culture is that so much you are going to let you go but already the muslims believe that they know nothing less than us and after forty years the so-called war on drugs has achieved precious little or none the less governments around the. russia hosts afghanistan to pakistan to discuss a battling the drugs that scorched coming from central asia with the afghan war

seen as the major cause of instability. moscow police on high alert as investigations suggest russia's number one terrorist suspect and the man behind him our moscow metro bombings could be responsible for tuesday's car bomb blast in southern russia that injured thirty. also a human rights group says the scandal involving an ex israeli army officer posting pictures of herself posing with a bound palestinian detainees is just the tip of the iceberg. and up next our t. is crosstalk our debate show tonight's question in focus is the war on narcotics waged for years with little success peter lavelle asks his guests whether it is time to try a completely new approach. if you can.

follow me and welcome to cross talk i'm peter lavelle after forty years the so-called war on drugs is achieved preciously little nonetheless governments around the world continue to pursue remarkably similar policies is it time to completely rethink the entire illegal drugs equation from production to consumption. you can. discuss measures to fight drug pandemics i'm joined by even needleman in new york he's the executive director of the drug policy alliance in edinburgh we go to dr ian all over he's a consultant for the united nations office on drugs and crime and in london we have sebastian seville the executive director of release the u.k. center of expertise on drugs the law and human rights and another member of our crosstalk team on the hunger all right gentlemen crosstalk rules in effect that

means you can jump in any time to respond to a panel member first of all i'd like to go to ethan in new york after forty years a trillion dollars has been spent and hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost during what has been called the war on drugs is out war a complete failure or a sliding scale here. well let's call it about a ninety five percent failure you know it may it may be the case that treating a variety of drugs is illegal has reduced the number of people who use it by a modest amount but as with alcohol prohibition the united states is generated extraordinary levels of crime and violence and corruption in the u.s. and all around the world it's responsible for massive incarceration rates the united states and russia and many other places it's responsible for many overdose they tally is responsible in significant ways for the spread of hiv aids around the world among people who use drugs and among the people who come into contact with

them it has as you pointed out peter cost over a trillion dollars there may be more casualties in this war on drugs the united states than any war in our history except possibly the civil war so there's no question that we need to head in a new direction and fortunately there's evidence that that's beginning to happen well if and it's not if i could stay with you then but a lot of people are very critical of the obama administration's policy on the war on drugs even they don't like to use that term anymore there's a lot of disappointment is that a valid thing to say. it's partially fair and partially now i testified before congress last month and when i pointed out was that on the one hand the obama administration is pointing in a new direction on drug policy different from the prior bush administrations the clinton administration nixon administration what have you they have they are for example speaking about drug problems as health issues rather than criminal issues they are pushing to reduce the very harsh mandatory minimum sentences which have

had an extraordinarily disproportionate impact on african-americans in america they did finally support federal funding for needle exchange they have allowed the states that have legalized medical marijuana greater freedom to implement those policies so in all those respects the obama administration is a breath of fresh air on drug policy but on the other hand if you look at the federal drug war budget the same two to one ratio in favor of throwing money down the drain on enforcement and interdiction remains in place you don't see the increase in interest on rehabilitation right they are resistant to speak in the language of harm reduction so there's a real mix story right now ok sebastian if i can go to you are you satisfied with i'm first of all why did why is it such a catastrophe ok ethan said ninety five percent ok i mean wow after a trillion dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives and we're still doing more or less the same thing maybe so slightly different but i mean why was it such a catastrophe well i would i would agree with probably everything. pops.

up to about ninety eight percent i mean prohibition has really been a complete abdication of responsibility by governments politicians to regulate substances like they do with everything else in the world. their response to drugs in essence to outlaw all three plants. and the outcomes of that weren't so tragic it would probably be funny i mean ethan alluded to some of the outcomes but when you think of the writhing weiland that's going on the rivers of money which a flurry into gangsters coffers align them to do stabilise countries i mean it's it's really ridiculous and the time has come to take a fresh look at this and politicians know this but they're very frightened to speak out about it because for so long they've beaten the same drum about how they're going to stamp out drugs and that's not possible well you know if i can go to you i mean we have a sitting president of the united states and a sitting prime minister in britain that have admitted to using illegal drugs i

mean isn't it really time to really completely rethink this i mean there's difference of opinions and due to what degree you decriminalize some of these drugs ok and it can be a big argument about that but is it finally on the agenda where we have to start talking about that and very openly and not being it's it's almost as if it's taboo still. well there's one of two things that ethan said that obviously patiently true in fact he missed out on the saying that much of the international terrorism and international organized crime is funded by drugs money and you've got so many interrelated problems that it's difficult to separate out the criminality of drugs from the problem of drug abuse given that what i would also say is that over the last hundred years we've had drug control if you went back to the early twentieth one thousand nine hundred century the problems of drug abuse illicit drug abuse then or even drugs that were illicit at that time were enormous and so to say the i

don't like the term war on drugs and i concede without doubt that many countries that failed to implement an adequate policy and the reason for that very often in the case of america in south america they talk about we had the plan colombia we had the counter-narcotics efforts in colombia but mixed up with all of that is the reality is that what america is concerned with addressing is a counterinsurgency because they're now dependent on south america for oil so you can not throw out little bit statements and say everything's failed because it hasn't the international conventions have provided all thoughts of ways of providing for treatment and rehabilitation which very often have been ignored and i agree that we don't want to turn every drug user interest criminal but neither do we want to go down the road of legalization because apart from anything else that's

demonstrably impossible no government in the world could legalize drugs and control it effectively because the end result of all of that would be a much worse health problem than we've got at the moment sebastian do you think that's true i mean you do what you really do we do the right it. subash we do first of all good evening on our heads i should i'll just. a quick point to. as well often happens is people do take the position is that they describe drug uses two things either either as criminals or people who need treatment now the vast majority of the router drugs of course. besides the drug use are not criminals and most of them don't need treatment recreational drug users so i think we go look at that as well one third of the population of this country has taken illegal drugs in their lifetime so it's not it was a problem i'm sorry to interrupt sebastian but the problem with all of these things is the distance mystical information about illicit subjects is enormously difficult

to get hold of the best we can say is that the information that we're talking about is informed guesstimates but you can't you can't throw out a statement like that the majority of people that use drugs have no effect and it's recreational look at the abuse of cocaine look at the abuse of cannabis for many people there's mental and heart problems you don't know how many people who die from heart attacks a cocaine you hear when you. know them and let me finish if you look at admissions to london hospitals on a saturday night friday saturday night the forty year olds many of them with heart conditions have actually been using cocaine and you cannot just say well this is all right because people here is here very clear just already even you want to jump in there go ahead. you know i just want to point to three mistakes that he and it's made the first is that he refers to a global drug control system that has evolved over the last century there's

elements of truth to that in dealing with pharmaceutical drugs but with respect to the three drugs from plant products to sebastian put it to the coke a cocaine the opium heroin the marijuana in fact we haven't had a control system we've had a global prohibition regime people sometimes make the mistake of assuming that prohibition represents the ultimate form of regulation i think ian makes that mistake when in fact prohibition represents the abdication of regulation in fact when you have a prohibition system anything you don't control effectively is controlled by the criminals the second mistake he makes is to say that change will never happen reminds me of a senator more a shepherd in one nine hundred thirty one was asked if alcohol prohibition would ever come to an end and he said i think the chances of alcohol prohibition ending in america are about the same as a hummingbird carrying the empire state building on its back to the moon and two years later a national memos repealing alcohol prohibition and i think the same is very much true certainly with respect to the probation of marijuana and thirdly it makes the third mistake yes the statistics are unreliable but would you look at the hundreds

of millions of people who use marijuana to argue with sebastian when he says the vast majority of those have been recreational users is simply flat out false the same is true with respect to cocaine there is abundant epidemiological evidence from all around the world that the vast majority of people who use cocaine or other stimulants were not addicted were recreational users so it's got three core mistakes in the argument he's making and quite frankly when you look in my country we're now will have a marijuana legalization initiative on the ballot in california this november where you look at the growing movement towards the decriminalization or at least legal regulation of cannabis in many countries i think we're definitely headed a new direction in the twenty first century and you want to reply to some of those comments yes i do because i'm putting arguments that i have made a merely pointing out the fact. that it's not possible to generalise in the way that this conversation is going to go i think that the conventions the international conventions do make treatment and and rehabilitation and help for

those that need it high priority and the problem historically has been and we all know in many many mistakes has been turning far too many people into criminals and depending too much on law enforcement to deal with a major problem that problem has gone so far now that it's idle to pretend that drugs don't have an impact on the society at large and there are all right even or for you know i'm going to help i'm going to jump in it is point what after a short break we'll continue our discussion on drug trafficking and other problems stay with. it. if you want to be. wealthy british style like it's a spot on the. market

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military because i thought that it was my duty not that it was something that i could do to help my country i believe my government bought the business necessary for america to vietnam there was a lot of drug abuse there was a lot of murder of american officers by american soldiers there were a lot of news stories to news story out of. this all the war i was stunned i wanted to win a lot of medals and they do have a lot of decorations but afterwards i realize that they they don't mean anything. that informs. i don't i don't i never kept the medal. secret every month we give you the future we hope you understand how we'll get there and what tomorrow brings the best in science and technology from across

russia and around the world join us with your knowledge update on our g. . twenty. summit in the i. think you can look into the. welcome back to cross talk i'm peter lavelle tree mind you were discussing whether countries around the world are doing enough to fight drug addiction. to cocaine and . stood. before let's see what russians think about this the scorch of the modern world illegal drugs this problem is as destructive as it's pervasive with governments all over the world grappling to find solutions there is some public appeal. a research center survey gauge the russians attitude towards drug addiction thirty seven percent saw drug addiction as a symptom of wider social problems twenty nine percent view drug addiction as

a disease which they believe should be treated in hospitals some say drug addicts represent a threat to social order and should be isolated from the rest of society and another six percent take a libertarian view believing drug abuse and its consequences is a matter of personal choice the russian government has a clear view of the problem president made to medvedev sees drugs as a threat to russia's national security and has committed huge resources to combating drug trafficking and addiction peter. ok before we went to the break we were talking about elements of criminalization of some drugs you want to continue your thought before the thought you were hearing before going to the break no i'll just continue briefly with that because of course there are massive problems associated with that with drugs regardless of where they're legal or illegal and the first one is it's already been alluded to as major public health problems

globally aids hiv hepatitis c. all blood borne diseases are exacerbated by needle used in sharing of needle with and this kind of thing many of the prisons around the world are nothing but incubated for these diseases second one we've referred to is is international organized crime and the majority of domestic crime in most countries is probably in one way or another drug related you've got money laundering which has a major impact on finance it isn't just the american subprime mortgage problem it is money laundering and the flight of capital around the world and then you've got the issue of terrorism and the threat to oil and gas supplies in central asia i could go on but we implicit in what ethan is saying anything title to his view is that drugs should be legalized and people should be able to get on with it and make their own choices my argument is that if you do that you will end up with a greater public health problem you will still have criminal with it will undercut

legalize ation and taxation and all of that and you will not alleviate the problem at all and so one of the things free to say what he wants and so is sebastian and have their opinions surely what they should be saying is let's have another look at it and let's do this and i for one would be the first person to say that i think it's time for a new u.n. convention obviously countries aren't complying ok sebastian what if there were this decriminalization and legalization of some if not all these drugs would it create a greater public health risk than we have now. i don't think there's any evidence to support that i mean the simple analogy is to look at that kind of misuse in holland where it's at all intents and purposes available through the regulated bodies and kind of its use amongst young people in holland is lower than amongst young people in the u.k. but i want to disco on to talk about something else about about really following through with a strong prohibition policies i mean even if we could catch say the thirty forty

biggest kingpins in the world to people to margin for one moment the drugs would cease to exist and the places would be immediately taken by less experienced younger potentially more violent people because the amounts of money the reward this work so enormous and so significant that people are always going to be replaced and the idea that somehow i'm measuring use of drugs is an indicator is this really not very useful sort of the pond i mean the harm the drugs cause is a much useful indicator i mean tell you had say in the u.k. if you had five million people who smokes a little bit of cannabis and had a line occur every three months would that be as bad as having five hundred thousand people who smoke crack every day clearly not ok ethan what do you think about that. well i mean i have to say and i appreciate even saying we're entitled

to our own opinions but we're not entitled to our own facts and many of the arguments he's making are remarkably similar to the arguments that were made against repealing alcohol prohibition the united states in the early one nine hundred thirty s. the claim that the criminals who just under sell the market sell cheaper booze and this sort of thing in point of fact if you have a sensible public health policy which taxes some of these drugs taxes these drugs keep the price high enough to discourage consumption but low enough to read a black market for coming in that moralist deals with that issue i mean some years ago the united nations office on drugs and crime to consult an estimate of the global value of the black market in drugs at roughly four hundred billion dollars a year or seventy eight percent of global trade that's a massive thing remember it's not drugs that are filling our prisons drugs that are empowering terrorists and creating crime and corruption violence it's not drugs pre-sale that's doing that it's drug prohibition it's a failed prohibitionist policy so we have a choice when it comes to drugs we can continue with the failed policy of the past

we can continue with the militarization and criminalization policy that empowers criminals all around the world from afghanistan to jamaica from russia to the united states that generates vast black markets and that is singularly unsuccessful in reducing drug abuse or we can move in the direction of allowing these drugs to be taxed controlled and regulated in a responsible way as we're trying to do with other substances ok subash and i both agree they give it the incredibly evident failures of past policies we do need to head in this direction ok why can't some of the things that ethan is been saying be incorporated in that because i think everyone agrees these drugs are not going to go away no matter what we do they're always going to be out there and someone is always going to try to make money off it under current conditions i mean i'm just trying to imagine even the reason we had some sort of magic power that you could click your fingers to my cease to exist would do. well be a better place still be

a great demand for stimulants and possibly we would move to something worse like methamphetamine so i think this idea of getting rid of substances is really not the way to go it's how to effectively regulation control it like we do with everything else ok a thing i mean one of the things you were saying earlier i think is really interesting is that there are different numbers about how large the illicit drug trade in the world is but it's remarked the number of the you use the i came across a slightly smaller one but that's almost exactly the amount of money that is being used to fight this so-called war on drugs i mean it's remarkable that the value of it and the cost of trying to confront it is almost equal again i mean there must be a different way of approaching this because you know it's employing cynical on the other side it's really funds these huge judicial systems and police systems and all of this here i mean it's almost an industry on both sides they both thrive on each other. well peter i think you put it exactly right that if you look at who's really

benefiting from the current global war on drugs is prohibition the system it's really two elements one is on the one hand it's the traffickers it's the politicians who make money from this it's all the people benefiting from the illegality of the drugs combined with the market and on the other hand it's these prison industrial complex is these law enforcement complexes it's people getting more and more jobs and money both as part of their legal salaries or through corruption who are also profiting and you were you seen of the last thirty or forty years is that each of these two groups the traffickers on the one hand the enforcements on the other keep getting bigger and bigger and wealthier and more powerful and the victims are essentially all the rest of us they're all the rest of us who use drugs all the rest of us who don't use drugs none of whom are really getting much benefit at all from the current system so i want to say we're speaking here as an advocate for different policies i'm speaking here as a former professor who's an analyst but i'm also speaking here is a parent and when you look at this policy which you realize is that the current drug policies are doing nothing to protect our children if anything the people have

the greatest access to illegal drugs in my country most others are young people so the whole notion that we need to continue with this failed prohibition is policy in order to protect the kids that's the ultimate lie of all subash and if i go to you is it institutionally driven i mean is this is this the inertia that we're facing is that everyone says it's really really bad but there's a lot of people that are. producers i mean you have the police on one side of the border buying what guns and then you have illegally illegally people buying guns on the other side of the border and it's just good business i mean it just keeps going on and on it's amazingly cynical. as it is i think i agree with what you think about and also there's been so many myths propecia about drug use over the last forty years but somehow to talk a new language a new ways of doing things can seem sort of counter-intuitive to people they've

been sort of misled by politicians for so long so the only way to deal with this is to stamp it out that to suggest anything else makes you sound somehow like you're encouraging drug use and not something else which is perpetuated by by the by the drug war is that people like us who want to see change somehow pro-drug years of course we're not in fact probably one tighter control on drugs when the prohibition of screws. right now there's obviously no control on drugs whatsoever ok even if i go to you i mean one of the things is that all of this the prison populations in the united states and the u.k. this is a by changing this approach to drugs we could see quite a few of the prison cells emptied. but i think that's exactly right i mean united states we've gone from a half a million people behind bars in one nine hundred eighty to two point three million people today in bars and the number one thing driving that is the war on drugs

united states we have less than five percent of the world's population but almost twenty five percent of the world's incarcerated population i should point out is not just in the u.k. but second only to the united states when it comes to incarcerating its fellow citizens is russia russia is second to the united states where it comes to rates of incarceration it's also filling its prisons with nonviolent drug offenders who are put in contact with much worse criminals and in a way the attitudes in russia are almost like the attitudes were in the u.s. a decade ago they still pursuing the same old failed policies without thinking clearly and gentlemen it is we've all run out of time you many thanks to our guest in oliver ethan nadelmann and sebastian seville and thanks to our viewers for watching us here darkie see you next time and remember cross talk rules. can you. still. want.

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