Drug War Capitalism in Latin America

The 6th annual Cannabis and Psychedelic Symposium takes place at CU Boulder on April 17. The closing plenary Drug War Capitalism in Latin America will be given by Dr. Dawn Paley, a researcher and journalist from Vancouver, BC and author of Drug War Capitalism.

“The impacts are huge and I think the impacts are pretty hidden from people’s imaginations and visually from people’s day to day life here. Maybe one of the impacts that people wouldn’t expect is for example the drug policies connected with the amount of migrants, the amount of Central American refugees. For example arriving to the U.S. Mexico border, many of them are actually fleeing the results of U.S. drug policy. So in Drug War Capitalism I look at U.S. policy basically starting from Plan Colombia, which started in the year 2000 and going through to present day in Mexico.”

Paley sees hope in the shift towards discussing drugs as a public health issue as opposed to a criminal issue.

“Harm reduction all the way along needs to happen. There’s all different kind of chains in the way that drugs get produced, for example cocaine which is the cocoa plant which can only grow in certain regions in the Andes and that is transported and then is used primarily by people here in the United States. There’s a small amount of users in Mexico and in other countries but most of the users of these substances are in the United States. Because those substances are made illegal because they’re prohibited there’s harms generated.”

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