Kofi Annan: The war on drugs has failed in West Africa and around the world

In 2013, a United Nations report estimated that the cocaine trade through West Africa was worth at least $1.25 billion a year. This is higher than the combined government budgets of several countries in the region, which has become an important transhipment point between Latin America producers and consumers in the United States and Europe. This cash flow threatens to corrode the institutions of the state and undermine economic progress and democratic practice in a part of the world that has only recently emerged from several decades of violent conflict and instability.

The region's political and security institutions are struggling to respond to these threats and are not always well equipped to mount adequate preventive measures. The "war on drugs" strategy, which focuses heavily on the suppression of drug shipments, has not enabled West Africa—or indeed other regions of the world—to meet and overcome the drug threat. Experience has shown that force alone cannot reduce the drug supply or the criminality and corruption that it induces.

Governments that focus on drug users and small-time dealers often create an unsustainable burden on their criminal justice systems while ignoring the health and social problems that have emerged with increasing levels of trafficking, consumption, and production, which goes on unabated.

By 2013, the situation had become so alarming that I decided to convene the West Africa Commission on Drugs (WACD), chaired by former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, with a membership of distinguished West Africans drawn from diverse sectors of society.

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