It seems appropriate as the government rejects the recommendation of it’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs to downgrade ecstasy form class A to Class B, that Johann Hari talks about why we should legalize drugs – a position I’ve always supported.

One startling fact that Hari reports is a Pentagon report which warns Mexico and Pakistan could face a “rapid and sudden” collapse.

“The Mexican possibility may seem less likely, but the government, its politicians, police and judicial infrastructure are all under sustained assault and pressure by criminal gangs and drug cartels,” the assessment of worldwide security threats says. “How that international conflict turns out over the next several years will have a major impact on the stability of the Mexican state.” Source: National Post.

As Hari points out

When you criminalize a drug for which there is a large market, it doesn’t disappear. The trade is simply transferred from pharmacists and doctors to armed criminal gangs. In order to protect their patch and their supply routes, these gangs tool up – and kill anyone who gets in their way. You can see this any day on the streets of London or Los Angeles, where teenage gangs stab or shoot each other for control of the 3000 percent profit margins on offer. Now imagine this process on a country-wide scale, and you have Mexico and Afghanistan today.

Drugs syndicates control 8 percent of global GDP – which means they have greater resources than many national armies. They own helicopters and submarines and they can afford to spread the woodworm of corruption through poor countries, right to the top.

Why Mexico? Why now? In the past decade, the US has spent a fortune spraying carcinogenic chemicals over Colombia’s coca-growing areas, so the drug trade has simply shifted to Mexico. It’s known as the “balloon effect”: press down in one place, and the air rushes to another. When I was last there in 2006, I saw the drug violence taking off and warned that the murder rate was going to skyrocket – but I didn’t imagine it would reach this scale. In 2007, more than 2000 people were killed. In 2008, it was more than 5400 people. The victims range from a pregnant woman washing her car to a four year-old child to a family in the “wrong” house watching television. Today, 70 percent of Mexicans say they are frightened to go out because of the cartels. Source: Johann Hari.

The more you look, the more obvious it becomes that a war-on-drugs is a war with only one outcome and that’s victory for criminal gangs and drug cartels. Once you accept this fact – and however much you might delude yourself otherwise it won’t change this fact; people take drugs, lots of people, regardless of the law and these people are putting huge sums of money into the hands criminals – for how much longer are we going to continue do this? Sadly it seems we’re doomed to carry on until there’s not an honest politician or law enforcement office left – then like Mexicans we’ll all be in fear of the drug cartels. It’s time to legalize.

What is the alternative? Terry Nelson was one of the America’s leading federal agents tackling drug cartels for over thirty years. He discovered the hard way that the current tactics are useless. “Busting top traffickers doesn’t work, since others just do battle to replace them,” he explains. A crackdown simply produces more violence, as an endless pool of young men hungry for the profits step into the vacuum and fight off their rivals. Nelson concluded there is an alternative: “Legalizing and regulating drugs will stop drug market crime and violence by putting major cartels and gangs out of business. It’s the one surefire way to bankrupt them, but when will our leaders talk about it?”

Of course, the day after legalization, a majority of gangsters will not suddenly open organic food shops and join the Hare Krishnas. But their profit margins will collapse as their customers go to off-licenses and chemists rather than to them. The incentives for going into crime and staying there will be decimated. Norm Stamper, the former head of the Seattle Police Department, says plainly: “Regulated legalization of all drugs will drive drug dealers out of business: no product, no profit, no incentive.” Source: Johann Hari.

Until then, the world’s drifting into the hands of some very dangerous people.