Poor countries 'in chaos' after ten years of UN's war on drugs

Published on Wednesday 11 March 2009 20:50

A UN anti-narcotics drive has backfired by making drug cartels so rich they can bribe their way through west Africa and central America, UN crime agency chief Antonio Maria Costa has admitted.

The ten-year "war on drugs" had cut drug output and user numbers, he said yesterday. But as a "dramatic unintended consequence" profit-gorged trafficking gangs had destabilised nations plagued by poverty, joblessness and HIV-Aids.

"When mafias can buy elections, candidates, political parties, in a word, power, the consequences can only be highly destabilising," Mr Costa, head of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, told a UN drug policy review meeting.

"While ghettoes burn, west Africa is under attack (by Latin American traffickers transhipping cocaine to Europe], drug cartels threaten central America and drug money penetrates bankrupt financial institutions," he said.

A key part of the problem was the failure of many countries to take UN conventions against crime and graft seriously and the prevalence of corrupt border, army and police officials.

"As a result, a number of countries now face a crime situation largely caused by their own choice. Worse is the fact that vulnerable neighbours often pay an even greater price," he said.

Mr Costa was launching a meeting of the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs to review the decade since a UN set targets to tackle producers, traffickers and end users.

At the last convention in 1998, the slogan "A drug-free world – we can do it" launched a campaign to eradicate all narcotics by using law enforcement to tackle producers, traffickers and end users globally.

Drug policy campaigners, social scientists and health experts argue that the strategy has failed, with statistics showing drug production, trafficking and use have all soared during the decade, while the cost of law enforcement, financially and socially, has rocketed, with vast numbers imprisoned.

In the United States, where illegal drug use is highest, the government spends around $70 billion (50 billion) a year to combat drugs. But illegal use has risen steadily over the past decade and a fifth of the prison population is incarcerated for drug offences.

Papering over internal dissent on ways of making anti-drug policy more effective, the 53 nations on the commission are expected today to enact a declaration committing them to a programme to fight the drug trade for another ten years.

"It is a tragic irony that the UN, so often renowned for peacekeeping, is being used to fight a war that brings untold misery to some of the most marginalised people on earth," said Danny Kushlick, head of Transform, a British drug policy group.

"More than 8,000 deaths in Mexico in recent years, the destabilisation of Colombia and Afghanistan, continued corruption and instability in the Caribbean and west Africa are testimony to the catastrophic impact of a drug control system based on global prohibition."

Global addiction had stabilised for several years, Mr Costa said, with demand falling for some drugs and rising for others. "This is no longer the runaway train of the 1980s and 1990s," he said. But he conceded world markets were still supplied with about 1,000 tonnes of heroin, 1,000 tonnes of cocaine and untold volumes of cannabis and synthetic drugs.