In an opinion column published Sunday in the Trinidad & Tobago Express, Emile Elias puts forward a case for the legalisation of drugs. First he notes that while the Ministry of Health has run advertisements in the press quoting World Health Organisation figures that tobacco use is bad for your health, tobacco is still legal:

WITCO [The West Indian Tobacco Company] in Trinidad, seemingly “smelling the coffee” some years ago, decided to diversify out of tobacco and invested some of their significant profits in a massive orchid farm. At the time I thought this was taking the concept of vertical integration a bit too far - first you kill them with cigarettes and then you sell them the flowers for the funeral!In spite of its awful ill-effects, tobacco is still legal, but the fight against tobacco is gaining ground. You cannot smoke on a BWIA [West Indies Airways] plane, or in most restaurants. However, possession and use of other drugs such as marijuana and cocaine are illegal.

And then moves onto the main crux of his main argument, that the war on drugs, i.e. the illegalisation of drugs, has simply not worked and instead has had the effect of increasing the power and wealth of criminals who profit enormously because of the very illegal status of their merchandise:

Let me make it clear - I hate drugs. I have never tried drugs. I hate what they do to individuals and their families and friends. And most of all, I hate the fact that they make criminals rich. But let us face facts - we have lost the war on drugs. We are like resistance fighters picking off the occasional occupying enemy infantry, one at a time, while the Mr Bigs grow richer. So what do we do?I say change the war. Open a new front, so to speak, by altering the economic fundamentals and taking the massive profits out of drugs. The truth is a kilo of cocaine in the jungles of Colombia and Bolivia costs US$500 a kilo to produce but by the time it reaches the streets of Miami its street value is US$60,000 a kilo. That is why we have lost the war on drugs. Making it illegal has created enormous profits for criminals at all levels.

Read it all here.

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