Like a Virgin: Secrets They Won't Teach You at Business School

TO WIN THE WAR ON DRUGS

People seem to have forgotten that, decades ago, crime generally wasn’t a good way to make a living: it was after the drug war began that pop culture started to portray drug dealing as a route from poverty to riches. But only a few actually become wealthy, and as Freakonomics authors Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt showed in their 2005 book, many street dealers live with a parent and take part-time jobs to make ends meet. Other studies have shown that many of these exploited workers are hard-core addicts themselves.

To cut off the flow of money to the top criminals, all we have to do is call a halt to the drug war and decriminalise the use of illegal substances.

The war on drugs funnels money to exactly the wrong people: when public officials pursue a tough-on-crime agenda, narcotics dealers profit as drug prices go up, while demand remains the same. This is an industry that earns a staggering $300 billion each year, and, with that sort of money at stake, criminals will do anything to outsmart the law: move their drug manufacturing operations to countries where authorities can’t pursue them; buy heavy weaponry (as in Mexico); infiltrate government agencies (as has happened in many nations, from Peru and Bolivia to part of West Africa); kidnap and intimidate police, politicians and civilians. Criminals get rich while ordinary people pay the price – both in terms of higher taxes and, sometimes, with their lives.

In a world where the drugs problem only gets worse – an estimate by the UN shows that consumption of opiates worldwide, including heroin, increased by 35 per cent between 1998 and 2008 – it’s difficult to imagine criminals reduced to looking for proper jobs. In some Latin American countries the drug cartels are challenging the authority of the government – some of their militias are better equipped than the military, and the gangs have been known to provide communities with security and basic social assistance. In Afghanistan, a fair proportion of the money flowing to the Taliban comes from the sale of opiates. The US Drug Enforcement Administration says that al-Qaeda agents in North Africa, West Africa and Europe have funded their operations through the drug trade.

Until recently I felt, as many people do, that the war on drugs was the best policy for our society. But I changed my mind soon after joining the UN Global Commission on Drug Policy along with former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, Javier Solana, the European Union’s former foreign policy chief, former Brazilian President Fernando Cardoso, and many others. Our findings clearly show that the global war on drugs has been nothing short of a well-intentioned but incredibly expensive mistake.

Our commission found that in countries where drug addiction was decriminalised and instead treated as a public health problem, there were decreases in crime, decreases in the number of addicts and improvements in overall public health.

Portugal, for instance, decriminalised the use and possession of drugs in 2001 and has not sent one person to prison in the last 10 years. By setting up clinics where heroin users have access to needles and methadone, along with medical treatment for addiction (which is much cheaper and more effective than prison), Portugal reduced its number of users, especially among young people and addicts. The number of new cases of HIV (from dirty needles) was down by 70 per cent between 2000 and 2009, and, as an interesting side benefit, researchers also reported a significant reduction in household burglaries.

As we assess new businesses opportunities, our team at Virgin often looks at what works in different countries, studying how we can adapt successful approaches to new markets. In the case of the drug war, our commission has shown that the key is to switch to ‘harm-reduction’ strategies. One of the more telling studies looked at the situation in Switzerland, which switched from a law and order approach to public-health-focused policies in the eighties and nineties.

According to research by the University of Lausanne: ‘Heavily engaged in both drug dealing and other forms of crime, [hardcore problematic users] served as a link between wholesalers and users. As these hard-core users found a steady, legal means for their addiction, their illicit drug use was reduced as well as their need to deal in heroin.…By removing local addicts and dealers, Swiss casual users found it difficult to make contact with sellers.’ The addicts, who are often both users and low-level dealers, but whose need had been reduced by medically prescribed heroin, had been the crucial link between suppliers and casual users.

Imagine that in your country addicts are not being jailed but treated at clinics. Imagine that their numbers are declining. That police departments have ended their efforts to round up low-level dealers and some of those officers are now focusing on organised (and random) crime. Many have been freed up to work on community policing, because even petty crime by addicts is on the decline. Imagine that the additional public funds are being spent on health and social programmes rather than on law enforcement and prisons. That, just like when Prohibition was ended in the United States, the black market has dried up and the drug gangs have withered away. Imagine that money and power are no longer associated with drugs and crime, and the media, and even our culture, are changing in response.

How do we take a stand against crime? By treating drug use as a health problem not a criminal problem. By eliminating the drug dealers’ connections to their markets. So let’s pull the plug – and save lives. As business people, if one of our policies is failing we will cut our losses quickly and change tack. It’s extraordinary that governments continue to pursue the same, failed policies, decade after decade, with all the misery these policies inflict.