Former President Bill Clinton says in a new documentary that his administration’s attempts to limit drug trafficking from Colombia “hasn’t worked.”
Clinton joined other world leaders — including former President Jimmy Carter — in filmmaker Sam Branson’s new documentary, “Breaking the Taboo,” which premiered Thursday at New York’s Google headquarters and charges that the global war on drugs is a failure.
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In the film, narrator Morgan Freeman says, “the U.S. spent billions of dollars funding military operations” in Colombia to cut of cocaine coming into America.“What I tried to do was to focus on every aspect of the problem. I tried to empower the Colombians for example to do more militarily and police-wise because I thought that they had to. Thirty percent of their country was in the hands of the narcotraffickers,” Clinton says in the film, which is available free online.
Clinton later says: “Well obviously, if the expected results was that we would eliminate serious drug use in America and eliminate the narcotrafficking networks — it hasn’t worked.”
The documentary was made before Washington and Colorado voted to legalize recreational marijuana, but its release comes as U.S. officials — including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — remain critical of its legalization. The Office of Drug Control Policy declined to appear in the film. Clinton said in November at a foreign policy forum in Washington that she was “not convinced” that legalizing marijuana would end violence related to drug trade.
Carter says he faced similar drug war problems as President Barack Obama and criticizes former President Ronald Reagan.
“When I was president, we had the same problems with drug production and distribution and consumption that we presently face. We tried as best as we could to minimize the emphasis on our criminal punishment, and I made a major statement to the Congress asking for changes in the law.”
He continued: “President Reagan and his wife [Nancy] adopted the drug program as the No. 1 issue for her to proclaim. She had a phrase: Just say, ‘No,’” Carter says in the film. “She made it clear that her prohibition against drugs included marijuana and everything else. So I don’t think that there’s any doubt that President Reagan made a profound impact then on the consciousness of our country, and I think that he also shaped the opinion of many members of our Congress.”
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