The war on drugs has been bad for the world's health. Concentrating on criminalizing the producers, traffickers and consumers of narcotics, it has failed to reduce supply. UN figures show that drug consumption during the decade after 1998 rose, with a 34.5 per cent increase in the number of opiate users, 27 per cent rise in cocaine users, and 8.5 per cent rise in cannabis users.
Mark Kleiman is Professor of Public Policy at the University of California, Los Angeles and has worked on drugs and crime since the 1980s. He tells Alan Philps that the real issue is not prohibition or legalization, but reducing the damage done by drugs.
Colombia has paid a heavy price in battling the cocaine trade which at one stage threatened to destroy the country. President Santos, the most outspoken of Latin American leaders on drugs policy, tells Alan Philps that now the consuming nations must share the burden.
There is a sense of frustration and impotence in watching the eurozone crisis unfold. Non-Europeans cannot understand why tackling the crisis has proved so hard. On a recent trip to China a senior central banker asked me: 'Why don't you Europeans get on with it? You know what you need to do. Just do it.' In the narrative of the eurozone crisis, slow action has come to epitomise poor leadership.