This past Friday, June 17, the “War on Drugs” turned 40 years old.
Forty years is a long time—half an average lifespan for a human being born today in an OECD (The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) country—and the human race has accomplished much in the last forty years.
For one thing, while we’re on the subject of life expectancy, a human being born today can expect to live ten years longer than one born forty years ago. Roughly speaking, average life expectancy in the OECD has gone from 70 to 80, while the overall world average has gone from 60 to 70.
Hundreds of millions of people have risen out of poverty in the last four decades, especially in places like China that have liberalized their economies. According to the UN, the number of people living on less than $1.25 a day fell by 400 million just between 1990 and 2005, even as global population has kept on rising.
Forty years ago, the United States was winning the space race against the Soviet Union, landing a handful of men on the surface of the moon on a number of occasions. That was something, but today, a bona fide International Space Station orbits our planet, with men and women from nations around the world living and working in space for months at a time.
Speaking of American-Russian rivalry, forty years ago the Cold War was still in full swing, with the threat of nuclear Armageddon ever-present in people’s minds. But the free and democratic countries of the world held strong while the authoritarian dictatorships of the Eastern Bloc crumbled. Despite current threats from different quarters, we should be grateful for the current period of relative peace and cooperation among the world’s major powers.
If an average guy living in 1971 somehow travelled forward through time to the year 2011, our world of cheap and ubiquitous laptops and mobile phones would amaze him. Email and the Internet would astound him. He likely wouldn’t get what Facebook was all about, but he’d probably be happy to see that the stranglehold of the three television networks on home entertainment had been broken.
Yes, the human race has accomplished much in the last forty years, but curbing the supply of, or demand for, illegal drugs—despite hundreds of billions of dollars squandered and millions of lives ruined in the effort—just isn’t one of them.
A popular definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. After forty years of governments beating their heads (and ours) against the brick walls of implacable human nature and immutable economic laws, isn’t it high time to demand a different approach?
