The Strategic Culture of Prohibition and the Puzzling Continuity of Drug Policies in South America

The persistence of the prohibitionist approach is particularly puzzling in South America, where US influence, pressure, and security interventions in the recent decades have become less powerful, thereby providing governments with unprecedented levels of autonomy in designing and implementing different drug policies. Moreover, the chapter presents South America as the host of a region-wide strategic culture of prohibition, which has internalized the goal of undermining drug use at all costs, even though the means to accomplish this goal do more harm than good. Uruguay, where harm reduction principles have informed drug policies over the past years, constitutes an outlier to the region-wide strategic culture of prohibition. A close examination of the continuity of prohibitionist policies in countries as diverse as Ecuador, Argentina, and Peru, illustrates how agents of the strategic culture of prohibition have successfully undermined, slowed down, and reverted efforts to reform drug policies.