Drug addiction is a dangerous disease that threatens the future of humanity. The United Nations and other human rights organizations around the world try, from time to time, to combat drugs and treat addiction. Every year at the end of June, events are planned in order to spread the call to battle drugs and addiction.
Monday June 28 is the start date of the Sixth Conference of the International Day Against Drug Addiction in Cairo. The title this year is “Drug Culture and its Relationship to Popular Culture”. The participants are scholars, doctors, police officers and authors all specialized in battling drug addiction.
While this is doubtlessly a positive act, is this event or this vision enough or even effective in halting the spread of addiction or the drugs that are causing the addiction? Monitoring the comments in the global media it seems that attention centers around two principal areas.
The first is how to reduce the supply of drugs through the efforts of police and by arresting smugglers, drug-dealers and distributors. The second area is reducing demand by creating awareness of the health hazards of drug use and their effect on the family and society as a whole along with providing treatment and rehabilitation to addicts.
The importance of these mustn’t not be underestimated. But what has been the result of all this effort over the years?
Regretfully, drugs in their various forms, are still abundant and pose a threat to society. A UN report states that security officers have confiscated no more than 10-20 percent of the global drug supply. This means that the drug cartels have succeeded at smuggling between 80-90 percent of their production to consumers.
There is definitely something wrong. Drug addiction is being dealt with as though it was an economic issue governed by the law of supply and demand. This is an unhealthy and futile theory. Clearly the policy against drug addiction has ignored an important angle: combating drug producers and destroying drug production centers. This angle should have precedence.
The issue relates to two types of drugs: the traditional planted drugs such as marijuana and opium and the manufactured drugs.
We must destroy drug plantations by any means necessary and at the same time undertake a study of problems facing farmers and offer them more profitable and valuable crops.
The combating of manufactured drugs must move in two balanced and synchronized lines, the first being firm government monitoring of the factories necessary for the extraction and production of those kinds of drugs. Discovering where these factories are located is easy enough for all countries to do on their own. The second line is destroying the drug factories using military force and by way of foreign military interference under Security Council resolutions. Drug production centers around Columbia and some Central American countries and the Caribbean and the Golden Triangle are obvious targets.
Recently outside interference in internal matters has become legitimate where it serves economic and political interests. It has therefore become imperative to interfere in the affairs of drug manufacturing or planting countries, over and above economic or political aims. If such a step were agreed upon through the United Nations, it would get international consensus.
Battling drugs requires political will and military might rather than annual demonstrations and conferences. After all, if we want to get rid of a poisonous tree we must uproot it and not just destroy its fruits.
Only one question remains: Does anyone have anything to gain from the continued existence of these drugs? The answer is yes or no depending on who makes the political decision and when.
