What is more poisonous for humanity, cocaine, coal or oil? asks Gustavo Petro

The president of Colombia confirmed this Tuesday at the United Nations General Assembly that the battles against the consumption of narcotics and to prevent the destruction of the environment have failed.

“The war on drugs has failed. The fight against the climate crisis has failed, ”said Gustavo Petro during his first speech as the head of the South American country in the high-level segment of the Assembly debate.

“What is more poisonous for humanity, cocaine, coal or oil?”, reflected Petro before the delegations that populated the hemicycle of the main organ of the Organization.

“The opinion of power has ordered that cocaine is the poison and it must be persecuted, even if it only causes minimal deaths by overdose, and more by the mixtures that its ruled clandestineness causes, but, instead, coal and oil must be protected, so that their use can extinguish all humanity”.

After denouncing that the culprit of drug addiction is not the jungle, but the irrationality of world power, he stressed that, if the course of a war on drugs that has already lasted forty years is not corrected, this battle will last another four decades.

“The United States will see 2,800,000 young people die of overdose due to fentanyl, which is not produced in our Latin America. You will see millions of Afro-Americans being imprisoned in their private prisons. The imprisoned Afro will become the business of prison companies, a million more Latin Americans will be murdered, our waters and our green fields will fill us with blood, they will see the dream of democracy die both in my America and in Anglo-Saxon America,” he predicted.

In addition, he predicted that the end of democracy will take place “where it was born, in the great western European Athens”, and indicated that by “hiding the truth, they will see the jungle and democracies die and denounced the failure of the war against drugs together with the fight against the climate crisis.

Money and oil, the addictions of the 21st century

He then recalled that at a time when actions to save humanity and abandon fossil fuels were most necessary, “a war and another and another were invented.”

“They invaded Ukraine, but also Iraq, and Libya and Syria. They invaded in the name of oil and gas. They discovered in the 21st century the worst of their addictions: addiction to money and oil. Wars have served as an excuse for not acting against the climate crisis. Wars have shown them how dependent they are on what will end the human species,” she revealed.

A complaint that linked to the climate crisis that affects the planet and the lack of regulation of markets and capital.

“The climatic disaster fills us with viruses that swarm and destroy us, but you do business with medicines and turn vaccines into merchandise. They propose that the market will save us from what the market itself has created. The Frankenstein of humanity is in letting the market and greed act without planning, surrendering the brain and reason. Bringing human rationality to its knees to greed,” she noted.

For this reason, he added that “the climatic disaster will kill hundreds of millions of people and listen well, it is not produced by the planet, it is produced by capital. The cause of the climatic disaster is capital”, and argued that the logic behind exhaustive consumption and production with ever-increasing benefits for some people “produces climate disaster.”

“Behind the addiction to cocaine and drugs, behind the addiction to oil and coal, is the true addiction of this phase of human history: addiction to irrational power, profit and money. Behold the enormous deadly machinery that can extinguish humanity,” she concluded.

Regional call to save the Amazon

Finally, he called on all of Latin America to “end the war on drugs and allow our people to live in peace” and to save the Amazon jungle “with the resources that can be allocated to life worldwide.”

“If they do not have the capacity to finance the fund for the revitalization of the forests, if it weighs more to allocate money to weapons than to life, then reduce the external debt to free up our own budget spaces and with them carry out the task of saving humanity and life on the planet. We can do it ourselves if you don’t want to. Only change debt for life, for nature”, ordered the Colombian president.