by Marie-Christine Bonzom in Washington, swissinfo.ch
A report by the Global Commission on Drug Policy has concluded that the war on drugs has failed, triggering a heated debate in the United States.
The report, written by a high-profile panel including former Swiss cabinet minister Ruth Dreifuss, criticises the repressive approach in the US and calls for the legalisation of some drugs and an end to the criminalisation of drug users.
Instead of prohibition, the commission recommends “regulation models of illicit drugs designed to undermine the power of organised crime and safeguard the health and safety of their citizens”.
“Drug addicts are patients rather than criminals – they are in fact patients exploited by criminals and it’s the role of society to protect them,” Dreifuss, a member of the centre-left Social Democratic Party and interior minister from 1993 to 2002, told swissinfo.ch.
The 24-page report, published last month, points out that it has been 40 years since President Nixon launched the US government’s “war on drugs”, which has been transplanted in the meantime to countries of production.
“This is the dominant discourse and we think it’s harmful,” Dreifuss said.
Dreifuss, who also held the rotating Swiss presidency in 1999, the first woman to do so, sits on the commission panel alongside former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the former leaders of Mexico, Colombia and Brazil, British entrepreneur Richard Branson and former US Secretary of State George Schultz.
Disease?
The US and Mexican governments have rejected the findings as misguided and “easy answers to the world’s drug problems”.
Categories: Americas, Colombia, Crime, Switzerland, United States