A high-level international panel slammed the war on drugs as a failure Thursday and called on governments to undertake experiments to decriminalize the use of drugs, especially marijuana, to undermine the power of organized crime.
"Political leaders and public figures should have the courage to articulate publicly what many of them acknowledge privately: that the evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that repressive strategies will not solve the drug problem, and that the war on drugs has not, and cannot, be won," the report said.
The 19-member commission includes former presidents of Mexico, Brazil and Colombia, Greece's prime minister, former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, former U.S. officials George P. Schultz and Paul Volcker, the writers Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa, and British billionaire Richard Branson.
I'm not sure about the rest of 'em, but I'm pretty sure Branson knows whereof he speaks when it comes to weed. Heh.
The office of White House drug czar Gil Kerlikowske said the report was misguided.
Of course he did. All these distinguished and erudite panel members, however practical and correct their findings, missed the point entirely:
Enforcement of marijuana laws is too good a method of oppression of The Other* and there's way too much money in the Prison Industrial Complex to liberalize the laws.
*In this case, minorities and anybody else the power structure and the anti-fun people suspect may be having a good time smoking a plant that didn't come from Big Corpora.
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