Title: Nixon's 'war on drugs' began 40 years ago, and the battle is still raging | Drugs | The Guardian
Headings: Nixon's 'war on drugs' began 40 years ago, and the battle is still raging
Nixon's 'war on drugs' began 40 years ago, and the battle is still raging
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Content: The war in the so-called "producing" countries has ravaged Colombia, is currently tearing Mexico apart, and again threatens Afghanistan, Central America, Bolivia, Peru and Venezuela. In places such as west Africa, the war is creating "narco states" that have become effective puppets of the mafia cartels the war has spawned. The drugs themselves have wrought misery and havoc across the planet, and continue to do so. According to the United Nations, in an exhaustive report by a global commission on drugs published this summer, worldwide opiate consumption increased by 34.5% between in the two decades to 2009, and that of cocaine by 25%. The UN estimates the drug business to be the third biggest in the world after oil and arms, worth £198bn a year. The former head of its office on drugs and crime, Antonio Maria Costa, posits that the laundered profits of the narco-trafficking underworld by the "legitimate" financial sector is what kept the banks afloat for years before they finally crashed in 2008. But while Costa (and I, for what it's worth, after three years covering the Mexican drug war) advocates going after the money as the most urgent priority, most of the lexicon in the now burning debate about what to do in the wake of the drug war's manifest failure concerns decriminalisation, or even legalisation. There has been a campaign for the legalisation of drugs in the US ever since the first state ban on marijuana in 1915. Now President Barack Obama's drug tsar, Gil Kerlikowske, carefully describes America's own war on drugs as "unhelpful". Last month, former president Jimmy Carter wrote in the New York Times that "excessive punishment" has "destroyed the lives of millions of young people and their families";