'End the failed war on drugs', urges group including Nobel economists
The 'war on drugs' has failed and new approaches are required that 'redirect resources towards effective evidence-based policies underpinned by rigorous economic analysis', group says
Global efforts to thwart the drugs trade have failed and the time has come for a radical rethink, according to a group including Nobel-prize winning economists, a former US secretary of state, the deputy prime minister of Britain and others.
“It is time to end the ‘war on drugs’ and massively redirect resources towards effective evidence-based policies underpinned by rigorous economic analysis,” the group said in a foreword to a new academic report on global anti-drugs policies.
Citing mass drug-related incarceration in the United States, corruption and violence in developing countries and an HIV epidemic in Russia, the group urged the United Nations to drop its “repressive, one-size-fits-all approach” to tackling drugs.
The UN is due to hold a drug policy summit in 2016. Debate on the merits of drugs liberalisation is already growing.
“[The UN] must now take the lead in advocating a new co-operative international framework based on the fundamental acceptance that different policies will work for different countries and regions,” the foreword said.
Signatories of the text included five Nobel-prize winning economists – among them Kenneth Arrow, Christopher Pissarides and Thomas Schelling – as well as former US secretary of state George Schultz, British deputy prime minister Nick Clegg and Javier Solana, a former European Union foreign policy chief.
