2.0 Confronting unintended consequences:

Drug control and the criminal black market

163

Last year’s World Drug Report reviewed 100 years of drug

control efforts, documenting the development of one of

the first international cooperative ventures designed to

deal with a global challenge. This pioneering work

brought together nations with very different political

and cultural perspectives to agree on a topic of consider-

legally produced and, in some cases, aggressively mar-

keted, to devastating effect. The collective nations of the

world have agreed that this state of affairs was unaccept-

able, and have created an international control system

that allows crops such as opium poppy to be produced

ficult to deter. The number, nature, and sources of con-

years. None of this could have been predicted at the

outset.

But then, very little has been simple or smooth about

developments in international affairs over the last cen-

war, weapons proliferation and infectious disease – have

defied early projections of a swift resolution. Some

contr

ol is uniquely subject to calls that the struggle

should be abandoned. Despite equally mixed results in

international interventions,

1

no one advocates accepting

poverty or war as inevitable. Not so with drugs, where a

2

The strongest case against drug control is the violence

main problem is not that drug control efforts have failed

to eliminate drug use, an aspirational goal akin to the

elimination of war and poverty. It is that in attempting

to do so, they have indirectly enriched dangerous crimi-

1946, 1948, and 1953, before the creation of the stand-

1988. Nearly every nation in the world has signed on to

3

This approach has appeal of

ideological consistency, since all these addictive sub-

164

while permitting and taxing others is indeed difficult to

themselves. Legal addictive substances kill far more people

every year than illegal ones – an estimated 500 million

This greater death toll is a direct result of their

being legal, and consequently more available. Use rates of

illegally (i.e. young people). If currently illegal substances

perhaps reaching the levels of licit addictive substances,

decriminalised. With bans on advertising and increas-

restricted to the developed world, where both treatment

and capacity to collect taxes are relatively plentiful. It

ignores the role that global drug control plays in protect-

ing developing countries from addictive drugs. Without

consistent global policy banning these substances, devel-

centrate on getting almost all of the cocaine and heroin

of addiction on those well suited to shoulder it, at least

For example, cocaine use in the countries where cocaine

European countries or the United States. This could

165

occur in developing countries.

seek to contain through the system of international drug

control. But this system itself has its costs, and these are

not limited to the expenditure of public funds. Interna-

tional drug control has produced several unintended

consequences, the most formidable of which is the crea-

Given the money involved, competition for the oppor-

tunity to sell is often fierce, resulting in small wars on

the streets of marginalised areas in the developed and the

166

As a result, some have argued that the costs of control-

the side effects are so severe that the treatment is worse

objectives: to control illicit drugs and to limit the costs

needed on ways of reducing the violence and corruption

Drug possession and sale are illegal in most countries of

the world, and, as a r

to make the criminal justice response more effective and

efficient.

In the end, the criminal justice system is a very blunt

as the deterrent threat remains, the arrest, prosecution,

corruption must lie in making the business of drug deal-

ing more complicated, making it more difficult for