The “War on Drugs” has been lost. Not only has it failed to reduce problematic drug use, it has cost more than a trillion dollars over the past few decades, and produced horrific unintended consequences. It has left in its wake a trail of violence, human rights abuse, and infectious disease.
The United States is at the forefront of countries that bear responsibility for this state of affairs. For more than 50 years, its leaders, both Democrats and Republicans, have pursued harsh and often abusive drug control policies domestically, an approach they then sought to have adopted by the rest of the world.
World leaders meet from April 19 to 21 in a rare special session of the UN General Assembly — the first since 1998 — to discuss the global response to drugs. The meeting was instigated by the leaders of Colombia, Guatemala and Mexico, who, citing the terrible consequences of the War on Drugs for their countries, said that “revising the approach on drugs…can no longer be postponed.”
As the chief architect of the global approach to drugs, the United States has a unique opportunity to acknowledge the disastrous legacy of the policies it advocated and to provide leadership in trying to come up with a new approach to drugs. Such an approach should reduce the harm drugs can cause without perpetrating widespread human rights abuse and violence.