War On Drugs

The War On Drugs is, in my opinion, one of the greatest policy failures in modern times. The fear and rhetoric thrown about in public by politicians and the media is preventing a sensible assessment on the subject and is costing lives.

In Mexico, a front line in the War On Drugs, 28,000 have been killed since 2006 in the fighting between Mexican Government security forces and the drug cartels. In this interview, President Calderon of Mexico lays the blame squarely with the Americans for the troubles in his country and has called for a debate on drug legalisation.

If your interested in the numbers of deaths caused by 'drugs' in the US relative to the murders in Mexico I have found some statistics of note.

In the USA 435,000 die from smoking related causes each year.
Alcohol kills about 85,000 in the USA each year.
Illegal drugs kill about 17,000 in the USA each year.
Prescription drugs kill about 32,000 each year in the USA each year.   

The first thing to say, and possibly the most important, is that every single person who dies from 'drugs' has elected to do so. This cannot be said of the 28,000 dead in Mexico. It also says something that prescription drugs kill twice as many people in the USA each year than illegal drugs, and yet the prescription drugs don't cause a real war to be fought in a neighbouring country or the outrage in the US.

There are of course many elements to the debate on drugs, and more information and research would be hugely beneficial to the debate. But you've got to wonder, if these simple statistics don't provide enough evidence to for an open and fair debate on the subject, how bad has it got to get before they do?  

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