By Elson Elizaga

First of two parts

(Mentioned is my previous articles is the educational video “Why the war on drugs is a huge failure.” It was uploaded to YouTube on March 2, 2016, by Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell, a German research group. The following text is one of the subtitles made by Amara.org. -- Elson T. Elizaga.)

“OVER 40 years ago, US President Richard Nixon declared drug abuse public enemy number one, starting an unprecedented global campaign, the War on Drugs.

“Today, the numbers are in.

“The War on Drugs is a huge failure, with devastating unintended consequences. It led to mass incarceration in the US; to corruption, political destabilization, and violence in Latin America, Asia, and Africa; to systemic human rights abuses across the world.

“It negatively affected the lives of millions of people. All of this while we waste billions of dollars every year only to create and fuel powerful drug cartels while the goal of the War on Drugs seems less achievable than ever: a world without drugs. How could this happen?

“The core strategy of the War on Drugs is “no drugs, no problems”. So almost all of the efforts in the last few decades have been focused on eradicating the supply of drugs and incarcerating drug traffickers. But this ignores the most fundamental of market forces, supply and demand.

“If you reduce the supply of anything without reducing the demand first, its price goes up. This might lower sales for many products, but not for drugs. The drugs market is not price-sensitive. Drugs will be consumed no matter what they cost. So the effect is to encourage production of more drugs and recruitment of more traffickers, which increases availability.

“This is also known as the balloon effect: even if drug production or a major supply route is destroyed, the supply for the end user is not reduced. 

“A perfect example of this is crystal meth.

“The US Government tried to stop its production by strictly regulating the sale of chemicals used to manufacture the drug. This forced big meth producers out of business, but the unintended consequences were that thousands of small-scale operations started all over the country, mostly in small towns and rural communities, using chemicals that weren’t regulated.

“In response to this, some US states wanted to reduce the supply of home-grown meth by regulating even more chemicals, which reduced small-scale meth production drastically. But the supply of meth still stayed the same. Mexican drug cartels immediately took over and opened big production operations. Their meth was even better than it was before, and they had lots of experience in smuggling.

“So all these efforts made meth production more professional, the drug more potent, while supply wasn’t reduced at all. (To be continued)