Colombian president Gustavo Petro: The international drug control regime has failed.

The international drug control regime, with its gravity center in Vienna, has failed. The latest World Drug Report from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime demonstrates this. Illicit drugs are readily available to all, while controlled medicines do not reach the patients who need them most. In other words, this global, anachronistic, and indifferent system has failed to destroy the illicit substance market or promote the legitimate medicine market. It insists on pitting the state against the market and thus endangers our countries and our people. This war on drugs has failed primarily due to: The increase in fentanyl consumption in the United States, resulting in over 100,000 deaths per year. One million murders in Latin America, making it the most violent region in the world due to drug criminalization. Tens of millions of people imprisoned throughout the drug trafficking chain, including peasant farmers who produce coca leaves. The destruction of democracy due to corruption and the armed takeover of territories by criminal organizations in Latin America. The health of our societies is at stake. The risk posed by the use and abuse of illicit drugs, both natural and synthetic, can only be mitigated through a harm reduction policy that prioritizes a public health approach. Colombia calls on the membership of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs to place the right to health at the center of its debates. The health of our democracies is at stake. Drug mafias, created by prohibition and criminalization, transfer their money northward to benefit the financial system controlled by major capital, leaving violence and destruction in our global South. They do not want strong institutions to combat them, nor empowered and educated populations with their basic needs met. They need them weak to corrupt and co-govern. They need them poor and subservient to cultivate, produce, and traffic. Colombia urges the Commission on Narcotic Drugs to recognize that arms trafficking, money laundering, and corruption are part of the engine of the global phenomenon of illicit drugs. Colombia implemented all the wrong formulas imposed on us from outside for a war on drugs. We bore the dead, entrusted soldiers and police with an impossible mission, wasted money from our budget, turned our peasant, indigenous, and Afro communities into enemies, violated rights massively and systematically, contributed to destroying our ecosystems, and sacrificed our development for a war others wanted. What the world calls the global drug problem reflects above all the loneliness of millions of people in developed societies today addicted to drug consumption and the lack of opportunities for communities within legitimate economies. There is no drug problem, but rather one of development and existence. The denialist spirit prevailing in the face of the multilateral drug system’s shipwreck is forcing countries to respond within the framework of flexible interpretations of conventions. Colombia is doing this on two levels. Internally, our national drug policy places the fundamental rights of Colombians at the heart of our action. Coca leaves are part of our history, and they are not the problem you have in Vienna. We will provide oxygen to the peasant farmers who cultivate coca leaves and suffocate those who profit from trafficking cocaine. This drug policy is part of the quest for total peace within and beyond borders, peace with local communities, and peace with nature, the right to life above all. Internationally, Colombia has called for a reassessment of the global drug situation. We will start in our region of Latin America and the Caribbean and want to bring this debate to the rest of the world. A former president of the United States said, and I quote, “with the United Nations when possible, without the United Nations when necessary,” end quote. We believe that everything should be done with the United Nations, but not with a United Nations that is deaf, blind, and silent. (Copied from cndblog.org)
El Pdte. Gustavo Petro envió un mensaje a Viena a los líderes que participan de la Comisión de Estupefacientes de las Naciones Unidas.
El mandatario entregó las razones del fracaso de la guerra contra las drogas y compartió las virtudes de la Política Nacional de Drogas del Gobierno del Cambio.