ABSTRACT
The 2012 United Nations World Drug Report on the urgent need for basic changes in global drug policy appeared as a great step toward enlightenment framed against the darkness of repeated failures and disasters in the War on Drugs. From the early 1960s onward the UN has been under relentless pressure from the United States to maintain the drug war-an extension of the holy crusade initiated by Harry Anslinger and his prohibitionist zealots during the 1930s. After several decades of calamitous results, however, the UN-through its Global Commission on Drug Policy-authored a harsh critique of this agenda, driven by hopes that rational alternatives might be taken up by forward-thinking government leaders. Its well-researched conclusions were meant to force systematic rethinking of the coercive, punitive (and ultimately undemocratic) approach to drugs that has long gripped American society and, indeed, much of the world. Despite the constructive implications of its analysis and recommendations, the report was met in the United States (including by the Obama administration) with a mixture of deadening silence and blind rejectionism.
