Bob Carr Declares The War On Drugs A Failure

In an independent report released by not-for-profit think tank Australia21, Foreign Affairs Minister Bob Carr has declared what we already knew – the ‘War on Drugs’ has failed. This is old news. The rest of the world has already conceded this fact but it’s promising to know at least some of our policy makers agree.

The War on Drugs has been ongoing in Australia since 1985. It has been going on even longer in the US where the term ‘War on Drugs’ was first coined by Nixon in 1971. The drug war saw the US Government use the power of its intelligence agencies, military and police force to control the production, manufacturing and use of illicit drugs to no avail. Instead they effectively squandered billions of dollars in resources, hiked arrest rates related to victimless crimes and galvanised the power of drug cartels.

The US spends $40bn a year trying to eliminate the supply of drugs but in that time there has been no proven correlation between the money spent on eradicating drugs and the lowering of usage rates. So then, is it not logical to consider an alternative? Not so in Australia.

The Global Commission on Drug Policy declared the war had failed in July 2011 but as noted in our chat with A Small Book About Drugs author Lisa Pryor, we are downright blind when it comes to legislative alternatives: “It seems like The Wire and popular culture in general is quite effective at changing people’s attitudes toward the war on drugs. Or at the very least something like The Wire can comment on how futile a pursuit it is. I find it interesting how America is supposed to be obsessed with the war on drugs and yet it seems like there’s more debate about changing the law and more changes to the law there than there have been in Australia. It’s quite sad.”

You only have to compare countries such as Portugal who have decriminalised drugs and have notably lower consumption rates than countries such as the UK and USA who experience higher usage rates despite tougher drug laws.

Carr, of course, has been a longtime supporter of drug liberalisation following the death of his brother Greg to a heroin overdose. He was also the first Australian Premier to introduce medically supervised injecting rooms in 1999.

Words By Cassandra Byrnes

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