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WaPo: Colombia, largest cocaine supplier to U.S., considers decriminalizing [1]
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Date: 2022-08-24
Newly inaugurated Colombian president Gustavo Petro
Apologies if this has already been covered, but I haven’t seen it anywhere until now.
From the Washington Post four days ago:
Two weeks after taking office, the country’s first leftist government is proposing an end to “prohibition” and the start of a government-regulated cocaine market. Through legislation and alliances with other leftist governments in the region, officials in this South American nation hope to turn their country into a laboratory for drug decriminalization. “It is time for a new international convention that accepts that the war on drugs has failed,” President Gustavo Petro said in his inaugural address this month. It’s a radical turn in this historically conservative country, one that could upend its long-standing — and lucrative — counternarcotics relationship with the United States. U.S. officials past and present are signaling concern; the drug was responsible for an estimated 25,000 overdose deaths in the United States last year. ... “Drug traffickers know that their business depends on it being prohibited,” Tascón said. “If you regulate it like a public market … the high profits disappear and the drug trafficking disappears.” [Felipe Tascón, Petro’s drug czar] said the administration will continue operations by air, sea and river to target major drug trafficking links. But authorities will also focus on providing rural farmers with crop alternatives to coca. He aims to reframe his job not as “counternarcotics” or “anti-drug” but rather “drug policy.” “The government’s program doesn’t talk about the problem of drugs,” he said. “It talks about the problems generated by the prohibition of drugs.”
I strongly encourage you to read the whole thing.
What concerns me is that I don’t see the U.S. government in particular standing by and just watching this happen. We already have a long history of knocking off leftist leaders in Latin America. I certainly hope Petro has good security.
Personally, I think this is a good idea, but it also needs to be coupled with decriminalization or even legalization in the countries where the demand originates. At the very least, this could certainly reduce the level of violence caused by prohibition, but I wonder how well unilaterally ending the fight locally will work. The DEA is already losing their collective shit at the mere proposal.
Honestly, the whole world needs to get its head out of its ass over these issues. prohibition doesn’t work — it never has and it never will.
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[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/8/24/2118503/-WaPo-Colombia-largest-cocaine-supplier-to-U-S-considers-decriminalizing
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