In an interview this week with London's Metro, President Santos of Colombia said "every time somebody in London sniffs coke he destroys the environment here in the tropical forests...and probably kills a couple of people"
There are two solutions to this. One of them has a chance.
Santos' view is widely shared. It was the basis of a joint campaign by the former Colombian vice-presidency and the UN, which came to Trafalgar Square in 2008. It was attended by Alex James. Jonathan Dimbleby said something very similar a few weeks ago, expressing his "contempt for cocaine sniffers in this country who ... do not realise that they are fuelling a drugs war".
George Monbiot wrote an article on this very point in the Guardian in 2009, in which he said "I know people who drink fair-trade tea and coffee, shop locally and take cocaine at parties. They are revolting hypocrites."
There is a lot that is wrong with these views. But they are not completely wrong.
Monbiot touches on a central issue in his contribution: "the counter-cultural association appears to insulate people from ethical questions".
This is an important point. But it is not just the counter-cultural association, but the fact that most people know that the main issue here is drug policies.
The issue is one of the locus of ethical responsibility, and the seeming ability of some who use cocaine, and let's face it, pretty much all policy makers, to pass the buck onto someone or something else.
Is demand for cocaine here in the UK and elsewhere contributing to violence and environmental damage in Colombia? Yes. It is nonsensical to deny this. We are all responsible for our own actions. That prohibition makes things vastly worse says nothing about a personal choice made in the knowledge of the damage the drug trade inflicts today. It's just not enough to say the market should not be so violent. It is, so we must make our decisions accordingly and live with them.
It is also true that one person's choice will have little impact on global demand. But this is obviously not an acceptable ethical response.
I work on human rights and drug policies so I am not aiming to stigmatise people who use drugs or are dependent on them here. Lord knows that has caused too much harm already (Google 'drug detention centre'). I campaign against human rights abuses against people who choose to use them or related to drug law enforcement. I also do not view drug use as a moral wrong. But given the damage the cocaine trade wreaks, and that of some other drugs, the ethical thing to do, as a recreational user, is surely to forego.
For many others this is not so simple and arguments about how one came to choose to use certain drugs in the first place deflect from real harm in their own lives - it's why we work for better harm reduction and treatment in the first place.
But the issue of personal ethical choice, while something for all of us to grapple with continually, is marginal to the bigger picture in drug policy. Passing the buck goes both ways. Far more damaging is the flip-side of this discussion, where governments, policy-makers, and law enforcement put all the blame on consumers to deflect attention from the harms drug policies have wrought on those same countries and communities in whose names they claim to speak; and from their own moral culpability.
The blatant fallacy in placing the blame on consumers is that ending all cocaine use one person at a time is a feasible solution to the violence and conflict associated with the trade. It's just another iteration of the fanciful 'drug free world'.
By this argument discussion of realistic and pragmatic policies that intervene in a transaction between producer, trader and user that need not be so harmful, are side-stepped, and debates about how to better reduce drug related harms here in the UK are frozen. It's a political dodge of the key issues, and they know it.
It boils down to this. There are two solutions to Santos' statement. One is that all people stop using cocaine. The other is that governments intervene and change the nature of the trade.
One of these has a chance. Monbiot spotted it. So did Dimbleby. Interestingly, Santos seems willing to consider it.