Narcoland, by Anabel Hernandez – review

It is by now surely beyond doubt that those governments committed to fighting the war on drugs — and on paper that’s all of them — face a total rout. To understand the scale of the defeat, all you need to know is that Barack Obama and David Cameron have both been unable to deny that they were once users.

The US spends more than a billion dollars a year on international narcotics control and as a result, as a US official in Colombia once told me, has forced up the price of a gram of cocaine in New York by just a few dollars. That must have put drugs beyond the reach of a few potential consumers. But it seems a very modest achievement for a government programme that has enjoyed such sustained, cross-party support for decades.

While the benefits of the war on drugs are hard to measure, the negative impacts are more obvious.