Drugs-Politics-Violences (DPV) is a multimedia platform that offers a new perspective on drug policies and its consequences in Latin America. On DPV more than 70 intellectuals, photographers and artists reflect from diverse points of view and formats. New works by journalists, writers and scientifics will be added to build a narrative different from war: the dominant discourse in the last fifty years.
The failure of this war is measured in victims. Just in Mexico close to 300.000 people have been murdered and more than 60.000 remain missing since 2006. But its impact on the economic, health and social aspects can also be seen.
States around the world spend approximately US $ 100 billion a year in prohibitionists policies -a quarter of the total is the United States budget for the war against the drugs in Latin America. Prisons in our region are saturated with small sellers, peasants, and drug users, even those for whom psychoactive plants are sacred or therapeutic. And the objective set by Richard Nixon in the inaugural speech of drug war, on June 17 1971, is far from been accomplished: nowadays there are more than 300 million consumers of illegal substances in the planet.
DPV was born out of the necessity to ask new questions to obtain different answers on substances that are more surrounded by myths than knowledge. To do this we have looked at mexican peasants who grow poppy in the mountains and at the cannabis regulation in Uruguay; to the unlimited night in Guatemala and to the medicinal use of psychoactive mushrooms; to the geopolitical consequences of prohibitionism and drug trafficking, and to the faces of cocaleros (coca growers) in the Bolivian jungle.
From DPV we propose new narratives in order to build new bridges and understand the diverse phenomena throughout the large chain of drugs production and consumption . We promote creative dialogues between researchers, opinion leaders, journalists and cultural agents. We produce deep stories to find new meanings. We change points of view.
After half a century listening to the same discourse, we believe it is time to tell a new story. One that not only looks at our region from prohibitionism, stigma and violence. A more humane story, so that so will drug policies.
