London School of Economics Report Calls for New Approaches to Drug Policy

A report from the London School of Economics released Monday night outlines the enormous negative outcomes and collateral damage from the war on drugs and calls for new, evidence-based approaches to drug use and the drug trade.

Afghan poppies fields (unodc.org)

The report, Ending the Drug Wars: Report of the LSE Expert Group on the Economics of Drug Policy, has chapters authored by leading drug policy experts from around the world and has been signed onto by five Nobel Prize-winning economists, as well as political figures including British Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, Guatemalan Foreign Minister Luis Fernando Carrera Castro, former Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski, former US Secretary of State George Schultz, and former European Union High Representative for Common Foreign and Security Policy Dr. Javier Solana, among other luminaries.

“It is time to end the ‘war on drugs’ and massively redirect resources towards effective evidence-based policies underpinned by rigorous economic analysis,” the report says forthrightly. The pursuit of a militarized and enforcement-led global ‘war on drugs’ strategy has produced enormous negative outcomes and collateral damage. These include mass incarceration in the US, highly repressive policies in Asia, vast corruption and political destabilization in Afghanistan and West Africa, immense violence in Latin America, a HIV epidemic in Russia, an acute global shortage of pain medication and the propagation of systematic human rights abuses around the world.”

The stark prohibitionist approach to drug control has been a flop even by its own measures, the report found.

“The strategy has failed based on its own terms,” it noted. “Evidence shows that drug prices have been declining while purity has been increasing. This has been despite drastic increases in global enforcement spending. Continuing to spend vast resources on punitive enforcement-led policies, generally at the expense of proven public health policies, can no longer be justified.”

The report chided the United Nations for its continued adherence to such failed policies and urged it to accept experimentation while emphasizing public health and human rights.

“The United Nations has for too long tried to enforce a repressive, ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach,” the report concluded. “It must now take the lead in advocating a new cooperative international framework based on the fundamental acceptance that different policies will work for different countries and regions. This new global drug strategy should be based on principles of public health, harm reduction, illicit market impact reduction, expanded access to essential medicines, minimization of problematic consumption, rigorously monitored regulatory experimentation and an unwavering commitment to principles of human rights.”

“The drug war’s failure has been recognized by public health professionals, security experts, human rights authorities and now some of the world’s most respected economists,” said John Collins, coordinator of LSE IDEAS International Drug Policy Project. “Leaders need to recognize that toeing the line on current drug control strategies comes with extraordinary human and financial costs to their citizens and economies.”

“Repressive drug laws cost governments billions of dollars and result in horrible epidemics of infectious diseases and serious human rights abuses,” said Dr. Kasia Malinowska-Sempruch, the director of the Open Society Global Drug Policy Program, which hosted a launch event for the report at the LSE Monday night. “We know the terrible costs of failed strategies and what can be gained from smarter approaches.”

More fuel for the fire as an increasingly broad-based global movement for drug reform takes aim at the UN and its 2016 General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) on Drugs.

Article republished from Stop the Drug War under Creative Commons Licensing