 By Euan Wilson | Excerpted from the July 2011 Socionomist |
[Ed: Socionomist Euan Wilson explains that deeply mixed social mood is beginning to produce fractious debate over the bloody global Drug War.
[This timely revisit of Wilson’s article, published two years after the original landmark study, updates the state of the legalization movement in the United States and notes several other key developments.]
In the past two months, events in the U.S.-Mexico Drug War presented exactly the kind of actions we’d expect from a partway-down mood.
- A highly decorated, international commission calls for the U.S. and Mexico to end their War on Drugs.
- The drug agencies of both countries dismiss the recommendations as “misguided.”
- In the very same month, two U.S. congressmen float a bill to end the feds’ involvement in the question of pot’s legality, saying it is an issue for each state to decide.
…Positive social mood tends to yield restrictions on drug use; negative mood impels societies to relax those same restrictions. Our long-term forecast says that during an extended period of falling mood, the increasingly bloody Drug War will become a source of bitter debate in the U.S. and globally. Eventually, citizens will demand that their governments end the war via broad legalization….
Initiative # 1: Report from the Global Commission on Drug Policy
End the … : Reflecting the recommendation of the Global Commission on Drug Policy, the word “war” is marked out on the cover of its June 2011 Report.
“The global war on drugs has failed with devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world.”
—The Global Commission on Drug Policy, June 1, 20111
These words are not the rehashings of some blogger or band member at a counterculture music festival. Instead, they form the core argument of the latest report from the Global Commission on Drug Policy. The group boasts several notable members, including former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan; Nixon and Reagan cabinet appointee George P. Schultz; former Fed chairman Paul Volcker; former presidents of Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia; billionaire and Virgin chairman Richard Branson; and the prime minister of Greece. …
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Read the remainder of this two-page update to discover why the debate over pot legalization is heating up, and what we expect will be the eventual outcome. Also learn more about the responses of U.S. and Mexican drug agencies and how, like windsocks, they reflect the prevailing social mood.
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