Colombia is looking to decriminalize the cocaine trade, with an aim to regulate and control the market.
It was the Colombian President Gustavo Petro, who proposed the change and promised to end the “prohibition” of cocaine and the president also added that Colombia will work with its neighbors to turn Colombia into “a laboratory for drug decriminalization.”
“It is time for a new international convention that accepts that the War on Drugs has failed,” said Petro.
The leadership in Colombia leans towards socialist policies and so does its neighbors throughout Latin America, who unsurprisingly also produce cocaine – usually bound for the United States market.
Felipe Tascon, the president’s authority on drugs, said that decriminalizing cocaine would offer new opportunities for governments in Latin America, like Bolivia and Peru, to unite and work together on controlling the substance.
“Drug traffickers know that their business depends on [cocaine] being prohibited,” said Tascon. “If you regulate [the cocaine trade] like a public market, the high profits … [and] the drug trafficking [both] disappear.
Apparently, changing out the armed cartels for an armed government, is going to stop drug trafficking, but as previously stated, the destination for cocaine is the United States and other Western countries – where it is still very much illegal.
Natural News reported:
An economist by profession, Petro expressed his desire to meet with his counterparts in Peru and Bolivia to tackle the decriminalization of cocaine at the regional level. At the domestic level, his administration sought to bring back legislation decriminalizing both cocaine and marijuana. The Petro administration also sought to put an end to aerial spraying and the manual eradication of the coca plant, which is processed to make cocaine.
Colombia is the world’s largest producer of cocaine and is responsible for more than 90 percent of the drug seized in the United States. As such, the plan to decriminalize cocaine undermines Bogota’s long-standing and profitable counter-narcotics partnership with Washington.
The U.S. has spent billions of dollars to fund a strategy with a view to destroying the coca plantations in rural Colombia. Furthermore, U.S. intelligence and other agencies have lent a hand to the Colombian military’s decades-long effort to rid the country of coca. Despite these efforts, and more than 50 years of the war against cocaine, recent figures showed that production of the drug has hit record levels.
An anonymous former U.S Drug Enforcement Agency official, said that the agency would become limited on what they can do in regard to drug-trafficking cases and would be unable to fully collaborate with Colombia.
“It would be devastating not just regionally, but globally,” said the official. “It would incrementally kill the cooperation. Everyone would be fighting from the outside in.”
Even the Biden administration has said that they do not support the move and the United States does not support the decriminalization of cocaine.
Monica Showalter wrote in an article for the American Thinker, “Somewhere from the depths of hell, Pablo Escobar is smiling,” and added that even though there are plans by the Colombian government to tax and regulate cocaine, it won’t have much effect on illegal activity.
“Illegal growers and dealers can make much more money by staying in the underground economy, undercutting the legal growers and dealers.” Showalter then used California as an example of how legalization of an illicit drug, continues to have an underbelly of crime.
“Pot shops all over the state are going out of business based on this dynamic. Winner? The same old illicit drug dealers who don’t pay taxes or bother with regulation.”
Petro’s decriminalization of cocaine will be used as the first step towards legalization, which will benefit him and his narco-guerilla allies, “which would enable them to make money hand-over-fist with their already existing drug-dealing monopolies,” according to Showalter.
“The original cartel narco-state and home of Escobar himself. It, along with Mexico and its cartels whom the Colombians worked with, became the big reason the War on Drugs got started in the first place.” Showalter concluded.
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