What comes to your mind first when you read the word "drugs"? Do you think of an addict, immersed in a world of his own making? Or of a person slowly killing himself, one dose at a time? Of faces in the news, accompanied by pictures of huge shipments of a mysterious white powder?
I think of soldiers in a far-off jungle, fighting heavily armed criminals and burning down plantations.
However, any one of the above visions is disturbing, to say the least. I happened to muse a little on the subject, and here are my views, for what they're worth.
Once we made this distinction, it was much easier for society to punish the errants, care for the needy and reject the misfits. Today, we define an adult as anyone over the age of 18 who is mentally fit. This person can elect governments, drive motor vehicles, buy firearms and, most importantly, buy and drink alcohol. So if I am over the age of 18 and decide that I would like a drink, the Government of India is not stopping me in any way. However, I may find alcohol unpleasant, realize the risk of addiction, and refrain from drinking it of my own accord. There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of teetotalers in the world, and they must surely reason it out so.
Why, then, is the same logic not applied to narcotics? I never understood why alcohol and drugs are not met with the same set of control measures. Alcohol makes me happy and relaxed. Drugs make me happy and relaxed. Alcohol gives me a deadly hangover the next morning. Drugs give me deadly withdrawal symptoms soon enough. Too much alcohol makes me a menace to society. Too much of any drug makes me a menace to society. If I'm addicted, I'll kill for a bottle of alcohol. And of course, the same applies to narcotics. They are similar in so many ways, yet the steps we take against them are so different.
An adult can walk into a pub, flash his ID and get unlimited alcohol. It's hard to imagine a similar situation with narcotics.
One might argue that this is so because drugs are infinitely more potent than alcohol in almost every way. This is true, but again, I see a double-standard. Why are there similar restrictions in place on beer and hard liquor, then?
At the end of the day, I am still completely clueless. There must be something I don't know, or somebody must surely have raised this issue in the 200-odd years in which governments have implemented this flawed policy.
In the 1980s and 90s, it was Pablo Escobar's Medellin cartel which ruled the world in terms of the narcotics trade. However, the Columbian government saw to it that his reign (and life) was cut short quite abruptly. This led to the rise of the Mexican cartels - less powerful individually, but a fearsome prospect collectively. The sheer chaos of 10 or 15 cartels fighting multiple wars simply overwhelmed the Mexican administration. Each cartel fought other cartels for territory, and they all battled the government for survival. This was then compounded by corruption on a gigantic scale in the Mexican police, so much that the chief of Mexican Judicial Police switched sides to become a drug lord himself.
All this led to the calling in of the Army, always a bad idea. If you release troops into your own territory, there's always going to be trouble. The Army fought bitterly with the cartels, but also caused hundreds of civilian casualties.
The US Government then entered the fray, tightening up the Mexican border and making trafficking into the US almost impossible.
However, as the saying goes, when one door closes, another opens.
Like the financial corporations 20 years before them, the cartels realized that there was only one way out when their home market was choked - expansion. This was the second wave of globalization, except that no Economics textbook will ever be written about it.
It slowly dawned on the cartels that the good people of Europe were willing to pay double the US rate for cocaine. Business, as they say, is business. And so they began to expand. They set up camp in West Africa, tying up with local gangs for support. Sounds like your textbook example of a multinational?
From West Africa, they smuggled drugs to Spain in small shipments, and from there to the rest of Europe. And voila, Columbian cocaine could now be had (for the right price) in the picturesque calm of the Swiss Alps.
So what if gang violence spiked in Africa and drug use rose in Europe? The US doesn't care, right?
Anyway, my point is, world governments are spending millions of dollars, thousands of military as well as civilian lives, in pursuit of the un-gettable. Is it really worth paying that price for a few tonnes of narcotics and a couple of drug lords?
Narcotics have, for all intents and purposes, ceased to be a problem in today's world. It is now the non-availability of drugs that is a problem. People fight over drugs. They traffic arms in exchange for drugs. They traffic people for drugs. All things considered, people will do things far more illegal than drug trafficking, in order to get their hands on what they want.
So now the solution is not drug restriction - it's the opposite. Let us use the money we would have spent shooting drug lords, on implementing a comprehensive drug awareness programme. Not just in schools and colleges, but even in workplaces and public areas.
Instead of denying the masses narcotic substances, let us give them the choice. They are, after all, responsible adults, who know what's good for themselves and what's not. If they choose the path of gradual degeneration and decay, then so be it. Let them die out like the chronic alcoholics of today. If they choose to shun narcotics in favour of a life which they can actually remember, then let them do so. Governments can ask drug cartels to lay down their weapons and do business out in the open, treating them as normal companies. If the extremists of Assam could be persuaded to desist from violence, then an organisation with as much attraction to money as a drug cartel should be easy.
By de-linking drugs and organized crime, we will be cutting off an integral part of the operations of crime syndicates around the world. Their easiest source of income will now be away from their grasp, and call me an insane optimist, but they might probably die out too, as a result.
I hope you've either started asking the same questions as me, or got frustrated to the point of wanting to punch me in the face a good few times. Either way, leave a comment :)
bala
