Drugs, education, acceptation

Hey my dear readers,
I was fooling around the net when I saw that amazing documentary on the way past government dealt with drugs (see War on Drug) and the fact it did not work.

The film is very well directed with a lot of power messages from past presidents, authors and other World personalities I would recommend that movie.
Now the message sent was half clear on the solution they would propose. They talked about hard drugs like heroin and cocaine, to end up saying they should legalize and regulate marijuana... a little bit of a dimension problem. Hence not a bold move; a move that looks more like (scary) baby step. While some personalities really said it clear that you need to understand the drug addict (I do believe that too), for me you can win a war if you look at your own people, meaning Americans should educate and care about their backyard. The reality that the US is the first consumer far ahead of all the others means that they have a wrong angle of attack towards their social system. You don't do drugs if your happy unless you're an idiot that like to shoot himself in the foot or you suffer from complexes that are reflecting your society (examples are pouring like Congolese prostitutes in Pointe Noire's night clubs).

"If I was President" (W.J.)
I believe you cannot fight this war unless you act on both end of the rope: production and consumption. They spend millions in destroying the crops, why not spending these millions in subventions for crops that could make farmers quit the drug business? If cocaine pays that much, lets the country create a new economy based on subventions to farmers: 1kg of corn the price of 1kg of cocaine! that makes the poor farmer a man sustaining his family AND abandoning the cocaine business. Let them do that for 5 years and you'll see the drug harvesting dropping 90%. Now I only mentioned the subvention, but it can be that they would get hospitals and schools or free electricity/water and lesser direct subvention. The message that Colombian farmers send to their government is "you don't help us, so we're going somewhere else to find help". Now that can be reversed, not without some corruption and abuses of course but no great system goes without abuses and corruption.
At the same time you regulate and control the cocaine production to a certain volume of total mass a year. All farmers must be registered, all produced crop weighted and registered. Heavy fines to whoever is caught producing more, the most important is IGNORING THE DRUG LORDS.
That would basically be a development plan to fight the drug system in Colombia, by redirecting their workforce towards a legal trade, looking beyond drug production and letting drug Lords like sitting ducks. Trade would probably react by increasing the price but that's just like the Oil price, it follows the international geopolitic tensions. The result would be price increase on the other end (consumption end), so the market would shift to another country till it has nowhere else to run.
If it is not the best of options, prone to create lots of abuses, better these abuses than lack of sovereign control and uncontrollable violence.

Now a bit of Maths

• Cocaine farming monthly wedge = 1000 USD per household (67000 households, several sources like this one).

• Development of a new farming economy, based on subvention (wood or whatever sort of crop that would fit the local ecosystem) = overall (direct and indirect subventions) 1500 USD per household (counting conservatively 15% being coca farmers we talk about 450000 households, 18% of colombian population)

• Total development plan = 675 MUSD/year that we can top up to 1 BUSD/year (GDP for agriculture being 26.3 BUSD in 2010, 9% of Colombia's GDP the same year)

I don't plan to come and speak directly to Mr President, nor do I think I hold the truth of it, but if a PhD in chemistry can figure this out imagine what an expert in economy can implement then!!! To finish with my little prose of the day, the one thing that I really liked in this documentary was that the countries that implemented different approach to this social issue did not try to hit the consumer any-more. They tried to understand the sociological illness behind the drug consumption. Some European countries are a long way to understand that (e.g. I know the social issues in France and the refusal to accept some truths) and the message the populations send to their governments should be more acknowledged. Eventually there is a parallel to be drown with human traffic (e.g. prostitution) and arm smuggling, also increasing dramatically, especially in Europe.