Why Obama will fail in Afghanistan

June 6, 1998, a letter to the Secretary General of the United Nations from statesmen, scientists and nobel laureates including Milton Friedman said “the global war on drugs is now causing more harm than drug abuse itself.”

“Every decade the United Nations adopts new international conventions, focused largely on criminalization and punishment, that restrict the ability of individual nations to devise effective solutions to local drug problems. Every year governments enact more punitive and costly drug control measures. Every day politicians endorse harsher new drug war strategies.”

“What is the result? U.N. agencies estimate the annual revenue generated by the illegal drug industry at $400 billion, or the equivalent of roughly eight per cent of total international trade. This industry has empowered organized criminals, corrupted governments at all levels, eroded internal security, stimulated violence, and distorted both economic markets and moral values. These are the consequences not of drug use per se, but of decades of failed and futile drug war policies.”

Afghanistan supplies a huge part of the world’s heroin (a nice safe drug actually) and the people who control the trade will use part of their profits to buy weapons and defend the trade.

Has the new war push in Afghanistan lead by Obama got a hope against the billions of dollars available to those who control the drug trade?

Legalise heroin and then talk about cleaning up the human rights abuses in Afghanistan.

Kevin McCready