Juan Manuel Santos is the former president of Colombia, which makes him a bit of a drug-policy expert by default.<\/p>\n
Center to a\u00a0generations-long civil war is a struggle<\/a>\u00a0over his country\u2019s coca-producing regions, which are responsible for as much as 60% of the raw material supplying global cocaine demand.<\/p>\n Coca production is both a key means of subsistence for rural farmers as well as a clear sign of the severe economic imbalance between the global south and north. As such, international cocaine policy \u2014\u00a0such as the 25 years\u2019 worth of the weed-killer glyphosate sprayed onto 4.2 million acres of Colombian farmland<\/a>, a U.S.-backed interdiction campaign that Santos opposed \u2014 is propelled by political and economic concerns rather than public safety or public health.<\/p>\n Which makes cocaine a typical drug. Politics, and not science or public health, inspire the classifications and restrictions imposed on illegal drugs including cannabis and heroin as well as cocaine,\u00a0according to a report released this week from the Global Commission on Drug Policy<\/a>, a Switzerland-based organization of former heads of state, of which Santos is a member.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was a political decision\u201d to classify cocaine and cannabis as dangerous drugs, and to allow other powerful and deadly narcotics, like opiates, to be prescribed by doctors, Santos said, as per the Guardian. \u201cAccording to the studies we\u2019ve seen over the past years, substances like cannabis are less harmful than alcohol.\u201d<\/p>\n Other members of the commission include British billionaire and drug-policy reform advocate Richard Branson; former U.K. deputy prime minister Nick Clegg; Paul Volcker, a former chairman of the U.S. federal reserve; and former presidents and prime ministers from Nigeria, South Africa, Chile, Portugal, Poland, Switzerland and others.<\/p>\n Individual countries are free to set their own drug laws,\u00a0but three international treaties<\/a>\u00a0agreed to under the auspices of the United Nations also influence drug-control policy. The most recent international treaty on drug control was signed in 1988, which means neither scientific understandings nor practical policies have been reviewed in more than 30 years. Controls are recommended by medical and scientific experts, but \u2014 like most laws \u2014 are voted on by U.N. member-states part of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs, which leaves classifications ultimately beholden to politics.<\/p>\n And that is a significant problem, said Ruth Dreifuss, the former president of Switzerland and chair of the commission. \u201cThe international system to classify drugs is at the core of the drug control regime,\u201d she said, \u201cand unfortunately the core is rotten.\u201d Dreifuss wants a total overhaul of standing drug classifications, and wants health and medical experts from the\u00a0World Health Organization (WHO)<\/a>\u00a0to lead it.<\/p>\n Though some countries, including the United States, have bullied others into abandoning liberalized drug laws because they violated these treaties, domestic developments make a further mockery of the international drug-control order and further prove the commission\u2019s point.<\/p>\n Thirty-four U.S. states have passed liberalized cannabis laws that violate American federal law, which continues to claim that cannabis is a highly addictive drug with no medical benefit. That statement is directly contradicted by a steady stream of scientific research,\u00a0including a significant review conducted by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.<\/a><\/p>\n These bad policies have worse effects than mere hypocrisy. As much as 80% of the world\u2019s population lacks access to life-saving and life-sustaining medicines, and \u201call of the reasons\u201d why \u201care linked to repression and prohibition-based control systems,\u201d according to the commission.<\/p>\n Restrictive policies set along political lines have fueled both the ongoing human and natural destruction in Colombia as well as the American opiate crisis, according to the commission. More than 70,000 people died of drug overdoses in America in 2017, an annual toll greater than the total number of American dead during more than a decade of combat in Vietnam.<\/p>\n But now what? The former heads of state saying their current counterparts should do something else, something different, all have something in common \u2014 they are all former heads of state, no longer in a position to act politically. The first step is admitting you have a problem. If the former heads of state weren\u2019t quite able to fix the issues they\u2019re not identifying, figuring out why and mustering the political support to put science, and not power or votes, in charge of drug policy might be the commission\u2019s greatest benefit, rather than telling us yet again what most already know.<\/p>\n TELL US<\/strong>, do you think drug classifications have more to do with politics than science?<\/p>\n The post Former Heads of State: Drug Classifications Are All Politics, No Science<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
Juan Manuel Santos is the former president of Colombia, which makes him a bit of a drug-policy expert by default. Center to a\u00a0generations-long civil war is a struggle\u00a0over his country\u2019s coca-producing regions, which are responsible for as much as 60% of the raw material supplying global cocaine demand. Coca productionContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[50,917,6017,2823,81,1173],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36480"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36480"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36480\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36481,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36480\/revisions\/36481"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36480"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36480"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36480"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n
\nRead More: Former Heads of State: Drug Classifications Are All Politics, No Science<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"