listened to science and pursued rational policies to protect their citizens. They abandoned classical disapproval of drug use when evidence showed such disapproval unfounded; the U.S. must do the same.