Ending the Global Drug War: Voices from the Front Lines

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 11:05:00 EST

“Ever since the War on Drugs, everything has hit the fan,” says Romesh Bhattacharji, former Narcotics Commissioner of India. Rather than continue the unnecessary and costly drug war, Bhattacharji advises the United States to simply "Relax, take it easy, [and] tolerate.”

Last month, at the Cato Institute’s “Ending the Global War on Drugs” conference, Bhattacharji’s sentiments were echoed by ex-drug czars, cops, politicians, intellectuals, liberal and conservative journalists, and even the former President of Brazil. Reason.tv attended the event and spoke with a number of the featured speakers, including: 

Glenn Greenwald, Salon.com

Mary Anastasia O'Grady, Wall Street Journal

Tucker Carlson, The Daily Caller

Luis Alberto Lacalle Pou, Speaker of the House of Deputies, Uruguay

Leigh Maddox, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition; University of Maryland School of Law

Enrique Gomez Hurtado, former Senator, Colombia

Larry Campbell, Senator, Canada

Romesh Bhattacharji, former Narcotics Commissioner, India

Eric Sterling, Criminal Justice Policy Foundation

Harry G. Levine, Queens College (N.Y.)

Juan Carlos Hidalgo, Cato Institute

About 6.15 minutes.   Produced and Edited by Anthony L. Fisher. Camera by Joshua Swain, with help from Seth McKelvey.   Graphics by Meredith Bragg.

For more Reason coverage on the Drug War, go here.   For Cato Institute Drug War coverage and research, go here.

Scroll down for downloadable versions, and subscribe to Reason.tv's YouTube Channel to receive automatic updates when new material goes live.

They're So Scared They Put 20 Tons on One Ship!

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 13:26:00 EST

If you thrill to the sight of boats chasing boats, this video of the Coast Guard's "Top 10 Drug Busts" is for you. In a recent press release, the Coast Guard brags that it's been "a record year for cocaine seizures with 355,755 pounds seized, worth more than $4.7 billion." It claims smugglers are "desperate" and cites unusually large seizures as evidence.

Is a rising seizure total a sign of success or a sign that the volume crossing the border has increased? Is an increase in large-volume seizures a sign of smugglers' desperation or a sign that smugglers are not terribly worried about interdiction, treating the risk as a cost of doing business? The press release acknowledges that "smugglers adapt their tactics in response to effective counternarcotic measures." So even "effective" interdiction efforts cannot have a substantial, lasting impact on drug consumption, as Antonio Maria Costa, director of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, conceded in a speech at the International Conference on Drug Policy Reform earlier this month.

However much the Coast Guard seizes, enough drugs always get through to meet the demand. The most drug warriors can expect is to temporarily increase prices by raising traffickers' cost of doing business. Since the cost of replacing seized drugs is very small compared to their retail value, with most of the markup occurring after they arrive in the U.S., interdiction is a highly inefficient way of discouraging drug use. But don't tell John Walters. The drug czar thinks "every load of drugs seized represents that much less that can be used to poison our young people and harm our nation."

[Thanks to Veronique de Rugy for the tip.]

Reason.tv - Topics

Ending the Global Drug War: Voices from the Front Lines

They're So Scared They Put 20 Tons on One Ship!