禁毒战争徒劳无功，浪费金钱毁人生活
这场毒品战争已经以 1 万亿美元的代价宣告失败。四十多年来，世界各国政府向低效且高压的禁毒行动投入了巨额资金。这些资金本应用于真正有效的项目，比如针具交换计划和替代疗法。这不仅是浪费金钱，更是适得其反。
The war on drugs has been a $1tn failure. For more than four decades, governments around the world have pumped huge sums of money into ineffective and repressive anti-drug efforts. These have come at the expense of programs that actually work such as needle exchanges and substitution therapy. This is not just a waste of money, it is counterproductive.
伦敦经济学院刚刚完成了迄今为止对毒品战争最为全面的评估报告。五位诺贝尔经济学奖得主支持的结论是：这场战争弊大于利。
The London School of Economics has just completed perhaps the most thorough account of the war on drugs done to date. The conclusion, backed by five Nobel Prize-winning economists: it has done more harm than good.
禁毒政策催生了规模庞大的黑市，据某些估算价值高达 3000 亿美元。它将“禁毒”的负担转嫁到了阿富汗、墨西哥等毒品生产国和过境国身上。这种方法也未能应对一个基本事实：毒品市场具有极强的适应性。在一个国家打压毒品交易，它就会在其他地方死灰复燃。
Drug prohibition has created an immense black market, valued by some at $300bn. It shifts the burden of “drug control” on to producer and transit countries such as Afghanistan and Mexico. This approach also fails to grapple with a basic truth: drug markets are highly adaptive. Repress the business in one country and it springs up elsewhere.
以哥伦比亚为例。当该国的执法机构在打击可卡因贸易方面取得进展时，大部分犯罪活动及其伴随的暴力行为转移到了墨西哥。伦敦政治经济学院的报告估计，2007 年后，哥伦比亚的拦截政策是墨西哥谋杀率上升的 20% 以上的原因。
Consider Colombia. When its law enforcement agencies made progress cracking down on the country’s cocaine trade, much of the criminal business and the violence that goes with it moved to Mexico. The LSE report estimates that after 2007, Colombia’s interdiction policies accounted for more than 20 per cent of the rise in Mexico’s murder rate.
波哥大当时有大量混乱可供输出。根据该报告，1994 年至 2008 年间非法毒品市场的爆发，“解释了哥伦比亚当前约 25% 的凶杀率。这意味着与非法毒品市场及禁毒战争相关的凶杀案，平均每年多出约 3800 起”。这种暴力行为造成了巨大的经济损失：企业搬迁、外国投资枯竭、行业衰退、市民逃离以寻求更好的生活。
Bogotá had a lot of mayhem to export. The explosion of the illegal drug market between 1994 and 2008 “explains roughly 25 per cent of the current homicide rate in Colombia. That translate into about 3,800 more homicides per year on average that are associated with illegal drug markets and the war on drugs”, according to the report. This type of violence takes a massive economic toll; corporations relocate, foreign investment dries up, industries decline and citizens flee in search of a better life.
成本并不局限于生产国；消费国同样深受其害。
The costs are not limited to producer countries; consumer nations suffer as well.
这种情况在美国尤为突出——美国人口不到世界总量的 5%，但囚犯人数却占全球的近 25%。其中大多数是因毒品和其他非暴力犯罪入狱，对他们而言，戒毒治疗及其他替代监禁的措施，在减少再犯率和保护社会方面，可能成本更低、效果更好。全球 900 万在押人员中，40% 因毒品相关犯罪身陷囹圄——而且随着亚洲、拉丁美洲和西非地区对毒品犯罪者的逮捕数量稳步增长，这一数字很可能还会上升。
This is especially so in the US, which has less than 5 per cent of the world’s people but almost 25 per cent of the planet’s incarcerated population. Most are drug and other non-violent offenders for whom drug treatment and other alternatives to incarceration would probably prove cheaper and more effective in reducing recidivism and protecting society. Worldwide, 40 per cent of the 9m people who are incarcerated are behind bars for drug-related offences – and that figure is only likely to rise, as arrests of drug offenders in Asia, Latin America and West Africa are increasing steadily.
尽管人类遭受的破坏规模空前，但那些本可拯救生命、降低社会成本的服务却资金不足，甚至完全没有资金支持。
Despite the epic scale of human wreckage, services that could save lives and cut down on the costs to society go underfunded, or not funded at all.
多年以来，我的“开放社会基金会”一直在支持针具交换等减少危害项目——这是一种经过验证、成本效益极高的预防艾滋病病毒传播方式。某国发现，在针具交换上每投入 1 美元，就能节省 27 美元的治疗开支。考虑到治疗艾滋病病毒耗费了数十亿美元，这可不是个小数目。我们在监督下药物注射室、以及用药物辅助治疗阿片类药物成瘾等项目上，也看到了类似的投资回报。然而，尽管有这些好处，美国国会仍然持续禁止联邦资金用于针具交换。全球多国政府也在国际论坛上竭力阻止任何提及减少危害的内容，唯恐这与主流禁毒战争理念相冲突。
For years, my Open Society Foundations have supported harm-reduction programs such as needle exchanges – a proved, cost-effective way to prevent HIV transmission. One country found that for every $1 invested in needle exchange, $27 is returned in cost savings. That is no small matter, considering the billions of dollars spent treating HIV. We have seen similar returns on investment with supervised drug injection rooms and medication-assisted treatment of opiate addiction. Yet despite these benefits, the US Congress continues to block federal funding for needle exchanges. Several governments around the globe fight to prevent any mention of harm reduction in international forums, lest it clash with the predominant drug war ideology.
然而改变仍然可能发生。2016 年，联合国大会将审查毒品管制体系的当前状况。联合国长期以来一直在全球推动实施"一刀切"的模式，其基础是相信仅靠禁止性政策就能解决全球毒品问题。
Yet change is still possible. In 2016 the UN General Assembly will review the current state of the drug- control system. For too long the UN has worked to enforce a “one-size-fits-all” model around the world, based on a belief that prohibitionist policies alone would solve the global drug problem.
根据《伦敦政治经济学院报告》（将于周三发布）的建议，政府应将经过验证的公共卫生政策作为重中之重，致力于最大限度地减少非法市场的危害，并强制推行“严格监管下的政策和法规试验”。我对此深表赞同。
The LSE report, to be released on Wednesday, recommends that governments give top priority to proved public health policies, moving to minimize harm in illicit markets, and mandating “rigorously monitored policy and regulatory experimentation”. I heartily concur.
全球各国的政府都需要权衡当前政策的成本与收益，并愿意将资源重新投向有效的项目。这不仅挽救生命——同时也节约资金。我们面临一个千载难逢的机会，来修复应对药物危机的全球框架。不作为的代价，沉重到难以承受。
Governments the world over need to weigh the costs and benefits of their current policies, and be willing to redirect resources towards programs that work. This will save lives – and save money along the way. We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to fix a broken global framework for coping with the drug crisis. The costs of doing nothing are too great to bear.