The wars don’t work

IN 1971 Richard Nixon fired the first shot in what became known as the “war on drugs” by declaring them “public enemy number one”. In America and the other rich countries that fought by its side, the campaign meant strict laws and harsh sentences for small-time dealers and addicts. In the poor, chaotic countries that supplied their cocaine and heroin, it meant uprooting and spraying coca and poppy crops, and arming and training security forces. Billions of wasted dollars and many destroyed lives later, illegal drugs are still available, and the anti-drug warriors are wearying. In America and western Europe addiction is increasingly seen as an illness. Marijuana has been legalised in a few places. Several countries may follow Portugal, which no longer treats drug use as a crime.

But even as one drug war begins to wind down, another is cranking up across Asia, Russia and the Middle East (see article). Echoing Nixon, China’s president has called for “forceful measures to wipe [drugs] out”; his Indonesian counterpart has declared drugs a “national emergency”, and in January sent six traffickers to a firing squad. This week Indonesia executed eight more, despite international pleas for clemency. Iran is executing five times as many drug-smugglers as it did a few years ago. Russia is arguing for the spraying of opium-poppy fields in Afghanistan, and is trying to get its neighbours to follow it in banning methadone, an opioid used to wean heroin addicts off their fix. Earlier this year China lobbied the UN’s drug-control body to place tighter restrictions on ketamine, an anaesthetic, though it failed—for now, at least.