Top U.S. General Says Marijuana Legalization Makes Latin American Officials Less Eager to Join the Futile War on Drugs

Testifying before the House
Armed Services Committee on Wednesday, Gen. John F. Kelly, who is
in charge of the U.S. Southern Command,
complained that marijuana legalization in Colorado and
Washngton has made it harder to enlist Latin American countries in
the war on drugs:

We’ve been encouraging these countries to be in the drug
fight for 25 years. The levels of violence that our drug
problem has caused in many of these countries is
just astronomical. And so when we talk about
decriminalizing, the example I would give you is the two
states that voted to decriminalize marijuana, or legalize
marijuana. Most of the…countries I deal with were in utter
disbelief that we would, in their opinion, be going in that
direction, particularly after 25 years of encouraging them to
fight our drug problem in their countries and, you know, in
their littorals. So that’s kind of where they are on it.
They’re very polite to me, but every now and again when
they’re not so polite, the term hypocrite gets into the
discussion. But frankly, the crime rate is so high in many of
these countries and the fact that they see us turning
away from the drug fight…They’re starting to chatter a lot
about, “Well, why don’t we just step back and let it flow?”

Contrary to Kelly’s gloss, “the levels of violence” in Latin
America are caused not by “our drug problem” but by our insistence
that other countries help us solve it by cracking down on
suppliers, a strategy that has never
succeeded in cutting off the northward flow of drugs but has
resulted in many
deaths. It is the height of arrogance for the U.S. government
to demand that Colombians, Bolivians, and Peruvians help enforce
its arbitrary pharmacological decrees, especially when that effort
is not only futile but demonstrably harmful. So it is not hard to
see why the officials with whom Kelly deals might react in the way
he describes to signs that Americans are having second thoughts
about this crazy chemophobic crusade. But recommitting to the
never-ending, always-failing “drug fight” is not the only way to
avoid charges of hypocrisy. If the experiments in Colorado and
Washington lead to a broader re-examination of the war on drugs, I
would count that as a benefit, not a cost.

Kelly claimed “countries that have decriminalized or legalized
drugs are all now trying to figure out ways to turn back the
clock,” because “legal or decriminalized drugs bring crime, bring
higher addiction rates, bring higher, you know, substance abuse
problems.” He did not cite any specific examples, which is not
surprising, since no country has ever “legalized drugs” in the
sense of eliminating penalties for production, distribution, and
possession. The closest example is
Uruguay, which has approved a plan to make marijuana legally
available but has not implemented it yet.

[Thanks to Tom Angell of Marijuana Majority for the tip.]