The Telegraph are amongst the media outlets that pick up comments by Antonio Maria Costa to the effect that there’s no such thing as fair trade cocaine:
One of the world’s top drug enforcement officials has launched a fierce public attack on “celebrity” cocaine users Amy Winehouse and Kate Moss, accusing them of glamorising a global drug trade that now threatens to devastate parts of Africa.
Antonio Maria Costa, head of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, singled the pair out as he warned that Britain faced a massive new threat from Colombian cocaine barons, who have recently carved out new transit routes to Europe via Africa’s west coast.
He said the burgeoning trade posed a severe risk to youngsters in Britain, where cocaine use has doubled among 16- to 24-year-olds in the past 10 years. It also threatened the “complete collapse” of some impoverished West African nations, where weak and corrupt governments were now uniquely vulnerable to the corrosive influence of drug money.
And while I’m sure that it’s once again worth pointing out that the relationship between celebrity drug use and young people is complex, I think the general point – that drug use doesn’t just affect your own health or your local community it has an international dimension – is well made.
My feeling is that drug education should explore the harms that are done to the wider community by drugs just as much as it focuses on harms to an individual’s health and wellbeing.
Filed under: UNODC , Antonio Maria Costa, celebrity drug use, ethics of drug taking
Vita Nova’s latest piece addresses this very issue. The impression given by ‘celebrities’ that one can check into rehab. at a moment’s notice and everything will be sorted out is grossly misleading to young people. We all know the harm to the wider community through drug use is massive. If money was spent now on preventing drugs entering the country, dealing with drugs already in the country and manufactured here and, maybe most importantly, on the causes of addiction (which is evidently more than just through exposure to them) there could be hope for the future.