FHC: Politicians lack the courage to decriminalize drugs.

Da Deutsche Welle Brazil - At 85 years old, former president and sociologist Fernando Henrique Cardoso addresses the controversy surrounding drugs with enviable lucidity and without any political inhibitions. At the request of DW Brazil, he agreed to answer questions about drug trafficking and reflect on the recent crisis in Brazilian prisons. However, he did not answer a single question about the current political situation in Brazil.

With no intention of returning to public life, FHC has dedicated himself to the debate on the decriminalization and legalization of drugs for the past six years, in an international crusade that embarrasses politicians from his own party, the PSDB, since the subject is taboo in Brazil.

In this interview, he states that the Global Commission on Drug Policy, which he created with the help of other former presidents, assisted in the debate on the peace agreement with the FARC in Colombia and was a benchmark in drug regulation in Uruguay.

A proponent of drug decriminalization in Brazil, he claims that the national political class is cowardly and that the country lacks leaders to debate this issue with society. "Let's put aside the hypocrisy: access to drugs in Brazil is free, but in the hands of traffickers."

DW Brazil: You were one of the mentors and coordinators of the Global Commission on Drug Policy, created in 2011. Did the group make any progress in the debate on drug decriminalization?

Fernando Henrique Cardoso: I founded and chaired the commission for five years, from 2011 to 2016. Together with former presidents César Gaviria of Colombia and Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico, we had already created the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy in 2008. Our journey bore much fruit. Not that we achieved everything we hoped for, but last year some of the international guidelines on drug policies were revised. The scenario today is radically different from what it was when we started in 2008.

We, as former presidents and global leaders, broke the taboo on this issue and provided the necessary support so that current leaders could dare to explore new paths, not limiting themselves to the decriminalization of drug use. Uruguay's regulation, for example, was based on our work, just as the drug actions proposed in the Colombian peace agreement follow the roadmap we proposed.

In early 2017, Brazil experienced a new wave of barbarity in its prisons, highlighting the power of criminal factions and the state's failure to deal with the situation. Does the Brazilian political class insist on a repressive approach, a war on drugs, and a punitive culture?

Brazilian drug policy, unfortunately, is still guided more by moralism than by information and efficiency: the fact that we still consider drug use a crime is proof of this. The prison crisis, on the other hand, is a consequence of years of applying laws that disproportionately punish people involved in the lower echelons of drug trafficking, handing them over to organized crime. Instead of undermining these groups, current practice strengthens them, which seems paradoxical, but it is not.

Drug use and abuse are not a security issue, but a health issue. And even small-scale retail drug dealing doesn't have to result in imprisonment. The person can receive an alternative sentence, as the most recent report from the Global Commission argues. The focus of public safety strategies needs to shift towards dismantling drug trafficking.

Could the decriminalization of drugs have an immediate effect on the prison population in Brazil?

I increasingly see that this is indeed the case. Decriminalizing drug use may seem to have little impact in places in Brazil where, theoretically, users are no longer imprisoned. But each seizure still generates a whole unnecessary process of police registration and subsequent filing in the criminal justice system. And, to worsen our situation, we don't use objective parameters to identify who is a user and who isn't based on the quantity of drugs seized. This creates a gray area in law enforcement.

If we used criteria from other countries, a large portion of the people imprisoned for drug crimes would be released. We would see that they are users mistakenly identified as traffickers.

Why is the Brazilian political class so afraid to discuss this issue? Is it a lack of clarity about the facts or simply a conservative bias?

This is not about conservatism. In the US, for example, some proposals to reform the criminal justice system and several initiatives to reform drug policies have support from both Republicans and Democrats. Both parties understand, for different reasons, that current policy has failed and are seeking new solutions.

Here, the debate is still heavily influenced by moralizing and prejudice, rather than by objective diagnoses of possible alternatives. This increases the political cost of being a pioneer and breaking the paradigm, for which we need courageous and visionary leaders. We are experiencing the consequences of the lack of such figures in the national political landscape, especially in the Legislative branch. We need to change this.

Who is more conservative in Brazil when it comes to drug decriminalization: politicians or society? Perhaps that's a question for sociologist FHC.

Politicians. Politicians have been very fearful and do not engage in dialogue with society on issues that are no longer taboo. We lack leaders who can build new understandings with society. Some behavioral and cultural changes have progressed more thanks to decisions of the Supreme Federal Court and not the Legislative branch.

In your travels and experiences to better understand the problem of drugs in the world, what type of approach and public policy did you encounter that caught your attention as a positive example?

There are many examples. The ones that stand out to me the most are policies that acknowledge that some people will always use drugs, but that it is possible to reduce the harm involved in that use.

Safe consumption rooms, for example, have existed in Switzerland since 1986. These are places where people with serious substance dependence problems receive the substance in controlled quantities and quality for use under the supervision of healthcare personnel, cutting off these people's ties to the illegal market.

The decriminalization of drug use in places like Portugal and the Czech Republic is moving in the same direction by cutting off contact between drug users and traffickers, as well as the criminal justice system.

The debate on drug legalization follows a different logic and a different level, and there are already experiences in the world. Do you think legalization is out of the question in Brazil? For what reasons?

I don't think it's out of the question. It's an option to be considered with due seriousness and responsibility. It's not simple, of course, but crisis is also a time of new opportunities. That's what we did in the 90s to pull the country out of the rampant hyperinflation we were experiencing. Daring should never be ruled out, but neither should it be a path taken lightly.

The Global Commission argues that we should begin with experiments regulating cannabis. We should move forward with regulating the use of other drugs and put aside the hypocrisy: in practice, access to drugs here is free, but in the hands of traffickers... This needs to end.

Recent studies on the economics of drugs reveal that one of the world's most lucrative illicit markets can only be combated with rigorous instruments to prevent dirty money from entering the economy through formal means (money laundering, asset concealment, repatriation, etc.). What is your opinion on the economic flow of drugs and what global actions could weaken the true beneficiaries of trafficking?

To truly weaken those who profit from trafficking, we need to talk about responsible regulation of the drug market. The state, in each country, needs to regain control of the drug circuit, with models suited to each national situation.

Furthermore, regarding repression, we must focus on actions guided by intelligence and information, in addition to the ongoing fight against money laundering.

In other words, we must impact the structure of organized crime. Today, unfortunately, police repression is geared towards flashy actions, such as seizing drug shipments, without truly dismantling organized crime. A seizure is barely made before another shipment appears the next day, since this approach does not target the control centers of organized crime. It is neither an efficient nor a sustainable way to combat crime.