Nadelmann, Ethan. "Drug Laws: Time to Think of Alternatives." Letter. The Nation. April 10, 2003.
The Thai government is not alone in forgetting why the drug laws were enacted in the first place: to reduce the harm associated with drug use.
In Thailand, and in the United States, and many other countries as well, the war on drugs is now responsible for more death, disease, crime and suffering than drug abuse itself. The drug laws have taken on a life of their own, divorced from the concerns with health and wellbeing that sparked those laws in the first place.
A police official in Chiang Mai recently said: "When ya ba is eliminated, there will be a new drug." Indeed! There has never been a drug-free society in the history of human civilisation, and there likely will never be one.
The challenge for individuals, societies and governments is not to eradicate drugs - for that cannot be done - but to learn to live with drugs so that they cause the least possible harm and the greatest possible benefit.
Thailand is like so many other countries today: a victim of prohibitionist laws and policies, both national and international, that do little to reduce drug abuse but much to generate organised crime and violence, corruption and the deadly excesses in which government agents now appear to be involved.
Perhaps the time has come to think seriously about real alternatives to this costly war without end. In decades and centuries past, many governments throughout Asia devised ways of regulating the production, sale and consumption of opium. None of these regulatory schemes were perfect, but they surely compare favourably to the moralistic, ineffective and deadly drug prohibition policies of today.
Ethan Nadelmann Executive director, Drug Policy Alliance
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