Re last post on prohibtions and smugglers

By chance, The Economist June 2 issue has an article on drug policy relevant to the last post:.  Here are the first four paragraphs of that article:

NARCOTICS liberalisation was once the cause of freethinkers and hippies. Now a more sober bunch is criticising the “war on drugs”. On June 2nd the Global Commission on Drug Policy, a group including ex-presidents of Brazil, Mexico, Colombia and Switzerland; the prime minister of Greece; a former secretary-general of the United Nations; and, from America, an ex-secretary of state and ex-chairman of the Federal Reserve, called for the decriminalisation of all drug taking, and for experiments in the legal regulation of the sale of drugs, starting with cannabis.

Calls for a rethink of the 50-year-old policy of prohibition have been growing. As the report pointed out, drug consumption has continued to rise, even as billions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives have been spent trying to stamp it out. In the ten years to 2008, the most recent data available, the number taking cannabis worldwide increased by 8.5%, of cocaine by 27%, and of opiates by 34.5%. America’s federal government alone spent $15 billion in 2010 on drug control; perhaps $25 billion more went in other public spending. .

Prohibition has brought many short-term wins but no lasting ones. The authorities drove cocaine smugglers out of the Caribbean in the 1980s. But they then popped up in Mexico. A campaign against “narcos” there has cost at least 35,000 lives in the past five years—and is driving them into the chaotic countries of Central America. Guatemalan officers found 27 headless bodies near the Mexican border last month, and blamed the Mexican Zetas “cartel”.

A similar merry-go-round is spinning in the Andes, where production driven out of Peru and Bolivia and into Colombia in the 1990s is now being swept back in the other direction. As cocaine taking has fallen in America it has risen in Europe: Latin American “cartels” have diversified their export strategy (wrecking parts of West Africa, a convenient staging post, along the way)