The taboo that kept some from outright admitting that current antinarcotics policies have failed has all but disappeared. A recent report by former Brazilian President Crdoso, former Colombian President Gaviria, and former Mexican President Zedillo made precisely this point and an op-ed by the three this week in the WSJ with the headline “The War on Drugs is a Failure” further emphasized it. A Government Accountability Office report from late 2008 states that Plan Colombia’s “drug reduction goals were not fully met,” noting that since 2000 coca cultivation grew 15 percent and coca production 5 percent. Edward Schumacher-Matos pointed out in the Washington Post this week that “Cocaine is still so readily available that its street price is a quarter of what it was in 1981.”
But the drug war has not only failed; it has caused significant harm. The U.S. strategy, which consists of combating drug trafficking with enforcement, is meant to disrupt cartels, with the hope that the raised cost of doing business will dissuade some from the drug trade. Unfortunately, a look at decades of the war on drugs demonstrates that the multi-billion dollar drug market is lucrative enough to dwarf the cost created by enforcement campaigns. Instead, enforcement leads to increased violence among drug cartels and between the drug cartels and enforcement authorities, leading to significant civilian and non-civilian deaths. This explains the tens of thousands that have been killed in Colombia in the past decade and the over 5,000 drug-related deaths in Mexico just last year. The situation in Central America is similarly dire, but underestimated to the point that today UN Assistant Secretary General Carlos Castresana asked this week for urgent help for the region.
Beyond the killings, the drug trade and the way it is handled also erode democratic institutions. This is what happened in Colombia when presidential candidates and members of Congress, as well as police officers and judges, were on the drug traffickers’ pay roll. It is what is happening now in Mexico, where the Juarez Police chief quit this week following threats and where the mayor of Vista Hermosa was killed today. Intimidation, not to mention assassinations, of public officials reduces people’s trust in institutions and weakens their role in society. The growing drug trade and counternarcotics strategy of the last decades has instigated violence and weakened democracies, but has not led to a reduction in drug production or trafficking.
Colombia is seen by some as a lone success story in the drug war, but even though violence has dropped and the drug trade no longer threatens the state’s stability, violence remains high and drugs continue to threaten Colombia’s institutions. A massacre of dozens of indigenous Colombians by the FARC in recent weeks serves as a reminder of the human costs of the drug-fueled war. The developing wiretapping scandal, in which officials from the state’s security service, known as DAS, apparently wiretapped lawmakers, magistrates, and journalists, and sold the information in the black market to the highest bidder, namely guerrillas, paramilitaries, and drug traffickers, is also a reminder of the corrupting effect of drug money. Even in a country that has received over $6 billion from the United States to combat drug trafficking in the past decade, the power of a multi-billion dollar black market cannot be stopped.
The recent criticism of the drug war has been accompanied by some policy proposals. The report by the three presidents recommends working around these priorities: “Reduce the harm caused by drugs, decrease drug consumption through education, and aggressively combat organized crime.” They also ” propose the careful evaluation, from a public-health standpoint, of the possibility of decriminalizing the possession of cannabis for personal use.” A recent Huffington Post column makes the case for legalization. Others have focused on more specific recommendations such as preventing weapons from crossing the border south into Mexico or targeting drug funds going south.
The problem is some of these proposals such as decriminalizing or legalizing drugs seem unattainable on a political level in the United States. The others, such as targeting guns and funds, would create complications for drug cartels, but would not significantly reduce the negative effects of the drug war in the long run.
At a time in which the United States cannot continue to throw its money into a failed strategy and with a country next door experiencing the human pain and eroding effect of drug trafficking, the Obama administration, as busy as it may be, will have to make some calls on how it will deal with drug trafficking. Don’t we have some creative policy proposals to offer? There seems to be a void in terms of realistic policy proposals that could have a significant impact. Any thoughts would be much appreciated.
6 Comments
I worked on alternative development issues in four different countries here in Latin America over the last 20 or so years, and I have to tell you, my perception is that we’re losing and losing everywhere in terms of the anti-drug war; it’s simply not working and hasn’t worked ever, really.
I read Hari’s article, and I agree with it. You’ve asked for realistic policy proposals, and frankly, the only one I see is legalization. One can argue that legalization is not politcally realistic at the moment in the U.S., and I’d have to agree the majority of Americans and American polticians do not agree with legalization. I would respond in turn that they themselves are not being realistic, nor are they in touch (and probably don’t care about) the reality of Afghanistan, Mexico and Colombia.
With the advent of the (growing) Mexican crisis I believe the reality of the drug industry and the drug wars is drawing much closer to home, and I feat that it’s only a matter of time before we have some Mexican-style shootouts on the American side of the border. I’m sure that there’ll be cries for more fences, the Army, etc., but really, this only going to get worse, everywhere unless and until we act as we did when we repealed Prohibition.
I acknowledge again, that outright and rapid legalization of drugs is not realistic for now. I think, though, we should begin thinking about some sort of broad and public dialogue, probably through the media, aimed at getting people to seriously consider alternatives to the laws we’ve currently got on the books. Dialogue we need and cold, hard-eyed dialogue of the sort Hari posits, is what we need to start – so let’s get started…
Lars,
Thank you for your response to my request for creative thinking on the drug war. I very much appreciate you taking this on.
Above you argue for legalization, and I would like to respond by challenging you (and our other readers) to think about the effect that legalization of narcotics would have on society and on the drug trade, and I say this because I feel this policy option is often heralded as a potential panacea, while in reality its effects may be more nuanced. The cost to society of this strategy may be higher than expected, and the payoff less. Let me explain…
In the post above I discarded the possibility of legalizing drugs offhandedly because it is not currently politically viable, but let’s imagine it were possible.
On the demand side, I would expect consumption to increase in part as a results of increased availability, but I also think there is something to be said about the fact that some people allow the state’s laws to guide what they consider ok or not ok to do. Legalizing drugs may decrease the moral issues some people identify with consuming drugs and may also lead people to underestimate the danger of using them. Furthermore, legalizing drugs would make it safer to use them, in the sense that one would not have to fear that what one thinks is ecstasy may actually be rhinoceros anesthesia (as I’ve seen happen before), but also in the sense that one would not have to fear the law. These two fear factors may serve as important disincentives for potential users at the moment, and legalizing would eliminate them. Unless legalizing drugs is accompanied with a very strong educational campaign, and I do think this may be possible, I would expect more people to use drugs. The costs to the world’s health care systems of increase drug abuse could be devastating.
I can also easily imagine that cocaine approved by the U.S. government, as an example, would probably be sold at an exorbitantly high price, in part due to the government’s safety requirements, but perhaps also as a policy to prevent the spread of drug abuse. I would expect a very high tax on narcotics, which would be justified as a way to pay for the expected high cost of cocaine use to the health care system. With this system in place, the Colombian and Mexican drug cartels that we very well know, may just find themselves very busy supplying below-the-market-price drugs.
Black markets do not only exist when products are illegal. They also exist when it is possible for trafficking organizations to produce and sell the product at a lower price, as I discussed on my post a month ago about the Guajira and the black market for gasoline there. And black markets, of either kind, usually come with violence.
Legalizing drugs would definitely transform the market for trafficking drugs, but would it eliminate it? Would it significantly lower the death toll in producing and trafficking countries? Probably not as much as we would hope. And would it increase the health care and society costs in consuming countries? Probably yes.
Lars, you ask for a broad and public dialogue to seriously think of alternatives. I definitely agree and I think our first step should be to try to come up with a policy that we would expect to have the effects we want. What frustrates me is that it seems that when it comes to counternarcotics it is not an issue of lack of political will or popular support. It seems that we don’t have good ideas on what may work. We need to come up with them.
Hi, Sebastian, First off, I should tell you that I am not what you would call a constant correspondent in that sometimes, I’ll respond to a comment or a blog right away and other times, I may not pop up for days or perhaps weeks, so be forewarned.
Ok, that said, I think your idea of trying to visualize a world in which drugs are legalized is a logical one. I am not a computer programmer or game theorist, but I shouldn’t be surprised if someone hasn’t taken a crack at gaming or designing scenarios wherein drugs are legalized. Writing within the confines of a comments section of a blog will, perforce, limit ideas/logic/arguments for how things might play out, but here are some thoughts in no particular logic order:
1. A legal drug industry would probably look a lot like the alcohol industry or perhaps some aspects of the pharmaceutical sector and/or the tobacco industry. You’d have registered/licensed producers/processors/transporters/wholesalers/retailers, etc., with all the usual governmental add-ons and aspects, i.e., FDA, ATF, public health agencies, etc., etc. There’d be permits, taxes, stamps, quality controls, health controls and so on. Drugs would be pricey, but they’re pricey now, just as booze and tobacco are, and people just keeping buying the stuff, but with the real benefit of not getting bunches of people killed in process (I’m not including the public health probs like lung cancer, DUI deaths, etc., I refer just to drug war deaths like we’re witnessing now.)
2. The transition to a legal industry system in the U.S. in tandem with its suppliers such as Colombia and Afghanistan probably wouldn’t be that difficult. I say this because all structural aspects of the system (coca and poppy plots, processing labs, transport systems and so on) already exist; it would simply be a matter of bringing them out of the closet, as it were. Btw, in bringing such systems into the legal world, it may be that we could use experiences/lessons learned during the post Prohibition rentry of a legal booze industry into the U.S. to faciliate the transition to a legal drug scenario.
3. Public health implications of legal drugs. As I am not a computer programmer, neither am I a public health expert. That said, I’d hazard the guess that incremental use of drugs in a legalized drug society probably wouldn’t be significant. I say that based on another guess regarding what happened regarding alcohol consumption when Probibition came to an end, and that is that there probably was some sort of semi-prolonged celebratory spike in consumption after we went wet again, and thereafter, things sort of leveled off over time. I’d guess again that if you take a look at marijuana consumption in the Netherlands, there’s some sort of constant level that’s been reached over time there. I know that anti-legalization critics argue that certain drugs are qualitatively (i.e., chemically/psychologically) more addictive than alcohol, and since I’m not a chemist either, I won’t argue that point. Still, I guess (again) that when you take recreational/social/true addict users together as groups for alcohol and drugs, you’ll see the same stable trends in usage and/or abuse in either group. (Btw, I’m not including tobacco here, because I see that substance as much more addictive/toxic for a higher percentage of its users than either alcohol or drug groups.) In resumen here, I’m saying that legalizing drugs will not turn the majority or even a significant percentage of the U.S. population into sociopathic crackheads, nor would it cause morbidity/mortality rates to jump significantly; there’ll be a small portion of the population that have serious problems, just as with alcohol, but I don’t believe that it’ll be that different, statistically speaking.
4. All of the above assumes the currently unrealistic political scenario which has the U.S. political elite greenlighting legalization. The dialogue concept I posit might (or more likely, probably won’t) lead to decisive legalization action by our political leaders, but I do believe that the globalization of the drug wars complicates the situation immensely. By that I mean, when I use the comparison of legalizing drugs with the re-legalization of booze, post-Prohibition, we hit the problem of what I call the all or nothing strategy, i.e., whereas we addressed the alcohol on just a national (U.S.) basis, drugs and (anti-) drug policies are interconnected on an international basis, in good part because of American pressure on other countries to act as we have. This means that we’ve created a huge and extremely complex web of laws, policies and even mores around the world that reflect how we see the problem.
That means in turn that if we ever were to move seriously on legalizing drugs, we’d have to get the rest of the world to go along with us or risk suffering what I call the “Needle Park” phenomenon (Remember the Swiss needle exchange program in public parks there which had to be shut down because it attracted addicts from all over Europe?). I know that we’ve got legalized dope (as I call marijuana) in Holland and the Dutch seem to have addressed the Needle Park syndrome, but I don’t know to what extent and/or if their approach would work in a suddenly (and improbably) drug free U.S. in a world where no one else goes along. En fin, I think a drug legalization approach would have to be global if we want to avoid attracting dopers from everywhere else.
OK, this is super long, so I’ll stop here.
Lars and Sebastian (and all other LatAmThought readers):
In advertising, we often look at solving creative briefs and communications objectives by looking at what we are trying to achieve and working backwards. For the sake of this argument, which I completely agree needs to look beyond broad legalization and increased military crackdowns on supply side, I propose we first look at the key shortcomings as individual issues rather than the overarching theme of “changing drug policy”, and tackle each issue as such.
The war on drugs has many components. If we think of the pros and cons for each, it may help us arrive at a strategy that takes each one into account
I’ve outlined a working list below, which is by no means exhaustive. I encourage all readers to chime in to add/subtract from the list, comment on a particular item, or shout out if there is anything you disagree with:
The supply side issues:
1. Violence caused by infighting of international DTOs
2. Instability of State Institutions, including but not limited to Police, Government, and Military
3. Increased homicide rates and urban crime in major trafficking areas, including Central America and Mexico
4. Dangers of global organized crime network
5. Revision of current punishment system for engaging in activity
The demand side issues:
1. Costs of legalization, both social and financial
2. Regulation of a legalized market. As Sebastian points out, legalization would likely be highly regulated and may have unanticipated costs and consequences.
3. Sale of firearms on US side of US-Mexico border
4. Revision of current punishment system for engaging in activity
Other
1. Spillover fighting from traditional supply side/trafficking countries to demand side. Look no further than the recent killings of Colombian cartel leaders in Spain, reports from IHT about Mexican cartel fighting in Arizona and Texas, and the idea of a joint US-Mexican effort to combat fighting, designed with protecting US interests from the spillover that Lars warned about in his first comment.
This week’s Economist cover article on the drug war argues that “the least bad policy is to legalize drugs.” (http://www.economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=13237193)
It is encouraging to see such a prestigious magazine discussing an issue which we brought up here two weeks ago, but at the same time it is depressing to see the magazine use a dejected tone similar to the one I used above. After reviewing all the problems with legalizing drugs, the article concludes: “Our solution is a messy one; but a century of manifest failure argues for trying it.”
The Economist argues for legalizing not because it will solve the various problems Eliot identified above, but simply because it appears to be the only alternative solution.
In fact, the Economist points out that countries like Sweden (which has harsh laws) and the Netherlands (which is very lenient on drugs) both have very low rates of problem drug users. It quotes a World Health Organization study of 17 countries which finds that a country’s policies do not seem to have a conclusive effect on drug consumption. The magazine also points out that a violent black market would probably continue even after a global legalization.
I was disappointed to see the Economist make policy recommendations that are the “least bad.” I refuse to believe there aren’t better possibilities out there.
One interesting fact I did glean from the Economist comes from the Monitoring the Future Project. This organization found that in 1998 70% of U.S. 12th graders believed smoking 1-2 packets of cigarettes a day was a great risk, the same percentage as 12th graders that believed occasional cocaine use was a great risk. By 2008 about 74% believe the cigarettes are a great risk, but only about 68% believe cocaine poses a similar risk. This highlights the success of the campaign against cigarette smoking, and the failure of campaigns against cocaine use. Whether drugs are legalized or not, there’s a lot to learn form the anti-smoking campaigns.
Thanks for the well-written article, bookmarked and rss subscribed…