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Bolivia was actually the pioneer in this decriminalization policy. With the election of Evo Morales, the first indigenous president of Bolivia (a largely indigenous country)--who was head of the coca leaf farmers union (and still is, I believe)--Bolivia decriminalized use of the coca leaf (an indigenous medicine, widely used in teas and for chewing; highly nutritious) although not cocaine at that time. Not sure what the status of their drug laws is now, but it may have gotten even more progressive since Morales threw the DEA out of Bolivia (for supporting white separatist coupsters). That was hard on Bolivia at first, but it was good that they weaned themselves off US "war on drugs" money--an addictive substance if there ever was one. It has lured more than one country into corruption, high crime rates, more drug trafficking not less, and ultimately into the nazification of the police and the military, who begin to see themselves as the only real human beings and everyone else (ordinary citizens) as "perps."
But even worse than this, it can transform into a monster, like the Colombian military/police state, where the money from US taxpayers ($6 BILLION to Colombia in military aid alone) is used to slaughter the poor, by the military directly and by its closely tied paramilitary death squads. Amnesty International put it at about half and half--half direct military murders, half rightwing paramilitaries--for murders of union leaders. AI says 92% of union murders are Colombian military/paramilitary, 3% by ordinary criminals and only 2% by FARC guerrillas. The FARC guerrilla movement, which has been fighting the Colombian military for over 40 years, was only lately added to the Bushwhacks' "war on terror" (last summer) as an additional excuse, along with the "war on drugs," to prop up this horrendous narco-fascist regime in Colombia.
And now, Colombia is getting at least seven new US military bases, and will become a launching pad for US aggression against neighboring democracies (main targets: Venezuela and Ecuador) to regain global corporate predator control of their oil. This is the ultimate peril of the US "war on drugs"--that it will be hijacked, like the US military itself has been hijacked, for corporate resource wars. The US "war on drugs" has been creeping up to this for some time--with killings and toxic herbicide sprayings against small peasant farmers, to drive them from their land into urban squalor, so corporations like Monsanto can expand biofuel production and other such corpo/fascist enterprises, and also so the big drug lords--the ones protected by Colombia's corrupt government (and our own)--can acquire more land. The "war on drugs" is a "war on the poor," as many others have pointed out. It is the poor who end up unable to feed themselves and their families, the poor who go to jail, the poor who suffer blighted crops and DNA damage from toxic herbicides, and the poor who are killed.
But now this Beast--the US "war on drugs"--after destroying so many lives, there and here, is morphing into a war machine for destabilizing and toppling democratic governments, aggressive attacks across borders, paramilitary killing sprees, assassination plots against elected leaders, and all out war. Having devastated Iraq and Afghanistan, and gotten very little oil out of those wars, and barred from Iran by China and Russia, the Pentagon is looking south in this hemisphere to gas up its war machine and to serve its war profiteer masters, Exxon Mobil & brethren. That, I firmly believe, is what the US "war on drugs" is now all about.
The US "war on drugs" may at one time have had a good, or at least an honest, purpose. I doubt very much that it ever did, but probably some of its personnel thought they were doing the right thing. Now it is merely a war, and, like almost all wars, it has become insane, corrupt and counter-productive. Its purpose has become war profiteering; it has done absolutely nothing to solve traffic in harmful drugs and associated crime, and instead has made things worse; and it is now part of a war plan--Oil War II--just waiting for the next Bushwhack to be Diebolded into office (2012?), to go forward. Or it may happen earlier, if the war planners can trap Obama into it, with some sort of "Gulf of Tonkin" scenario, a ploy made all the easier by this great escalation of US military presence in Colombia and in the Caribbean (with the US 4th Fleet). What is all this military buildup in South America for? Believe me, it has nothing to do with stopping drug traffic, which just flows right on, no matter how much of our tax dollars are thrown at it.
The US "war on drugs" was/is awful, but it has now become dangerous and a major threat to the peace in this hemisphere. I am glad to see country after country rejecting it, and bringing some collective clout to evicting it from South America. I wish that, along with decriminalizing personal drug use, Mexico would also stop the murderous "war on drugs," but that ain't gonna happen, because they're addicted to the US "war on drugs" money. (The Bushwhacks saw to that.) I don't know about the status of such funds in Brazil, Argentina or Ecuador. Probably Ecuador went "cold turkey." They hate the "war on drugs." (The US "war on drugs" base in Manta, Ecuador, that Ecuador has just evicted, was used for spying on Ecuador and for a US/Colombia bombing/raid on Ecuador last year.) Brazil, I think, accepts US "war on drugs" money, but has a president who is very vigilant about Brazil's sovereignty. Don't know about Argentina, but their president, Cristina Fernandez, has been very vocal in opposition to the US military bases in Colombia, and probably opposes accepting US "war on drugs" money. But Mexico is the one whose sovereignty is greatly threatened by this funding. It has a rightwing government that needs US funding of its police and military to control the growing rebellion against "free trade" poverty in Mexico. They may be decriminalizing minor drug use, but that doesn't mean they have a good policy on the "war on drugs"--they don't--and the decriminalization may be to empty their jails so they can fill them up with leftists. Just sayin. I don't trust Calderon.
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