Shortcomings in the repressive-only approach is forcing a change of tactics.
Increasing numbers of women are being locked up in the ferocious prison systems of Latin America in the so-called “war against drugs”. Often poor and black, they are among the hardest hit members of society, according to recently published reports from the United Nations and Transnational Institute.
With no reduction in the use of narcotics, the “war on drugs” – inaugurated in 1971 by US president Richard Nixon with emphasis on imprisonment and repression rather than prevention and treatment – is, in short order, collapsing.
The 2014 edition of the annual report from the Vienna-based UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), shows the use of narcotics has not reduced but has been stable in recent years. It states that about 243 million individuals, or 5 per cent of the world’s population aged 15-64, used an illicit drug in 2012.
Problem drug users meanwhile numbered about 27 million, roughly 0.6 per cent of the world’s adult population, or one in every 200 people.
“In recent years only one in six drug users globally has had access to or received drug dependence treatment services each year,” says Yuri Fedotov,
director of the UNODC and a former Russian ambassador in London. “Some 200,000 drug-related deaths occurred in 2012.”
The UN body does not include the successfully promoted and very profitably marketed use of tobacco and alcohol in its drug statistics.
Source: Hugh O'Shaughnessy, Irish Time, 18/08/14
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