FN förnekar inte fördelarna med total reglering.

Drug control was the subject of broad-based
international agreements in 1912, 1925, 1931, 1936,
1946, 1948, and 1953, before the creation of the standing
United Nations Conventions in 1961, 1971, and
1988. Nearly every nation in the world has signed on to
these Conventions.3
Nonetheless, there remains a serious and concerned
group of academics and civil society organisations who
feel the present system causes more harm than good.
Plans for drug “legalisation” are diverse, and often fuzzy
on the details, but one of the most popular alternative
models involves taxation and control in a manner similar
to tobacco and alcohol.4 This approach has appeal of
ideological consistency, since all these addictive substances
are treated in the same way.

The strongest case against the current system of drug
control is not the financial costs of the system, or even
its effectiveness in reducing the availability of drugs.2
The strongest case against drug control is the violence
and corruption associated with the black market. The
main problem is not that drug control efforts have failed
to eliminate drug use, an aspirational goal akin to the
elimination of war and poverty. It is that in attempting
to do so, they have indirectly enriched dangerous criminals,
who kill and bribe their way from the countries
where drugs are produced to the countries where drugs
are consumed.

Some palliative measures would
be available under a system of legalisation that are not
available today. If drugs were taxed, these revenues could
be used to fund public health programmes aimed at
reducing the impact of the increase in use. Addicts
might also be more accessible if their behaviour were
decriminalised. With bans on advertising and increasingly
restrictive regulation, it is possible that drug use
could be incrementally reduced, as tobacco use is currently
declining in most of the developed world.

Unfortunately, most of this thinking has indeed been
restricted to the developed world, where both treatment
and capacity to collect taxes are relatively plentiful. It
ignores the role that global drug control plays in protecting
developing countries from addictive drugs. Without
consistent global policy banning these substances, developing
countries would likely be afflicted by street drugs
the way they are currently afflicted by growing tobacco
and alcohol problems.

These countries can
ill-afford this burden of disease. They are even less capable
of giving up a share of their productive work force to
more immediately debilitating forms of addiction.