Canada GE: Editorial: WAR ON REASON

Today in New York City, an act of almost indescribable stupidity will be committed. Eighteen years after Ronald Reagan announced he would stamp out drugs, the "War on Drugs" will be declared once again.

This time the United Nations will play the fool, with an announcement of the most ambitious international anti-drug program ever. Representatives from 130 nations, plus 30 heads of state, including US president Bill Clinton, will be there to applaud.

The cornerstone of the UN plan will be a program to get farmers in the nine major drug-producing nations -- Afghanistan, Burma, Laos, Colombia, India, Mexico, Pakistan, and Vietnam -- to switch from growing plants that produce illegal drugs to other crops. The stated goal of the UN plan: To eradicate the world's entire production of heroin, cocaine, and marijuana in 10 years.

Bonne chance, nos amis. The nations being targeted range from merely corrupt to tyrannical to anarchic. Authority, where it exists, is often intimately involved in the production and transportation of drugs. Unless the UN is prepared to pay every farmer to grow soybeans and send peacekeepers to fight off the guerrillas, police, and soldiers who will be displeased that their cash-cow has dried up, its war will be lost.

But assume the UN could manage the impossible and turn the nations now producing the bulk of the world's drugs into exporters of soybeans. Would that mean victory in the War on Drugs?

Not at all. Cutting the supply of drugs does nothing to reduce the demand for them. It would mean, however, that some of that demand wouldn't be met, which would push the value of drugs skyward. That in turn would tempt criminals, soldiers, police, guerrillas, and farmers in nations elsewhere in the world to produce their own supply. If it's not Afghanistan and Burma supplying the drug markets, it will be Nigeria, or Peru, or somewhere else. Unless the UN can afford to put every farmer in the world on the anti-drug dole, crop substitution won't work.

Nor will it work even if it is coupled with new programs to lessen the demand for drugs. Every Western nation, particularly the U.S., has tried to stifle demand using every imaginable carrot and stick, and met with no more success than King Canute when he ordered the tides to halt. Demand for drugs rises and falls largely according to social factors which are impervious to the efforts of governments.

For all its futility, the UN's quixotic quest will not come cheaply. By one estimate, the new plan will require $3 to $4 billion US. To put that in perspective: 2.2 million children under the age of five die in developing countries each year from diarrhoeal dehydration because they don't have safe drinking water. How much clean water $3 to $4 billion US could buy can only be imagined.

There will be other facets to the UN's anti-drug drive, most of which will be decided over the course of three days of deliberations in the UN General Assembly. The UN will not, however, discuss alternatives to the War on Drugs. Mexico, a nation that bears the worst scars of the drug war, first proposed this conference as a way of assessing what has been done, and learning from that experience, but other nations, particularly the U.S., used the planning stages of the conference to push discussion of alternatives off the agenda. Non-governmental organizations that asked to hold a short, small seminar to discuss alternatives to the War on Drugs were refused permission.

What about Canada? As always, the federal government is clambering onto the bandwagon and cheering on the war. Since the Trudeau years, it has seldom given serious thought to drug policy, preferring instead to follow whatever variation on failure is being proposed.

That, sadly, is true of most of the world's nations. Sense and experience are ignored, folly is repeated, and the War on Drugs becomes a war on reason itself.