Facing calls at a regional summit to consider decriminalization, Obama said he is open to a debate about drug policy, but he believes that legalization could lead to greater problems in countries hardest hit by drug-fueled violence.

“Legalization is not the answer,” Obama told other hemispheric leaders at the two-day Summit of the Americas.

“The capacity of a large-scale drug trade to dominate certain countries if they were allowed to operate legally without any constraint could be just as corrupting, if not more corrupting, than the status quo,” he said.

This is simply an absurd defense of prohibition. If drugs were legalized and regulated like any other product, the business running them would be operate like any other legal business such as beer breweries, pharmaceutical makers, car manufacturers, alcohol distillers, dairies, etc. While corporations can and sometimes do have a corrupting influence over a nation’s politics, the idea that the level of corruption and violence from a legal business would ever be on the scale that we see with the cartels in the illicit drug trade doesn’t pass the laugh test.

I’ve never seen stories about Grupo Medelo, the brewer of Corona, offering local politicians the choice of the “silver or the lead.” Legal breweries simply don’t assassinate dozens of local politicians, police officers and reporters to get their way. Rival Tequila distillers compete with each other for market share using advertising and sometimes lobbying to get a tax or regulatory advantage, but they don’t use armed gangs to fight for market control in a bloody war that cost 50,000 Mexicans their lives. Legal car manufacturers don’t employ criminals to dissolve hundreds of their enemies in acid.

Just as the end of alcohol prohibition in America caused legal and law abiding businesses to replace the deeply corrupt and violent mafia in the American alcohol trade, ending the prohibition against other drugs, like marijuana, would result in law abiding businesses replacing the cartels.

If this pathetic defense is the best President Obama can offer to justify the continuation of a policy that is literally killing thousand of people a year, that is truly sad.

The one positive note is that the growing push for ending the failed “war on . . .” approach, both domestically and internationally, is forcing the federal government to continue to confront and address calls for reform.

He said he sympathized with Latin American leaders who are frustrated over violence tied to the drug trade and with the consumption habits in its biggest market, the United States. But the few potential benefits from legalization, like a smaller prison population, would be offset by problems, including a costly bureaucracy to regulate the drugs and new addicts, Mr. Biden said.

“I think it warrants a discussion. It is totally legitimate,” he said. “And the reason it warrants a discussion is, on examination you realize there are more problems with legalization than with nonlegalization.”

Even though Biden called the debate on legalization “legitimate,” he confirmed that the Obama administration would never consider changing its position on drug legalization.

While Biden’s statements and rather pathetic defense of the drug war are deeply disappointing, it is another sign that the administration can no longer simply ignore the issue.  In just the past few years the failed drug war has cost the lives of over 50,000 people in Mexico. Rapidly growing national support for marijuana legalization and increasing international pressure to end the violence caused by prohibition are forcing the US government to take part in the debate and try to defend its failed war on drugs on its merits.

In trying to stop the push for legalization, Biden had to at least acknowledge that it is a “legitimate” policy question for governments to examine. Simply starting a real open debate on the merits of a policy is almost always the first important step to eventual reform.

Just say now. Costa Rican President Laura Chinchilla (photo: Wikipedia)

Drug legalization in Central America merits a “serious” debate as a solution to the crime and violence coursing through the region even if it runs up against U.S. opposition, said Costa Rican President Laura Chinchilla.

“If we keep doing what we have been when the results today are worse than 10 years ago, we’ll never get anywhere and could wind up like Mexico or Colombia,” Chinchilla said yesterday in an interview in San Jose.

Recently there has been a string of top government officials throughout Latin America calling for a serious look at drug legalization as the solution to the violence caused by huge illegal profits created thanks to prohibition.

Last month Guatemalan President Otto Perez Molina said the drug war can’t be won through force alone and he will try to win support from other Latin American leaders for adopting drug legalization as a way to defund the cartels. Similarly, this past November Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos said that the legalization of marijuana would be a way forward as long as it was done at a global level.

In addition to the currently serving President, several previous leaders, such as former President Vicente Fox, have called for the legalization of drugs to end deadly violence in Mexico caused by the current drug war.

There appears to be an important shift of attitudes in the region. As the drug war continues to become a deadlier and more costlier failure, the political leaders in Latin American have become increasingly willing to talk openly about a solution through legalization.