The Latin American and Caribbean Drug Conference concluded this Friday that the traditional war on drugs has failed and needs to be reconsidered. However, there is no consensus on designing a new model for regulating drugs such as cocaine.
At the meeting, which took place from Thursday to Saturday in the Colombian city of Cali, experts and government officials – mainly Colombian – put forward a roadmap to propose a new way to tackle the global drug problem, which leaves, among other things, the persecution of farmers.
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“International leadership belongs to our country and I believe that it is exercised in a responsible manner,” said Colombian Justice Minister Néstor Osuna in the first panel of the day.
And within this leadership, he assured, Colombian President Gustavo Petro, at various summits and in various countries, “has indicated to the international community that prohibitionism is not a correct policy.”
New drug policy
The president himself will present the new drug policy at the end of the conference on Saturday, an initiative aimed at stopping the persecution of farmers who grow coca leaves and highlighting measures against drug trafficking networks.
This “narrative change” is an important step, say organizations that work with farmers and have a lot of knowledge about drugs, but also experts like María Alejandra Vélez, director of the Center for Studies on Security and Drugs (Cesed) at the University of Los Andes in Bogota believes Colombia is “timid” toward its “international leadership.”
“I welcome the drug policy, but I call for us not to shy away from at least proposing what this model of regulated cocaine could look like, because if we continue to defend the peasant producer without proposing alternatives on the other hand, with a market of 21 “Millions of cocaine users, what is fixed on one side will explode on the other,” the expert said.
The Justice Minister then hoped that “we will move towards a world without an illegal drug economy with responsible, sensible regulation of cocaine, heroin, opioids and cannabis”, but stressed that this is currently difficult given international laws to do so.
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For this reason, Colombia cannot operate outside this international framework, the minister said, but it will propose in the international environment “that a regulated market with appropriate consumption of cocaine, heroin, opioids and all these substances is necessary, and that there are bans and There are penalties.” doesn’t work.”
And the evolution of alcohol consumption, whose consumption was traced a century ago, can serve as a guide, as can that of tobacco consumption, which has reduced consumption not by “putting smokers in prison” but through prevention and health campaigns.
End punitiveness
On the other hand, the conference also discussed ways to leave punitivism behind. “It is an idea that does not correspond to reality to believe that the big bosses of the drug trade are in prison. That’s not true, the prisons are full of poor people,” the minister said.
“Punitive approaches have limited results in any area and the assumption that criminal law or a punitive approach or prison can achieve results that go beyond the limits of criminal punishment is a common mistake in our societies today, fueled by the penal phenomenon will,” he reflected.
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But “there is no room for maneuver” to end the punitive approach, which is why the Colombian government believes prosecution efforts should focus on the main players in the drug trade and not farmers.
“What we will do is to prioritize the punitive approach in the fight against cocaine, not against the coca leaf, not against the poor farmer who had no choice but the coca leaf,” Osuna explained.
The Latin American and Caribbean Drug Conference has spent two days collecting positions, criticisms and new ideas to solve a global problem and will tomorrow submit its conclusions to Colombian President Gustavo Petro and Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
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