here with r t live from moscow the headlines libyan rebels rejects colonel gadhafi is offer of talks about the country's future the national transitional council says it wants to see him in jail and not at the negotiating table. bloodshed in syria continues despite promises of press reforms with activists claiming at least five people were killed over the weekend the arab league has become the latest international body to pressure president assad to end the violence. and the ultimate retreat a russian company plans to open the first ever space hotel in just five years it

will cost potential tourist one million dollars to enjoy the out of this world view the political pressure to tell the. next robust debate is guaranteed in cross talk as peter the bell on his gas discounts the war on drugs the next ago and its heavy cost. will. remain you delayed just in some instances. from the realms. we've dumped a few jerks. if. you think you're. below it well come across non-computer all about

the war on drugs has been declared a failure the us government has spent more than two and a half trillion dollars fighting this campaign over the past forty years but the problem has only gotten worse and more deadly is it now time to seriously consider decriminalization and we have some illegal drugs. can. cross talk what went so wrong fighting drugs i'm joined by geoffrey my run in newton he's a senior lecturer and director of undergraduate studies in the department of economics at harvard university he's also a senior fellow at the catch of institute and he's also the author of the book drug war crimes the consequences of prohibition and in san diego we cross the ac one hundred seven he is a senior partner at the acer hutchinson law group all right gentlemen this is cross talk about means crosstalk rules in effect but before let's have a look at a short report about this forty year old war. a worldwide enterprise worth some

four hundred billion dollars a year illegal drug trafficking has become one of the most ferocious lucrative businesses in the world alongside only the oil industry and the arms trade and single largest market the u.s. is also the world's biggest consumer of cocaine heroin and marijuana shipped from colombia and mexico and although the u.s. government has been hard pressed to control him for tail going to college straight drug related violence has spread like wildfire across latin america and especially mexico our insatiable demand for illegal drugs fuels the drug trade our inability to prevent weapons from being illegally smuggled across the border to arm these criminals causes that that stuff. police officers soldiers and civilians mexican officials have long been trying to draw attention to the torrent of illegal weapons flowing in from the us which conveniently sustained drug cartels and crime with have seen more than forty thousand mexicans killed in the last five years and

a recent report by the global commission on drug policy denounced the recalcitrant violence calling the global war on drugs i feel your stop the war on drugs and let's be more constructive in trying to reduce the consumption if you remove all the duction and mark this so profitable that all time to be someone we could be able to risk his life to continue to be traffic and indeed profit margins related to the drug industry are huge and is the main factor that sustains it and many argue that if some drugs were legalized it would help put a cap on their price and the stop to the incessant violence all the while purging the economy of a black market making drugs more available if this report suggests will make it harder to keep our communities healthy and safe the fact that each dollar that an american spends on drugs goes to fuel a job or not of corruption and violence is no revelation and neither is the fact that the u.s. war on drugs has not managed to keep that while and said they nor yield any

substantial results but whether or not legalization can provide an alternative that wouldn't open the floodgates to an even larger problem remains to be seen and so does the prospect of any other viable strategy. for crosstalk r.t. . ok gentlemen i want to go to geoffrey first i'm sure i'm sure both of you aware of the global commission on drug policy and it's a pretty dismal report card after spending two point five trillion dollars in fighting what's called the war on drugs jeffrey just what went wrong would give me your priority list well this is what needs to be fixed first. well i think the first thing that went wrong was thinking of the whole policy issue as a war in one particular war on drugs it doesn't make that the metaphor that doesn't make any sense drugs don't have guns drugs don't have tanks they can't fight back

so war on drugs is just a non sequitur it's actually a war on keek will who want to consume drugs and once you think about it in those terms then it's obvious that a bunch of other bad things are going to happen we're going to spend a ton of money we're probably not going to dissuade that many people from wanting to consume drugs we're going to generate a huge black market and in black markets we have violence and corruption exactly as was documented in the lead into this discussion as we all know about in mexico and latin america and afghanistan and all sorts of other places that pursue their gross war on drugs and so what do you think about that the whole premise of the last forty years has been wrong what do you think. i disagree with it ok fundamentally and the introduction to the program ok you've got to be clear if you're going to say what we've been doing is wrong i don't mind changing the metaphor but to reduce the seriousness of our global commitment to reducing illegal drugs i think it's

wrong first of all we for it to stay in the past over all drug use fifty percent cocaine use by seventy five percent during the last forty years whenever you look at legalization if that's the solution to reduce the powers of a cartel then forty going to legalize you can debate marijuana but that's not going to solve a problem because they're going to be peddling in methamphetamine heroin cocaine if you legalize each of those they're going to continue to increase consumption of those the problems in our society and i don't think anybody really wants to legalize methamphetamine or or cocaine or heroin that's not the solution this is a commitment to reducing illegal drugs we've had success and that certainly we need to make improvements but let's don't throw this out and say let's legalize everything and anything about that jeffrey what would you legalize would you legalize everything across the board. i would legalize everything across the board so let me agree with mr hutchinson that just legalizing marijuana is

a relatively small issue in terms of all the ancillary negatives of black markets and corruption and and violence huge fraction of all those negatives that we associate with the illegal drug trade they are due to other drugs not mainly to marijuana so we really do have to have an honest conversation about all these other drugs where i really disagree is the view that drug prohibition is reduced is keeping the consumption of drugs substantially lower than it otherwise would be there's just no evidence for that whatsoever ok we don't have perfect evidence on that issue because very few countries have ever taken the legalization experiment but the extent we do have evidence it suggests very strongly that consumption of drugs would not change very much even if we were to legalize second even if it goes up and even if it goes up a lot we have to balance whatever negatives might come from that against all the huge negatives we get by attempting to prevent that increase in use and so it's not just a question of whether prohibition has some potential benefit in the sense of reducing

drug use if you consider that a benefit if the prohibition has huge costs and the claim of legalize is that all the costs of prohibition are far worse than any possible benefit it might have from reduced use ok so if we look at just the prohibition is more costly then legalization that's me jeffrey's piece this is you i mean you obviously probably disagree with that. well i do but first rock jeffrey first being very honest on this and defining the debate if you want to decrease violence or the powers the cartel you have to legalize everything and i don't think that's the debate that's going to win in america or across the globe when you look at our historical experience experience though in alaska alaska decriminalized marijuana in the seventy's they recall it criminalized it in the ninety's by a vote of the people because drug usage went up marijuana use usage went up and there was concern for parents with their teens and so that is

a historical experience that you know. decriminalization did not work and it's a it's so i think that when you look at the cost of prohibition it's another dangerous product you want to put cocaine heroin increased methamphetamine use ecstasy use all out in the marketplace i don't think that's the solution for america jeffrey what about you know prevention because it seems like so much money is put into you know fighting this with using the military and we see that the mexicans are doing here i mean if we just put a lot more effort on prevention wouldn't that be more more cost effective i mean it really is a consumption issue at the end of the day isn't it. it's certainly consumption is a huge part of it again we have to balance that against the cost of whatever policy we adopt to try to reduce consumption there's absolutely nothing wrong with thinking about prevention and some kinds of preventions sort of may be somewhat effective but i think it's misleading it's sort of

a false hope to believe that by putting lots more money into prevention we can drastically reduce the demand for drugs and therefore not have to worry about the problem all the evidence would suggest that while prevention is clearly beneficial for many people and treatment is obviously should be available for people who want to reduce their drug use lots and lots of extra dollars spent on prevention and are probably going to make a very minor difference to the overall demand for drugs rightly or wrongly the demand for drugs the demand for other intoxicating things like alcohol seems to be a pervasive and persistent feature of human beings it's just something we can't change very much and so neither prohibition nor prevention is going to change the underlying reality that some people are going to use those substances it's important to note many people use them without adverse effects to themselves or others a small fraction of course do use them in ways which are unfortunate for themselves or harm other people and that's what we should be focusing on not just the use by

itself because much use is basically innocuous it and see if i can go to you is there a middle ground here or could be an prohibition but still some kind of decriminalization legalization regulation can you is there a middle ground that we can find you because this report that just came out that i mentioned beginning of the program says that this so-called what we call the war on drugs is that utter failure what do we need to rethink because we can if we continue down the same path which is very expensive it clogs up the digital system people are put in prison for using drugs maybe they should not be put in prison i mean it has to be a fundamental rethinking because it seems to just get more and more expensive more and more violent. i don't disagree with terms of a middle ground we need to criticize a century ago first go ahead. yes we need to rethink some things that's why i support the right on crime initiative which wants to reduce our incarceration rate for those who got an addiction problem utilizing drug prevention courts where it's

alternative to incarceration and many of the states like texas which has high incarceration rates are reduced and then put in more money into reentry program for rehabilitation programs they're trying to reduce the incarceration right these are absolutely correct things to do we are reducing our spending on prevention i think we need to continue to emphasize that that message that we give nationally and internationally makes a difference in consumption as well jeff and you want to make a quick comment on that before we go to the break yeah i just want to say i think the crucial part of finding the middle ground is that the supply side of the market the production and sale ok as well as possession has to be legal if you just decriminalize possession but you still try vigorously to keep the market underground to go after the traffickers to go after production you're still going to have all the corruption and violence that we currently have so again it's

a false hope to think that we can have an easy middle ground just by decriminalizing demand side you have side of the chart here just let me jump in here we're going to a short break and after that short break we'll continue our discussion on drugs stay with our. please. please. use.

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the macro rostock on peter lavelle remind you we're talking about the war on drugs . can you say. ok jeffrey and i think about feeling newton and i think one of the interesting things i found out researching this program is that politicians play a very big role in this policy and you know when they are up for election everybody wants to be tough on crime tough on drugs tough. on this stuff on everything tough on terrorism you just name it tough on something and there's not really much of a real discussion at least in the united states about how to deal with this growing problem of potentially coming from the south is this one of the bottlenecks that we have been having a more blunt discussion about how to deal with drug abuse and with the drug importation into the united states well i think that the politicians are for the most part in both sides of the aisle democrats republicans conservative liberal are

not talking about this issue very much but i think they're reflecting the views of the voters in the united states and similarly elsewhere i agree with mr absence in that there is not currently the desire of the will from a significant majority or even the you know that large minority to legalize hard drugs like cocaine heroin methamphetamine and so it's not going to happen for a long long time it's not going to happen until or unless there is substantial change in attitude substantial change in understanding by the voters about what the actual evils are my view is that the evils are coming from the policy many of the evils are coming from the policy not from use per se but that's not the widely held view ok until i'm able to persuade more people other people to change their minds hey we're not going to see a change in politicians behavior they're just reflecting what voters want ok so if i go to san diego what do you think about how politicians deal with this i mean it be they need it they want to show that you know they will be completely against

this without looking into new ideas more nuanced ideas we'd like would geoffrey's be bringing up and look at some of the expense experiments and policies that say in europe that they have tried but some people would say are a success. well the politicians and i've been a former congress they do reflect the the public will and so the public is not in a mood to change the current illegal status they don't want to move toward the criminalization politicians are open to greater different ideas for example the push toward drug treatment courts alternatives to incarceration that is not the criminalization bad it's alternatives to incarceration and recognizing that there's addiction problems whenever you look at the problems of violence and mexico it's a concern to everyone we want to be able to support the reduction of a at the importance of the rule of law colombia has been

a success through strong leadership they've reduced the power of the cartels the. terrorist organizations that fuel the drug trafficking there and so there are signs of success we need to build upon those and i think there's an increased willingness to look at new ideas you know jeffrey south not to change the fundamental point ok jeffrey a lot of the south of the border a lot of people would say the united states is far more concerned with security than with the consumption issue i mean should should it be balanced out a lot more because a lot of those guns i mean i don't know all the numbers because it's not you legal but the guns come from the north and they go to the south and that's where all this killing is happening. that's certainly true that guns are right now coming substantially from the us but it's silly to think they're trying to prevent the guns from crossing the border to mexico or further south would make a huge difference there are lots of countries that produce guns if we do more to interdict guns going south will just be more violence related to the illegal gun

trade the fundamental fact is there's a huge demand for guns right now in mexico because of the violence because of the risk and so we're not going to change that with any policy toward the united states it's only by deescalating the war that we would have had a significant difference to go back to your point about is there any middle way hey i think a very useful point it's not my absolutely preferred policy but a very useful thing to note is that while mexico had drug violence before their sort of middle of two thousand and seven when we started started to see this huge escalation in mexican drug violence they still had prohibition they still had some but it was relatively mild it was quite mild compared to what we've seen in the last three or four years what happened because that was that felipe calderon escalated the war against the traffickers in mexico escalated the war against the cartels the more policy interferes the more it declares war against the traffickers and really tries to fight that war the more auxilary violence we're going to see so if mexico would just go back to what it was doing before two thousand and seven not

fully legalizing but just scaling back the war that would be highly beneficial that would be a huge step in the right direction so if i get to ask you i mean so violence begets violence here you lower the threshold you lower the amount of killer jeffrey brings up a good point there what do you think about that. well i mean i understand the point and sure you can reduce your targeting of the cartels by the calderon administration in mexico but that's not going to help the long term and they have to recognize they have recognize they have some institutional problems in mexico where the cartels are more powerful than law enforcement you've got to strengthen the institution of the rule of law in mexico and that is the goal of what they're trying to accomplish that doesn't happen overnight and. so this solution is not to decriminalize to legalize to hopefully put the cartels out of business for one thing or the cartels or engage an alien smuggling and so how much are you

going to legalize to try to put them out of business even though in prohibition in the 1930's you perhaps when you legalized alcohol reduce some violence you didn't put the lid cosa nostra the mafia out of business they even continue until today they just look for for a new business opportunities and that's what the cartels in mexico are doing and will continue to do so the answer is not legalization but the answer is strengthening the rule of law in mexico ok jeffrey what about just taxing it all i mean america is a place of free markets ok so why don't you just make it into. an into alcohol ok i mean they pay their health risk obviously related to both of them i don't wait until you do that with some not all but most most of the drugs. it's turned into a business it's a back row in particular is a very tobacco is a very very useful example the us and the world started to recognize in the early

one nine hundred fifty s. that tobacco was a much more dangerous product than had previously been recognized we did not prohibit it or outlaw what we engaged in all sorts of public and private public health initiatives education initiatives and slowly but surely over thirty forty years tobacco consumption in the united states dropped enormously the fraction of people smoked the amount that's being consumed as gone down a huge amount without any prohibition without the black market violence or any of that so a system in which we have some sort of syntax and which we have regulations on minimum purchase ages in which there are possibly sort of government funds going to help with treatment and so that has been my assessment my analyses are much much better ratio of benefits to cost does it keep us absolutely zero of course not doesn't prevent all use no but it recognizes that use has some negatives but prohibition has some negatives we have to balance those two things now we should

emphasize we're not going to keep abuse at a teeny level with a big tax if you have that big tax is going to evade the tax and just going to drive the market underground so we can make some attempt to reduce use with moderate sin taxes but we have to accept that legalization is likely to lead to some increase in use not dramatic increase in uses but that needs to be is one side of the ledger and the other side is all the negatives done by prohibition and if i go to you i'm a former smoker about four months now i haven't had a cigarette so and i only quit for health reasons not because of the syntax but what about that turning into a business like alcohol and cigarettes and things like that i mean just as jeffrey said i mean these to take some of it away from the black market where you have control words with regular. that's the model can be debated but jeffrey pointed out the fundamental question do you want to increase

consumption. and whatever you whether it's tobacco or alcohol the legalization increases consumption historically now you've got a balance that with what happens on the other side of the ledger as jeffrey points out when it comes to tobacco they we've invested enormous amounts of money and tobacco education we need to make sure that we do that in terms of the other illegal drugs cocaine methamphetamine we need to invest in education but there was there is the black market on tobacco even because people want to evade the taxes they circumvent paths and so we would be really negligent if we thought that we're going to reduce the black market or impact the cartels because they can engage in trafficking and black market methamphetamine ecstasy just like in pharmaceuticals today they're all regulated but but there's still

a black market for it oxy cotton which is you know an opiate that's sold the black market it is it is part of the criminal enterprise and it's totally regulated today so i think we have to have a honest debate as jefferson gauged and alternately though you balance it and i think the world is and believes in its heart that if we decriminalize it increases consumption so let's try other things reducing the incarceration rates let's look at better education rehabilitation programs i chair family to give you the last word on this program do you think americans will change their attitude about drug laws as the violence gets worse and worse as comes from the south to the north. i don't see there being i don't anticipate a big change in attitudes by americans in the near future with the possible exception of marijuana and the medical ization of marijuana down in about sixteen

states they may well spread and the way medicalization works of marijuana is it's very close in many ways to being de facto legalization but that aside i don't think that there is going to be a fundamental change unless perhaps the kind of violence we're seeing in mexico were to spread at that level in the u.s. and if that happens then there might be a fundamental rethinking but unfortunately i think we're sort of stuck in a crowd lines all right on that point gentlemen thank you very much many thanks to my guest today in san diego and in new guinea thanks to our viewers for watching us here to see you next sunday remember.

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