• It is criminalisation itself that creates the threat, by placing such a lucrative market outside government control and empowering organised crime. More impoverished regions trade many other valuable commodities with nothing approaching this level of dysfunction.
• Enforcement in the face of such robust demand is ineffective and often detrimental, wasting resources and causing further danger to the public.
• Criminal involvement further marginalises populations in urgent need of outside help. Developing economies are trapped between law enforcement and organised crime; their own efforts to develop are liable to be undermined by the widespread violence and dysfunction.
• The longer these trends continue, the harder it will be to reconstruct these regions once the drug war ends.