FW: Uruguay surrenders to win #drugpolicy

Le Monde Diplomatique
February 2014

Legal pot challenges the endless drug war

Uruguay surrenders to win
http://mondediplo.com/2014/02/12uruguay

José Mujica has attempted to change the premises and conditions of the drugs
wars through the legalisation of marijuana. Although even the people of
Uruguay don't really back their president's initial reform, at least it's a
start.

by Johann Hari

When I travelled across Mexico, pictures of the missing were everywhere in
the streets, like dystopian corporate advertising. Human Rights Watch says
that more than 60,000 people have died in the drug war launched in 2006 by
former president Felipe Calderón; the US pours money and arms into Mexico to
suppress the drug trade, while rival drug gangs battle for control of supply
routes (1). As Charles Bowden wrote, there is a war on drugs, and there is a
war for drugs. Both are deadly.

Until recently, there was a despairing sense that the violence could not be
stopped, only moved on. But over the past two years, Latin American leaders
such as Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos have begun to demand a
different course, which they claim will end this violence. José Mujica of
Uruguay has taken the first step, and in 2013 became the first leader
anywhere to legalise the production and sale of a banned drug.

Mujica was already unusual. He was a Tupamaro guerrilla in the 1980s,
imprisoned at the bottom of a well for two and a half years. After being
elected president in 2009, he refused to live in the presidential palace,
preferring his tiny shack in a downmarket area of Montevideo, and going to
many meetings by bus. He gives away 87% of his income to the poor.

In July 2013 the coalition he heads passed a law permitting the growing of
marijuana within the country and its sale to adults. They will be allowed to
purchase up to 40g a month from a pharmacy or grow six marijuana plants per
household. This is the first definitive break from UN treaties prohibiting
cannabis.

Mujica told me that there had been repressive policies on drugs for more
than a hundred years, but their failure had finally become apparent.
Uruguay's defence secretary, Eleutorio Huidobro — another ex-Tupamaro (who
also survived imprisonment in a well) — explained why his country took this
step. The administration realised that "if we don't do this now, in a matter
of time what happened in Mexico [will happen here]. We're going to be in big
trouble." Uruguay is on a drug supply route, with cocaine from Bolivia and
marijuana from Paraguay being smuggled through to western Europe. A deputy
from Mujica's Movement of Popular Participation (MPP), Sebastián Sabini,
says a third of the country's homicides are related to the drug trade.

The remedy is worse than the illness

Huidobro explained that drug prohibition created narcotrafficking, and the
violence that followed: "By not legalising marijuana, what you do is
transfer all that money to criminals, and make the drug dealers into a big
institution with power." In a criminalised economy, disputes cannot be
settled through the courts, only by violence and terror. As the economist
Milton Friedman pointed out, this is why alcohol prohibition gave the world
Al Capone and the St Valentine's Day massacre (2), and drug prohibition
produced the Zetas gang and the massacres in northern Mexico.
Huidobro said: "The US drug war causes more harm than marijuana itself.
Many more deaths. Much more destabilisation. This is worse for the world in
general than any drug. The remedy is worse than the illness."

The Mujica administration believes the eradication of the drug trade is a
utopian fantasy. It regards the UN slogan — "A Drug-Free World — We Can Do
It!" — as absurd. The desire to get intoxicated is a human instinct.
Mujica's chief of staff, Diego Cánepa, says there has never been a society
that didn't seek out chemical alteration.

The only effect of massive military suppression is to move the trade a few
hundred miles: "the balloon effect" (push down on the air in a balloon, it
pops up elsewhere). Colombian production moves to Bolivia; Caribbean supply
lines flow through northern Mexico. Given this reality, Mujica concluded
that the only sensible solution was to take this enormous market back from
armed gangsters, and regulate it. Legalising alcohol in the US ended
speakeasies and alcohol dealers; drug reformers point out Budweiser does not
try to murder people who work for Guinness. Legalising marijuana — and
marketing it in licensed outlets — will mostly end the participation of
criminals. The sales can be taxed, with the proceeds building drug treatment
facilities and high quality drug education programmes.

The new Latin American legalisers are not arguing that marijuana use is
positive, or should be encouraged — Mujica has called drug users nabos,
"dickheads". They say that it is no worse than drinking alcohol and that we
have to find a sensible way to live with it.
Beneficial for teenagers

The Uruguayan reformers were not aware that they were challenging the
prohibitionists. For years, people have been told legalisation means a
free-for-all, where anyone, including children, can get drugs anywhere.
But the Uruguayans argue we have anarchy now — unknown gangsters sell drugs
of unknown quality to unknown customers. The reform is a way of regaining
control of the market and regulating it for the first time.

They argue this will have a good effect on teenagers. There is substantial
evidence that cannabis use among teens can permanently lower their IQ, and
all sides agree ending teen use is a priority. Yet many American teens find
it easier to get hold of marijuana than alcohol (3) because no drug dealer
asks for an ID. Legal, licensed drug retailers will have to see an ID, or
lose their licenses.

Worldwide, legislators and police privately recognise the advantages of
legalisation. What was different in Uruguay, and why didn't fear of the US
(See A globalised business), or fear of public opinion, stop reform?
Several factors came together. There was an especially vigorous marijuana
reform movement, spurred by injustices. In April 2011 a teacher from the
military academy, Alicia Garcia, 66, was arrested for growing a few
marijuana plants, and faced a potential prison sentence of 20 months for
commercial production. A movement rose around her, and the younger
parliamentarians in Mujica's party began to champion reform. A major factor
in their success was the popularity and determination of the president,
whose long incarceration had no doubt equipped him to resist pressures both
internal and external.

Meanwhile, the ability of the US to lecture the world on this policy was
collapsing from within as, in 2013, the states of Colorado and Washington
adopted a bill approved by referendum to fully legalise the use, commercial
production and sale of marijuana.
Ordinary Uruguayans unconvinced

Mujica and his allies have not yet succeeded in persuading the wider
population of their case. Although there has been a small shift in opinion,
some 60% of Uruguayans still oppose the moves. Opposition deputy Veronica
Alonzo said: "As soon as you legalise ... people will be using more."
Evidence suggests this is not correct. Since 1976 the Netherlands has
allowed marijuana-selling coffee shops. (To remain within the UN treaties,
the Dutch didn't technically legalise: they just announced the police would
not prosecute the shops.) About 5% of Dutch citizens smoked cannabis over
the past month, against 6.3% in the US and 7% on average in the EU (4). This
suggests that the fears are wrong.

The second worry is the gateway effect, that more people will go on from
marijuana to harder drugs, especially "pasta base", a crack-like derivative
of cocaine used by a very small but visible minority in Uruguay. Dr Raquel
Peyraube, the leading drug treatment specialist in Uruguay, says marijuana
users are, under prohibition, subject to the opposite process, which she
calls the gondola effect: illegal marijuana is sold by a dealer who will
almost always sell other drugs. "You know how at the supermarket you buy
things you don't even need." Dealers offer marijuana users cocaine and other
drugs cheaply. Recent research from George Soros's Open Society Foundations
backs this up: the Netherlands have the fewest problem drug users in Europe,
in part because they have separated out marijuana (5).

Dr Peyraube debunks the claim that legalisation will lead to a rise in
schizophrenia, saying that if marijuana caused schizophrenia, the rate of
the illness would have risen across society over the past few decades, since
marijuana use has grown. Yet the rate has held steady. It is more likely
that people developing schizophrenia are drawn to cannabis, to try to calm
down.

Some people in the Uruguayan administration are privately receptive to a
more substantial critique of these reforms: marijuana is only a part of the
trade in prohibited drugs, and not the largest. Legalising it will shrink
the black market significantly, but leave the most profitable parts intact.
To cripple the cartels, the market in other drugs will have to be legally
controlled, by regulated sale for ecstasy or cocaine, and by medical
prescription for heroin, as has been successfully piloted in Switzerland.

Sabini, the main champion of the current legalisation, agrees: "It may take
some time — it's not going to happen now," but "we'll be able to bring this
same cause to the public when it comes to other drugs."
Mujica's most likely successor as president has already publicly proposed to
legalise cocaine.

The alternative is fighting a war everybody knows, as Huidobro put it, is
"lost already. Totally lost." While they wait for the politicians to admit
this, people such as Emma Veleta from Mexico, who lost eight family members,
pay the price. David Simon, creator of the television series The Wire, in
which drugs are an alternative economy and society in the US, has warned
that the US seems willing to fight the drug war "to the last Mexican" (6).


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