Colombia’s incoming government wants to decriminalize illicit drugs despite the government of the United States, which insists on a disastrous prohibition policy.
The effort to end the prohibition of illicit drugs in Latin America is one of President-elect Gustavo Petro’s multiple proposals that seek a radically new drug policy in the region.
The new government, which will take office on Sunday, has been preparing its drug policy proposals in response to record cocaine production and a resurgence of violence by illegal armed groups and organized crime.
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Colombia’s counternarcotics disaster
A 700 kilogram cocaine shipment seized in Santa Marta’s port earlier this month. (Image: National Police)
The counternarcotics policy of Petro’s predecessor, President Ivan Duque, has been an utter disaster no matter how you measure its results.
Colombia’s estimated cocaine exports reached their highest level in 2020, according to the United Nations’ Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).
The government’s failure to provide substitute crops for farmers who voluntarily eradicated their coca crops is causing a food crisis in the southern Guaviare province after causing one in the northern Antioquia province.
Illegal armed groups involved in the drug trade have expanded their territorial control in the countryside after the demobilization of the now-defunct guerrilla group FARC in 2017.
Violence in the country’s most important port cities last year reached levels they had not seen in years, according to government statistics and local authorities.
Last but not least, corruption at the highest levels of government is impeding the implementation of any policy that would effectively fight organized crime.
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Regulating drugs instead of prohibition
In an attempt to turn the tide, Petro wants to end the forced eradication of coca by the security forces and seek the development of Colombia’s legal economy in the countryside instead.
Furthermore, Colombia’s incoming president will also “speak up louder internationally” to convince world leaders that the problem isn’t illicit drugs, but “the problems that drug prohibition has caused,” Petro’s drug policy coordinator Felipe Tascon told newspaper El Espectador.
Following a series of electoral victories of progressive governments in Latin America, “there never have been this many [favorable] conditions to move towards the regulation of drugs,” said Tascon.
Colombian lawmakers
Fighting drugs despite the US?
Petro’s drug policy chief diplomatically ignored US President Joe Biden, who explicitly opposes “decriminalization” of drugs in Colombia, his deputy national security adviser Jonathan Finer said after a meeting with Colombia’s President-elect in July.
US Deputy National Security Advisor Jonathan Finer
US Senator Ted Cruz of the conservative Republican Party said Thursday that he would secure that Petro “won’t get more counternarcotics funds” if Colombia’s government decides to “regulate” cocaine and other illicit drugs.
US Senator Ted Cruz
If Cruz’s party gets its way, this would free up funds to bolster a domestic drug policy in the US where 107,000 people died of drug overdoses last year, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
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Petro not alone
The regulation of drugs proposed by Petro has received increasingly powerful support in Colombia while the US’ failing prohibitionist policy appears to be falling out of grace in the international community.
In an address to the United Nations’ Security Council, the president of the truth commission that investigated Colombia’s armed conflict for almost four years called on the international community to “end the war on drug trafficking” and “reject the nation that “drug trafficking is a national security issue.”
According to Truth Commission president Francisco de Roux, the so-called “War on Drugs” declared by late US President Richard Nixon has “increased the profits” of drug trafficking.
De Roux asked consumer countries like the US to allow “the major mafiosi” to reveal their “political, economic and military alliances, and the banks” that launder drug money.
The Truth Commission president also urged for international “regulation of illicit drugs and asked the UN ambassadors “to understand the connection between drug trafficking and corruption” in government and the private sector.