War on drugs a failure: study
Posted September 30, 2013 5:04 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – The war on drugs is over and it has failed according to a new study conducted by BC and California scientists.
It shows illegal drugs have become more potent as prices continue to drop.
The study reaches across the globe during the last two decades and says despite the money being spent to stop it, drug use and sales are on the rise.
That’s enough to declare the so-called war on drugs over says study co-author Dr. Evan Wood with BC Centre for excellence in HIV/AIDS. “You see the same thing when it comes to heroin and cocaine, the potency is going up and the price is going down. The huge investment that’s a criminal justice approach to control these has been totally ineffective.”
Wood says that even though street-level seizures of drugs are up, that can be misleading. “Increase in seizures that we see are actually only an indication of the ever-increasing success of this market. Really efforts to reduce the supply of drugs have been an astronomical failure.”
He says it just means more supply and in turn, more demand. “If you ask economists why, they’ll sort of chuckle and explain to you that it’s the laws of supply and demand, and that any intervention that seeks to reduce the supply of drugs will have the perverse effect of increasing the price and incentivizing more people getting into the supply.”
Wood also emphasizes drug use is a public health not criminal justice issue.
The study by the International Centre for Science in Drug Policy will be published in the October 7th issue of the British Medical Journal Open.
