Both personally and as Chairman of Australia21, I am
disappointed to hear that there is to be a spill of full-time positions at the
Australian National University’s wonderful School of Music, so that the 32
full-time staff have to apply for positions in a reduced establishment of 20.
Disappointed because I think we as a society should be
moving in the other direction – more engagement with music as high art – and I
have begun considering how to frame an Australia21 project that could examine
the social wellbeing benefits of the Venezuelan program known as El Sistema (“the
system”) and how the lessons from that might be applied in an Australian
context.
El Sistema is a publicly financed music education program in
Venezuela, founded in 1975 by economist and musician José Antonio Abreu under the name of Social
Action for Music.
El Sistema is a state foundation which watches over
Venezuela's 102 youth orchestras, 55 children’s orchestras and 270 music
centres, and the instrumental training programmes which make them possible.
While the organisation has 31 symphony orchestras, its greatest achievement is
the 310,000 to 370,000 children who attend its music schools around the country
where it is estimated that 70 to 90 percent of them come from poor
socio-economic backgrounds.The program
is known for rescuing young people in extremely impoverished circumstances from
the environment of drug abuse and crime into which they would likely otherwise
be drawn.
Interestingly, it has always been located under the wing of social
services ministries, not the Ministry of Culture, a fact which has helped it to
survive several changes of government, and political persuasions of government,
over a period of more than 30 years.We
are talking about classical music as a positive force for personal development
and a benefit to society, not simply as recreation, important as the enjoyment
aspect is.As Abreu himself puts it:
Music has to be recognized as an ... agent of social development in the
highest sense, because it transmits the highest values -- solidarity, harmony,
mutual compassion. And it has the ability to unite an entire community and to
express sublime feelings.
A detailed account of El Sistema’s achievements and history,
including its spread to the United States and the United Kingdom, may be found
in the relevant Wikipedia entry.A video of Abreu talking about El Sistema on
the TED website on the occasion of being awarded the TED Prize may be accessed here,
and a June 2010 TED Blog post on the graduation in Boston of 10 young musicians
from the the El Sistema USA program at New
England Conservatory may be accessed here. These young
musicians were to spread out to seven centres across the United States and
establish “nucleos” – programs and centres that will “teach children to play music,
believe in themselves, and reach for their dreams”.
I would like to see Australia as one of the next to take up
El Sistema, but sadly, we seem to be moving in the opposite direction. To mix
the metaphors, we seem to see music as the icing on the cake, not as core
business.But for people “doing it tough”,
and especially their children, music offers great benefits and opportunities.
Many readers of this blog will know that I am currently
Chairman of Australia21 (www.australia21.org.au),
a non-profit research organisation which I helped to establish in 2001.
Australia21’s objective is to establish new frameworks of
understanding of complex problems that are relevant to Australia’s future. We
are an approved research organisation which receives Gift Tax Deductibility status
from the Australian Taxation Office.
People contemplating donating to a non-profit organisation
quite reasonably want to know not only that their donation will be tax
deductible, but how much of the money they donate will be applied to the
purpose for which they make their donation, and how much will be expended on
overheads. Many of them will also wonder what other sources of support the
organisation might have, because they want to know whether their donations will
make a difference.
To deal with the second question first, we have sometimes
encountered in personal conversation and in the media an assumption that
Australia21 receives government funding. For example, one media commentator who
was hostile to the findings of our report on illicit drugs policy described us
as “a government-sponsored think tank”.
There is no foundation whatever in this claim, and in fact while we have
on occasion managed to secure funding from government agencies for specific
projects that were of particular interest to them, we have never sought
government support for our running costs because of the potential for our
independence to be compromised. In order to ensure our independence our preference is for our running costs to
be derived from a widely dispersed group of contributors.
Regarding the running costs themselves, we keep them to what
we regard as the irreducible minimum:
- Because we are a registered non-profit with Gift
Tax Deductibility, as a matter of law our Directors receive no remuneration for
their efforts in running the company, fundraising, or representing the company
at public events.
- We maintain a small secretariat: a part time
Executive Director who works a nominal two days a week and routinely contributes
extra time, for which we are grateful; a part time office administrator who
comes in for a few hours a week, and a part-time book-keeper.
- Our office is a single room in the former
Weston Primary School in the Australian Capital Territory, which the ACT
Administration has renovated as a centre for NGO offices. Our monthly rental is
currently $295.
- We conduct our Board meetings by monthly
teleconference: face to face meetings are a rarity.
- Our accounting and audit costs are provided
at concessional rates, but in order to be permitted to raise funds in some
jurisdictions we are still required to have a full annual audit of our accounts,
notwithstanding recent changes to the Corporations Law.
Averaging all of these costs over the year we need about
$4,000 per month or $48,000 per annum to provide the infrastructure which
enables us to undertake our projects and communicate the results to the public.
We also do our best to keep project costs to a minimum. We can usually find a university willing to
provide us at no charge with a venue for our conferences and roundtables, as
the Australian National University and Melbourne University have done on several
occasions, and as the University of Sydney did for our recent roundtable on
illicit drugs.
We encourage participants in our roundtables to meet their
own travel and accommodation costs where they are able to do so, but always
budget to meet the costs of some participants as we do not want capacity to pay
to be a limiting factor on participation.
Our directors participate in these events without fee. On
occasions we pay a suitably qualified person to write a discussion paper for a
roundtable, or to prepare a major research report. Usually we can identify a person with very
high level expertise who can prepare a top quality review paper quickly and who
is prepared to do so for “mates’ rates”. Where that suitably qualified person
happens to be a Director of Australia21 we will pay them a modest fee, but many
of our Directors waive their right to the fee, or donate it to Australia21.
When all is said and done, the cost of running a roundtable including
preparation of a commissioned paper, and write-up and publication of the
report, typically comes to around $25,000.
The above figures will illustrate why small donations are
important to Australia21. We get a lot
of bang for the buck, and depend upon private donors for our running costs.
To illustrate the point: within a few days of the release of
our report on illicit drugs (see here)
over 3000 visitors downloaded it from our website. If each of these visitors
had donated a tax-deductible $10 to Australia21, that would have covered over
60% of our running costs for a year, or alternatively have funded a new
project, such as the studies we are seeking to finance on Regreening Australia
(see here)
or a roundtable on the applicability to Australia of the Portuguese experience
in the decriminalisation of drug use.
So be assured that small donations really do matter, and
will be appreciated by Australia21. If you want to support our work, please
visit www.australia21.org.au and
hit the Donate button to make a tax deductible
donation. And tell your friends about us.
I am indebted to fellow blogger Andrew Catsaras (twitter
handle @AndrewCatsaras) for the link to this splendid YouTube item of Contralto
Eula Beal singing Ebarme Dich from
Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion, conducted
by Antal Dorati, with Yehudi Menuhin playing the solo violin parts.
Today the Medical Association for the Prevention of War
(MAPW – www.mapw.org.au) released a paper
I had written for them on the desirability of relocating to the Australian
Federal Parliament the decision making power concerning the deployment of the
Australian Defence Force into hostilities or situations likely to lead to
hostilities.
This short document develops three key themes:
- The decision to send Australian troops to war
can be taken by Cabinet without Parliamentary debate. This has resulted in
misleading claims, lack of clarity, and questions on the legality and
legitimacy of such decisions.
- Requiring the Government to submit a case for
war to Parliament would improve the quality of Australian governance.
- The Australian Government should convene an
inquiry into the Iraq War.
Read the full document available for download here.
To accompany the launch I wrote a longer piece for the ABC’s
The Drum website – see it here.
This led to an interview with Fran Kelly on this morning’s Radio
National Breakfast: listen here.
The Lowy Institute's blog, The
Interpreter, is running a debate on future defence policy with particular
attention to force structure. It is a polite wrestle among those representing
entrenched military prerogatives and like-minded academics and bureaucrats.
Very little lateral thinking is revealed in these courteous exchanges.
The starting point is the view that defence policy is again at a
watershed, as in the 1970s. That may have been the case then but the
opportunity was not taken to leap a generation and anticipate the 21st century
when that was quite possible. There were voices then that could have provided
the intellectual basis required to skip decades of wasted expenditure on large
capital items that did not even accord with the agreed strategic basis at the
time. That basis was that Australia was unlikely to be invaded within the next
generation or two as has proven to be the case. The outlook is much the same
today but the Lowy discussion regresses to the same old issues as listed by
defence planners in the 1970s - how many strike aircraft, how many submarines,
how many tanks, etc. to defend a country that would not be attacked - at a
steady cost of some 3% of GDP.
Former deputy secretary of defence, Alan Wrigley seeks now to revive
the 1970s 'core force’ concept which “would provide an expansion base of
military and technical skills that would greatly reduce the time to build a
more capable force as any credible threat began to emerge”. The trouble with
that was it presupposed that the military skills required necessitated the
acquisition of expensive platforms in numbers beyond what the strategic basis
could justify. Spread across the services, as it had to do so that each service
got its “fair share”, the country acquired a force structure that was over
equipped for action that never took place and under equipped for the low-level
but lethal campaigns (Iraq and Afghanistan) respective governments got our
forces into. The exceptional campaign was East Timor for which the forces lacked
critical capability, especially in logistics.
A later defence deputy secretary, now Lowy and ANU, Hugh White,
doubts that the 'core force’ concept remains a sound basis for defence planning
today as it was developed in the 1970s in response to big shifts in Australia's
strategic environment in the later 1960s and 1970s. As now, there had then been
big shifts in Australia's external environment. But defence planning misread
the implications of those shifts and the 'core force' concept was largely a rationalisation
for getting what the services wanted, not what was needed. There was no
"new world" for the forces.
Overlooked
in their recall of the 1970s were two significant developments, neither of
which fully achieved their potential. First were the reforms introduced by
defence secretary Arthur Tange designed to lay down clear lines of authority as
between the defence department and the services vis-à-vis
the Minister, and minimise turf wars and obstructionism in these areas. The
second was the Dibb Report which sought to tailor force structure to a
realistic assessment of defence needs in that changing strategic environment.
The Report itself was far sighted but its implementation fell foul of the very
issues Tange had tried to overcome - and the 'core force’ concept was
introduced to placate all parties even if it became an expensive anachronism.
Lowy readers are being regaled with mind-numbing numbers of
required submarines (12), JSF aircraft (50 or 100), legions of tanks - with
little or no explanation as to the whys and what-fors.
Hugh White however (to his credit) warned that Australia is in
danger of repeating the same mistakes this time around when he wrote:
"There is no plan for how the ADF will be used to achieve Australia’s
strategic objectives. And that is because no one has decided what our strategic
objectives are. In other words we do not know what the ADF is supposed to do.
That is why there is no systemic way to decide how many of anything we need.
But even worse, it means there is no systemic way to decide what we need at
all”. So one can safely say that the services will seek the toys they want and
rationalise their wish lists under some fancy new but vacuous strategic
concept.
So how in outline might a defence force structure be shaped to
reflect the realities of Australia's strategic environment over the coming
decades?
Given that invasion is an unlikely contingency, and given the
digital revolution in military technologies (especially with guided missiles),
we need to refocus and adopt a force structure that takes advantage of area
denial strategies because of the relative vulnerability of attack-mode
platforms.
The potentially 'big bad wolf' in the region is of course China.
The issue here is how far China might go in enforcing its resources claims in
the South China Sea or, if provoked, by further claims from Taiwan for
independence. The former would concern most Southeast and East Asian states,
the US and Australia; the latter, the US essentially alone (or do we have some
undisclosed diplomatic understanding with the US about this?). The question for
Australia would be how far to go in supporting those affected parties and with
what resources? Any strategic 'commitment' to a US response should surely
differentiate between the respective situations and require on our part a clear
choice based on the perceived 'national interest' - not just another ‘alliance
insurance' premium or token deployment.
Conflict between the US and China would have negative consequences
for both. As 'rival' powers they have an extraordinary degree of
inter-dependence which is likely to be on-going. What might disturb that is a
political breakdown internally in China when a foreign distraction (i.e.
conflict) might suit a struggling regime. The international community should
encourage China to stay on track and conform with the norms of global
governance. Current trends in multilateral diplomacy and international law
would reinforce this endeavour.
Closer to home there is the potentially (actually) unstable arc of
Melanesian and Polynesian states around our northern periphery, which may call
upon interventionist forces to restore order and maintain a peace (when there
is a peace to keep) - or on humanitarian grounds. Specifically there may be
problems with PNG but these would more likely be in the nature of police rather
than military actions (e.g. Solomon Islands). Our best expenditure has been on
SAS-type forces. We may need more of these along with their requisite materiel
support (helicopters, amphibious craft, etc.) where versatility and rapid
response is imperative.
Surely we will not again indulge in out of area Iraq/Afghan type
operations - unless it be a peace-keeping exercise unequivocally sanctioned by
the UN or in support of 'civil society'. The capabilities we have developed in
East Timor and Afghanistan (the one positive from the latter) could prove
useful, militarily and politically, and be very much in our interests to
strengthen. Safeguarding our maritime approaches will remain a primary task for
which we are presently poorly equipped. At a routine level, early warning
surveillance (aerial and other) and high-sea state fast patrol craft are
necessities. Then, to monitor, deter and resist less benign intrusions, there
is a role for light frigates and submarines (also for intelligence operations).
Currently we lack the necessary equipment and skilled manpower for reliable
submarine deployments but a new generation to follow the troublesome, near
obsolete Collins-class vessels might rectify this deficiency in time (a
generation). A role for guided-missile carrying catamarans (as being developed
by China) would be interesting!
Air surveillance and deterrence is another formidable issue,
because of its expense, our dependence on the overseas supply of aircraft, and
the uncertainty of their availability. Will the F35 Joint Strike Fighter ever
be available, and at what cost and for what purpose? This question is not being
honestly addressed.
There was no reason why similar requirements, and issues, could
not have been foreseen back in the 1970s. The broad geo-political trend has
long been apparent. All this time Australia's physical security has not been
endangered. Yet we have spent billions of dollars on capabilities that either
have not been required or would not have been operational had they been.
Meanwhile we have lost too many good soldiers, killed or maimed, in conflicts
that have lacked credibility and acceptability to the Australian public - or
can be justified in terms of protecting the national interest.
In short we should leave out-of-area conflicts of others to them;
be clever and focussed in our diplomacy; clear headed about our national
interests; and develop a force structure that is relevant to those interests
with more attention than previously to cost efficiencies and effectiveness
(administrative and military).
About
the Author
Andrew Farran, is a former diplomat (Australian) and academic
(Monash University Law School). Diplomatic postings included Pakistan (including
two visits to Afghanistan), Indonesia, and the UN General Assembly. He was an
adviser to the Australian Government during the GATT/WTO Uruguay Round and a
former vice-president of the Australian Institute of International Affairs, a
member of the Royal Institute of International Affairs and the International
Institute for Strategic Studies, London. He is also a publicist and company
director (Australia and UK).
In response to an article published in The Daily Telegraph on Wednesday 18 April
Australia21 Board member Dr Alex Wodak sent its author, Miranda Devine, an
email, which read as follows:
Dear Ms Devine,
I note your recent comments:
Into the middle of this social disaster rides the drug legalisation
crowd, to make everything much worse.
Pushed along by St Vincent's Hospital's irrepressible Dr Alex Wodak,
along with such luminaries as our new Foreign Minister Bob Carr, a think tank
called Australia 21 released a report this month urging politicians to
decriminalise illegal drugs because the war on drugs has been a failure. The
problem is not that the war on drugs has failed, it is that we have surrendered
our first line of defence to the criminals. (Daily Telegraph, Sydney 18 April
2012).
I don't expect you to change your views on drug policy.
But you might consider extending some courtesy to those
who have a view that is very different from your own.
I have attached the Australia21 report so that you can
see that, contrary to your claim of 18 April, the report did not propose a
specific policy remedy (such as decriminalisation or legalisation).
The report did support redefining drugs as primarily a
health and social issue.
The view that the war on drugs has failed is now
widespread.
Many others have said this before Australia21.
The Parliamentary Joint Committee on the National Crime
Authority said this in 1989 in their report Drugs,
Crime and Society.
Over the past two decades in Australia we have devoted increased
resources to drug law enforcement, we have increased the penalties for drug
trafficking and we have accepted increasing inroads on our civil liberties as
part of the battle to curb the drug trade. All the evidence shows, however, not
only that our law enforcement agencies have not succeeded in preventing the supply
of illegal drugs to Australian markets but that it is unrealistic to expect
them to do so.
I thought you might be interested in some recent comments
on the comprehensive failure of the War on Drugs.
Many of the following quotes are from conservative
commentators - because conservatives have been more vocal about the need for
drug law reform.
Mr Mick Palmer, former Commissioner of the Australian
Federal Police (during the 'Tough on Drugs' period) said at the launch of the
Australia21 report (April 3), that 'the police are better resourced than ever,
better trained than ever, more effective than ever and they still don't make
any difference [to drug trafficking].
LEAP is an organisation of retired and serving drug law enforcement
officials who believe that the War on Drugs has been lost.
Prime Minister Steve Harper of Canada said on 15 April
(see here)
What I think everybody believes is that the current approach is not
working. But it is not clear what we should do.
The article (below) from ForeignPolicy.com quotes President
Otto Perez Molina of Guatemala extensively. Earlier in his career, Otto Perez
Molina was in charge of drug law enforcement for Guatemala.
The following quotes are from Nobel Laureate Milton
Friedman:
Who would believe that a democratic government would pursue for eight
decades a failed policy that produced tens of millions of victims and trillions
of dollars of illicit profits for drug dealers; cost taxpayers hundreds of
billions of dollars; increased crime and destroyed inner cities; fostered
wide-spread corruption and violations of human rights - and all with no success
in achieving the
stated and unattainable objective of a drug-free America.
If you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the
role of the government is to protect the drug cartel.
Of course the problem is demand, but it is not only demand, it is
demand that must operate through repressed and illegal channels. Illegality
creates obscene profits that finance the murderous tactics of the drug lords;
illegality leads to the corruption of law enforcement officials; illegality
monopolizes the efforts of honest law forces so that they are starved for
resources to fight the simpler crimes of robbery, theft and assault.
Drugs are a tragedy for addicts. But criminalizing their use converts
that tragedy into a disaster for society, for users and nonusers alike. Our
experience with the prohibition of drugs is a replay of our experience with the
prohibition of alcoholic beverages.
Can any policy, however high minded, be moral if it leads to
corruption, imprisons so many, has so racist effect that it destroys our inner
cities, wreaks havoc on misguided and vulnerable individuals and brings death
and destruction to foreign countries.
Many, especially the young, are not dissuaded by the bullets that fly
so freely in disputes between competing drug dealers; bullets that fly only because
dealing drugs is illegal. Al Capone epitomizes our earlier attempt at
Prohibition; the Crips and Bloods epitomize this one.
The Commissioners of the GLOBAL COMMISSION ON DRUG POLICY
include:
- Asma
Jahangir, human rights activist, former UN Special Rapporteur on Arbitrary,
Extrajudicial and Summary Executions, Pakistan
- Carlos
Fuentes, writer and public intellectual, Mexico
- Cesar
Gaviria, former President of Colombia
- Ernesto
Zedillo, former President of Mexico
- Fernando
Henrique Cardoso, former President of Brazil (chair)
- George
Papandreou, Prime Minister of Greece
- George
P. Shultz, former Secretary of State, United States (honorary chair)
- Javier
Solana, former European Union High Representative for the Common Foreign
and Security Policy, Spain
- John
Whitehead, banker and civil servant, chair of the World Trade Center Memorial
Foundation, United States
- Kofi
Annan, former Secretary General of the United Nations, Ghana
- Louise
Arbour, former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, President of the
International Crisis Group, Canada
- Maria
Cattaui, Petroplus Holdings Board member, former Secretary-General of the
International Chamber of Commerce, Switzerland
- Mario
Vargas Llosa, writer and public intellectual, Peru
- Marion
Caspers-Merk, former State Secretary at the German Federal Ministry of
Health
- Michel
Kazatchkine, executive director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS,
Tuberculosis and Malaria, France
- Paul
Volcker, former Chairman of the United States Federal Reserve and of the
Economic Recovery Board
- Richard
Branson, entrepreneur, advocate for social causes, founder of the Virgin Group,
co-founder of The Elders, United Kingdom
- Ruth
Dreifuss, former President of Switzerland and Minister of Home Affairs
- Thorvald
Stoltenberg, former Minister of Foreign Affairs and UN High Commissioner
for Refugees, Norway
These Commissioners said:
-
the global war on drugs has failed
with devastating consequences for individuals and societies.
- vast
expenditures on criminalization and repressive measures directed at producers,
traffickers and consumers of illegal drugs have clearly failed to effectively
curtail supply or consumption.
- it’s
time to end the criminalization, marginalization and stigmatization of people
who use drugs but who do no harm to others.
These Commissioners are reputable people of some
accomplishment.
The Hon Dr Michael Wooldridge, Former Health Minister in
the Howard Federal Government said:
The key message is that we have 40
years of experience of a law and order approach to drugs and it has failed.
A few days after the launch, Dr Michael Wooldridge
appeared on Alan Jones radio programme - Alan Jones agreed with Dr Wooldridge.
David Cameron MP said while Conservative party leader,
before becoming Prime Minister of the UK:
Politicians attempt to appeal to the lowest common denominator by
posturing with tough policies and calling for crackdown after crackdown. Drugs
policy has been failing for decades.
The following World Bank report comes to the same
conclusion - but over a few hundred pages:
There's good news on the drug war: The world knows how to
end it -- so why can't the United States figure it out?
BY CHARLES KENNY | APRIL 16, 2012
America's longest running war -- the one against drugs --
came
in for abuse this weekend at the Summit of the Americas. The abuse is
deserved. Forty years of increasingly violent efforts to stamp out the drug
trade haven't worked. And the blood and treasure lost is on a scale with
America's more conventional wars. On the upside, we know that an approach based
around treating drugs as a public health issue reaps benefits to both users and
the rest of us.
President Otto Perez Molina of Guatemala opened the
rhetorical offensive against the drug war last week when he wrote
that "decades of big arrests and the seizure of tons of drugs" have
not stopped "booming" production and consumption. Molina argued that
"global drug policy today is based on a false premise: that the global
drug markets can be eradicated." Drug abuse, like alcoholism, should be
treated as a public health problem, he suggested. We should consider a move
towards drug regulation -- including taxation and prohibition of sales to
minors. As this weekend's discussion made clear, Molina's statement represents
region-wide concern with the business-as-usual strategy towards drugs. Indeed,
most of Latin America has already moved
towards decriminalization of drug possession in small amounts, and some are
considering legalization.
But it isn't just in Latin America that the winds of
change are blowing when it comes to drugs policy. Last June, the Global
Commission on Drug Policy, which included Kofi Annan, three former presidents
from Latin America, a prime minister and former president from Europe, former
Fed Chair Paul Volker and former Secretary of State George Shultz, concluded
much the same thing as Molina. "The global war on drugs has failed,"
they reported. It is high time to move towards experimentation with
"models of legal regulation."
As a domestic policy, a harsh enforcement approach has
done little to control drug use, but has done a lot to lock up a growing
portion of the U.S. population. Cocaine and opiate prices are about half their
1990 levels in in America today. And 16
percent of American adults have tried cocaine -- that's about four times
higher than any other surveyed country in a list that includes Mexico,
Colombia, Nigeria, France, and Germany. And while criminalization has a limited
impact on price and use, it has a significant impact on crime rates. Forty
percent of drug arrests in the United States are for the simple possession
of marijuana. Nearly half a million people are behind bars in the United States
for a drug offense -- that's more than ten times the figure in 1980.
As a result, the United States is spending about $40
billion per year $40
billion per year on the war on drugs -- with three quarters of that
expenditure on apprehending and punishing dealers and users. All of those
police out there slapping cuffs on folks found with a baggie of Purple
Kush aren't watching for drunk drivers or burglars. And drug enforcement is
more
closely linked with violent crime than drug use. Meanwhile, the cost of
lost productivity from jailed citizens is around $39 billion per year. Such sums
are considerably higher than the costs of ill-health associated with drug use,
suggesting in strict economic terms at least that it isn't drugs -- but drug
control policy -- that is the problem. Add in the social effects of mass
incarceration (from rape
to split
families to unemployment to poverty)
and the uncertain benefits of the war on drugs become dwarfed by the known
costs.
Harsh enforcement hasn't failed as a policy only in the
United States, of course. Across countries, analysis
by World Bank economists Philip Keefer, Norman Loayaza, and Rodrigo Soares
suggests that drug prosecution rates or the number of police in a country has
no effect on drug prices.
Conversely, the Global Commission on Drug Policy report
compiled evidence suggesting that approaches based on treatment rather than
punishment were far more effective in reducing consumption, HIV prevalence, and
crime rates among users. For example, Britain and Germany, both of which long
ago adopted harm reduction strategies for people injecting drugs -- programs that
include needle exchange programs and medication -- see HIV prevalence among
people who inject drugs below 5 percent. The United States and Portugal, by
contrast, where such strategies were introduced later or only partially, see
HIV prevalence among a similar community at above 15 percent.
Again, the global evidence that legalization would
increase use is sparse. Use is far more connected with social, environmental,
and economic contexts than legal status. Portugal decriminalized drug
possession and use ten years ago, and has seen drug use fluctuate at similar
rates to countries where possession remains illegal according to the Commission
report. Similarly, U.S. states that have decriminalized cannabis possession
have not seen greater increases in use than those states where it remained
illegal.
But if the war on drugs is a failed domestic policy in
the United States, it is also -- particularly as the U.S. population is the world's
largest consumer of illicit drugs -- a failed global strategy. And a larger
price for that failure is paid abroad. Drug crop eradication programs simply
don't work to dry up global supply. They can drive up the local price of a crop
-- but that alone is likely only to force a move in production rather than
overall reduction. Aggregate coca cultivation in Bolivia, Colombia, and Peru
was higher
in 2007 than in the late 1990s, for example -- despite stepped up eradication
programs in all three countries. In turn, this might help explain why multiple,
expensive eradication efforts from Colombia to Afghanistan have done little to
increase drug prices in Western markets, which reached historic lows in the mid
2000s.
Connected to all this is the fact that farmers are not
the ones making big money from the drug trade. The price of one kilo of cocaine
at the point of production in Colombia in 2000 was about $650. By the time it
reached Miami, that price had risen to $23,000, with a final retail price of
closer to $120,000 -- suggesting the point of production price is a little more
than half a percentage point of the final price.
Given the low wholesale price, it's not surprising that experience
from around the world suggests that given other crop options -- flowers in
Thailand, onions in Pakistan, potatoes in Laos -- and the ability to get those
crops to a functioning market, farmers will often abandon coca and poppy
production for these more profitable sources of revenue. The war on drugs, by
creating instability and weakening the operation of those markets, may have the
perverse effect of increasing the attractiveness of drug crop production for
farmers.
And while eradication doesn't work to reduce supply in
rich countries, alongside interdiction efforts it can have catastrophic
spillover effects in poor countries. Mexico is spending $9
billion a year to fight drug trafficking, for example, and yet the drug war
killed 34,000 people between 2006 and 2010, according
to the government. Some 27,000 Colombians died each year during the 1990s
as a result of violence fueled by drug cartels. Analysis
by Jennifer Holmes and colleagues at the University of Texas suggests that coca
cultivation was not related to violence in Colombia between 1999 and 2001 --
but eradication efforts were. Again, economists Oeindrila Dube and Suresh Naidu
found
that U.S. military aid to Colombia was associated with greater paramilitary
violence: A 10 percent increase in U.S. military aid was associated with a 15
percent rise in paramilitary attacks in regions where there was a Colombian
army base, compared to other regions.
In fact, thanks to the profitable, violent, criminal
oligopolies that are the spinoff of the global war on drugs, developing
countries that produce drugs or are on drug trade routes face a risk of
descending into narco-kleptocracy. In 2010, the commander of Venezuela's armed
forces, the president of Nicaragua, the prime minister of Kosovo, the son of
the president of Guinea, and a host of politicians allied with the Burmese
junta were all deeply involved in the drug trade according to Moises Naim of
the Carnegie Endowment.
Meanwhile, popular attitudes towards drug policy in the
United States are finally shifting. For the first time since Gallup
started asking the question, the majority of Americans think marijuana use
should be legal. And the country already has what might be called a more
nuanced approach to other addictive drugs. The U.S. government is happy to
conclude trade agreements that actually encourage
smoking around the world, for example. And the United States is willing
to bear the domestic health costs of tobacco and alcohol use that kill 30 times
as many people a year as do illegal drugs. Yes, policies towards cocaine or
heroin should be far more constraining than those towards cigarettes or beer,
but the rationale for such a completely different approach to one set of
substances than the other is threadbare.
Nobody should underestimate the appalling toll of drug
addiction -- it ends many lives and ruins many more. Of the 250 million drug
users worldwide, the United Nations estimates around 25
million are dependent. The question is, does the current approach towards
drug policy work to reduce that toll? And what are the spillover effects of
America and Europe's hard line on drugs to other countries? The evidence
suggests the policy has failed and that the spillover effects are considerable.
The good news is that a different strategy could turn
around the violence and lower the economic, social, and health costs of
narcotics. America and Europe should commit to a drug policy based around
public health and regulation -- making drug use safer, legal, and rare --
rather than criminalization and paramilitary enforcement. That switch will save
money and families at home alongside lives and livelihoods abroad. It is time
the world ended its addiction to war as a tool of social control.
An item in Open
Medicine, Vol 6, No. 1 (2012), entitled Improving
community health and safety in Canada through evidence-based policies on
illegal drugs, contains some remarkable data from North America on the high
cost of drug law enforcement and the failure to extract anything that might
reasonably be called value for money.
Two quotable quotes will suffice:
Canada
When the Office of the Auditor General of Canada last reviewed the
country’s drug strategy, in 2001, it estimated that of the $454 million spent
annually on efforts to control illicit drugs, $426 million (93.8%) was devoted
to law enforcement. The report further concluded, “Of particular concern is the
almost complete absence of basic management information on spending of
resources, on expectations, and on results of an activity that accounts for
almost $500 million each year.”
United States
Remarkably, despite an estimated US$1 trillion spent since former US president
Richard Nixon first declared his country’s “war on drugs,” the effort to reduce
drug supply and drive up drug prices through aggressive drug law enforcement
appears to have been ineffective. Instead, in recent decades, the prices of the
more commonly used illegal drugs (e.g., cannabis and cocaine) have actually
gone down, while potency has risen dramatically.
The costs of drug law enforcement come in other forms than
financial outlays by the taxpayer. In Australia just this week we have seen two
stories relating to the corrupting effects of drug law enforcement splashed
across our front pages, and the story of a high profile ex-AFL player who looks
to be in a lot of trouble of a kind that will benefit no-one:
Operation Dayu
Read here
Nick McKenzie and Richard Baker, $10
million trap nets drug ring from the 24 March edition of The Age and access an edited extract
from The Sting: Australia’s plot to trap
a global drug empire. The article refers to a multibillion dollar drug and
money laundering network which is responsible for the importation into
Australia of $1.2 billion worth of drugs annually, some of it distributed by
outlaw motorcycle gangs.
The article says that the
syndicate has achieved
"high-level infiltration of government in both law enforcement agencies
and political circles" across much of Asia, including China, Vietnam, Thailand,
Burma, Laos and Cambodia.
In addition to the article
in The Age, read here
a transcript of Mark Colvin’s interview with Nick McKenzie on Radio National’s PM program, Monday 26 March 2012.
Investigation of customs
officials
Four days later, in the 28 March edition of The Age, under the headline Customs
officers probed, the same two authors write (see here):
Australian border security
officials are helping organised crime syndicates smuggle multimillion-dollar
shipments of illicit drugs and other contraband into Australia.
Australian law enforcement
agencies are investigating more than 24 Customs and Border Protection officials
for corruption or misconduct - suspected offences include drug trafficking and
leaking sensitive information.
Ben Cousins
Then there is today’s story in The
Age about Brownlow medallist Ben Cousins, one of AFL’s most talented
players, on bail after his arrest with
drugs allegedly hidden in his rectum. A foolish young man no doubt, but who
will benefit from his criminalisation if that is what occurs?
