Tribune. As early as 2008, the UN recognized that the current global drug control system, based on the nationwide adoption of repression and the “war on drugs”, has created major negative consequences and unexpected. The mother of these consequences is the illegal market itself, which exists because of the prohibition of the production, sale or consumption of drugs.
If alcohol had been classified as an addictive and dangerous substance after the Second World War, it would certainly have a large and uncontrollable illegal market today. That of illegal drugs is estimated at an annual turnover of 500 billion dollars primarily benefiting organized crime.
The drug control system has also resulted in problematic budgetary and geographic shifts. In almost all countries, budgetary priority is given to the coercive response, at the expense of public health or social affairs.
Travel to deal locations
In the world, more than 100 billion dollars are used each year against drugs by the police, while only 170 million aids are earmarked for health and social harm reduction programs, which reduce violence linked to the illegal market.
Violence and places of deals also shift according to the presence, confrontation and attitudes of the authorities. Harassing the dealers leads to the geographical displacement (or the “inflatable balloon effect”) of violence, of the deal and of the market which goes towards more lenient skies, like the air being pressed on one side of the balloon, and so on. .
So why does the politician continue to support and even promote a failed policy? Quite simply because the latter is imbued with the collective imagination: everyone agrees to condemn drugs; everyone is stigmatized and scared enough not to object publicly.
What about the objective of the “war on drugs”
Thus, this repression also allows a certain impunity and little accountability in the political, social and budgetary priorities of the governors. But, beyond the current electoral situation in France, what is the main objective of drug control? The fight against drugs was constructed in the 1960s as a massive public health campaign, nested in social hygiene and the imposition of “healthy” individual behaviors.
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