Misha Glenny debates Michael Hartmann from UNODC

Here's an MP3 of Misha Glenny debating drug policy with Michael Hartmann. The event was organized by the London School of Economics and held on January 18th.

I enjoyed this podcast. It's about an hour and a half long, which is longer than my attention span so I listened to it in a couple of segments.

Hartmann is "manager and senior adviser of the Criminal Justice Programme at the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime." His background as a criminal prosecutor certainly helped him during this debate. He articulated his argument well. If you think you might find yourself debating a prohibitionist one day, in a formal setting, it would be worth listening to Hartmann to find out what your opponent might say.

Glenny is a well respected British journalist and the author of McMafia. In an op-ed he once stated that, "In the United States, the most effective group demanding change is Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, or LEAP, which is made up of current and former police officers, including erstwhile operatives of the Drug Enforcement Agency."

Together these two men offer a high level, international perspective on the drug policy debate.

Misha Glenny on the Drug War

Misha Glenny, author of McMafia, has a great op-ed piece in the New York Times about the need to end the War on Drugs. I particularly like how he frames the argument in terms of national security:

Two significant developments are contributing to the sudden surge in calls for reconsidering prohibition. The first is that drugs are now damaging long-term Western security interests, especially in Afghanistan and Mexico. The second is that production is migrating away from its traditional homes like Colombia and the Golden Triangle and moving into the heart of Western consumer areas like Canada, the Netherlands and Britain.

The problem is becoming so dramatic that elder statesmen, senior law enforcement officers, intellectuals and philanthropists the world over are speaking out loud and clear: The “War on Drugs” is a disastrous policy that achieves none of its aims and inflicts huge damage on global security and governance wherever it is prosecuted.

The whole essay is worth reading (and he has some very kind words about LEAP).

Correction: This did not appear in the NY Times. It was printed in the weekend edition of the International Herald Tribune, which is owned by the Times Company (so that's why it is hosted on nytimes.com).