Sunday, 17 August 2008

"Mexico's drug killings soaring"

More huge successes to report from the frontline in the War On Drugs!

My latest blogpost: "Mexico's drug killings soaring"Tweet this! Posted by Mark Wadsworth at 11:45

Labels: , , ,

4 comments:

Gregg said...

When we were working in Mexico there was a shoot out in our street involving drug gangs, quite frightening. That was in 1990, some things will never change as things stand.

17 August 2008 at 12:08
Anonymous said...

I’ve often wondered why murder is seen by most as an evil act no matter what. The murder of an innocent victim certainly qualifies as an evil act, but when one murderous drug gang member murders another murderous drug gang member can’t we just rejoice that there is one less murderous drug gang member in the world?

17 August 2008 at 18:01
Mark Wadsworth said...

On one level, yes. But if we treated all drugs like alcohol/tobacco (legal, but regulated and highly taxed) then there'd be fewer, i.e. practically no, murderous drug gang members.

17 August 2008 at 18:16
Anonymous said...

Not absolutely convinced that will work in a producer-economy rather than a distribution economy, but willing to give it a punt.

Following your maxim 'see what they do in Switzerland' it appears the cantons went for a harm-reduction strategy several years ago. They seem to think it has moved them approximately in the right direction, but then they have a very particular population so you can never guarantee that it would play out the same in another country.

Here's the main paper.
http://tinyurl.com/5kfqe6

The caveats are:

1) The Swiss are comfortable with the idea of different cantons having different protocols. Brits mind those inconsistencies more.

2) They haven't gone for a straight legalize and regulate model - although if you look in to the buried recommendations, it is there. It depends how you read it. The language - which I'm obviously reading in translation - might have an effect on meaning. In English, there is a danger that this can be used as another reason for the government to interfere with personal liberty in an unacceptable way, and we already have plenty of those.

3) The interesting approach seems to be to try make it as difficult as possible to profit from drug use or drug dealing. As the people who know most in the world about money and how to massage it, they are having some success.

4) The policy doesn't amount to condoning drug use a personal decision - they have strong tribal instincts and have never come out and said that, even if some of them thought it. The Swiss have gone in the other direction, moving away from a 'their choice, their problem' model, to a pragmatic approach of harm-reduction, explicitly accepting that this is not a soluble problem but it is a negotiable one.

It is much easier to get an audience to look something presented as a harm-reduction strategy,which ever tactics you finally recommend.

17 August 2008 at 23:57

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)