Conservatives Against the Drug War

Who woulda thunk it? Are you surprised? Didn't get the news? Not surprising. It is the Conservatives in Colombia.

"This drug war has moved beyond a question of crime," says Apolinar Salcedo, the mayor of Cali, Colombia's second largest city and the scene of much of the killing. "This is now a question of national security."

This hurricane of violence has led a growing number of Colombians, including leading members of the venerable Conservative Party, to question the drug policies that have helped make their country one of the world's most dangerous. "We Colombians have had enough," says Ferney Lozano, director of the Legalization Now movement, which was founded in 1999 and claims more than 100 elected officials across the country as members. "We're sick of paying the consequences of this war against drugs with thousands killed each year. People are seeing that if anything things are getting worse, with more people becoming addicts, and they are now questioning whether the costs of this drug war are worth it."

Evidently Americans have a much larger appetite for crime in violence in our country than the Colombians do. We also seem to have learned nothing from alcohol prohibition.

By itself Colombia can do only so much, since both the demand for cocaine and the demand to eliminate its production come from abroad.

Now where is the demand and the call for elimination of suppy strongest? Why from the good old USA of course. You see if your country does not have a large enough criminal class America will force you to adopt polices that will create or enlarge such a class. After all we are doing it in America. And as we all know because of the strong religious impulse of this country whatever we do is good. So the thinking goes. Which is why early in the 1960s America forced the Single Convention Treaty On Narcotics on the world. However, the idea goes back farther to a time when alcohol prohibitionists were strongly agitating in America; it goes back to the International Opium Convention, signed at The Hague early in 1912. You see there is only one way to treat this problem, the American way.

Well maybe not for much longer.