Colombian President Gustavo Petro has hit out at the longstanding US ban on cocaine, in response to Donald Trump’s crackdown on the drugs trade.
‘Cocaine is illegal because it is made in Latin America, not because it is worse than whisky’, Petro argued last week, adding that ‘scientists have analysed this’. He also suggested that the global cocaine industry could be ‘easily dismantled’ if the drug was legalised worldwide.
Although I was not consulted directly by Petro, I am one of the scientists he was referring to who have analysed the harms of various drugs. In 2010, I was the lead author of a Lancet paper which argued for the first time that alcohol was more harmful than cocaine.
Our paper, ‘Drug harms in the UK’, looked at 20 different drugs using different categories of harm which were weighted to reflect their importance.
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