Announcing the end of Mexico’s 13-year drug war, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador told reporters yesterday that “The main purpose of the government is to guarantee public safety … What we want is security, to reduce the daily number of homicides.” That modest goal sounds much less so if you consider that the Mexican drug war has claimed more than 200,000 lives, including 33,000 last year alone. And yet, remarkably, these numbers pale next to the projected toll of the current U.S. opioid crisis. In 2016, almost 64,000 Americans died of drug overdoses and one informed estimate suggests that during the next ten years 650,000 more will die from opioids if current trends continue.
Partly because opioids have affected a wider and less ghettoized demographic than previous drug crises, US lawmakers have begun to revisit the moralistic policies which have criminalized addiction ever since President Nixon launched a “war on drugs.” That war did little to discourage illegal drug use, nothing to lessen addiction, and a great deal to permanently warp the social and economic lives of scores of inner cities. The criminalization of drug use, and the militaristic responses this policy evoked, devastated so many poor neighbourhoods that there are several strong moral arguments that licences for newly legal marijuana dispensaries ought be restricted to urban areas that need to be revitalized from the ravages of the earlier policy rather than simply turned over to private businesses elsewhere.
America’s opioid crisis began with the explosive growth of addictive painkillers that big pharma companies thrust on a credulous public in the 1990s. While reaping vast profits from the overprescription of these drugs, Big Pharma deliberately ignored evidence of the oncoming disaster. Meanwhile illegal drug cartels took advantage of the undersupplied demand and flooded the market with heroin and fentanyl. One striking detail about the federal government’s response to the crisis is how little has been done to restrict the sale of legal opioids. In 2016, for instance, US doctors wrote more than 230 million prescriptions for these drugs — enough to provide every adult in the country with a bottle of pills.
Even today, as US lawmakers rethink their approach to the crisis, a transition to treatment rather than prosecution faces one obvious obstacle: currently only 10 percent of opioid addicts seek treatment. While individual states spend huge sums responding to the crisis with stopgap measures, the federal government has yet to develop a coherent strategy to manage the crisis. The 21st Century Cures Act – which was passed in December 2016 with the approval of big pharma companies – allocated US$1 billion over two years to treatment but experts say that tens of billions are needed for an adequate response.
This failure to respond to its own drug problems is painfully ironic given the US’s role in foisting intolerant drugs policies on countries like ours during the 1980s. Throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, the criminalization of soft drugs and the draconian treatment of low-level dealers contributed to overcrowded prisons, the entrenchment of cartels, and a huge increase in official corruption. It also empowered governments in Mexico and Colombia to adopt militaristic responses with predictably disastrous consequences. As 30 years were wasted on “fighting” drugs instead of treating addiction, millions of people lost their lives to the drugs in question or to the violence that ensued from the ‘wars’ that prohibition entailed.
America’s slow retreat from the folly of a “war on drugs” and its shambling response to a homegrown opioid crisis are painful examples of what happens when complex social problems are treated simplistically. These tragedies should also serve as a warning to smaller countries of the need to think for ourselves; to treat similar crises on our own terms instead of simply importing solutions that have ruined so many lives and squandered so much public money somewhere else.
