The OAS and the Hemispheric War on Drugs

Until the mid-eighties, the countries of the hemisphere had thought of the struggle against drug trafficking and drug-abuse as an essentially domestic activity; multilateral cooperation took place within the setting of the UN and some of its specialized bodies, but there was no specifically regional component in this struggle. With the establishment of the Inter-American Commission for Control of Drug Abuse (CICAD in Spanish) in 1986, the OAS formally began systematic consideration of the drug problem in the hemisphere. This essay analyzes the originality and the contributions of the OAS in this matter, in particular, the fact of advocating an approach that would give global treatment to the problem, that is that would give the same importance to control of the illegal demand for drugs, as to their supply, and that of achieving standardization of the internal legislation of the American States in terms of fundamental aspects of the drug trafficking problem and related crimes. The author underlines the importance of the CICAD promoting inter-state cooperation in this area, to the detriment of punitive and/or unilateral approaches, with the purpose of establishing a balanced, politically viable hemispheric mechanism that evaluates and directs antidrug efforts in the hemisphere.