The ‘War On Drugs’ Is Killing The Environment

16 December 2015

- Long-standing drug policies backed by the United Nations and financed by the United States have not only failed to slow global drug trafficking, they may also be driving widespread environmental degradation and accelerating climate change.

In a report published by the Open Society Foundation, researcher Kendra McSweeney calls for a broad reconsideration of conventional “cat and mouse” policies that have driven growers, producers, and traffickers into new frontiers, causing deforestation and inviting chemical contamination into some of the most sensitive ecosystems on the planet, including national parks and indigenous reserves.

“Among the many forms of collateral damage from drug policy that we already know about, we want the global community to know about the widespread harms to the environment,” said McSweeney, a geographer at Ohio State University.