The focus of the War on Drugs needs to be narrowed
It’s time to narrow the focus of the war on drugs
Top Story: Everyone suffers from the war,
except the drug lords
“Prohibition is an awful flop. We like it.
It can’t stop what it’s meant to stop. We like it.
It’s left a trail of graft and slime,
It don’t prohibit worth a dime,
It’s filled our land with vice and crime.
Nevertheless, we’re for it.”
” Franklin P. Adams (1931)
Hoping to appease a violent minority of coca farmers organized by Evo Morales, two Bolivian presidents have stepped down from office in two years, the latest in June. In a seemingly unrelated development, also in June, police Commander Enrique Cardenas, responsible for policing the Mexican town of Nuevo Laredo across the border from Laredo, Texas, was murdered in front of his nine-year-old daughter. Two weeks later, Alejandro Dominguez, proclaiming “I’m not afraid of anyone, and I don’t owe anybody anything,”was sworn in as Cardenas’ replacement. Six hours later he, too, was dead, his body riddled with bullets. What do unstable governments and horrific deaths such as these have in common? The war on drugs.
Joseph D. McNamara, the outspoken research fellow at The Hoover Institution and former Kansas City, Mo. and San Jose, Ca. chief of police, notes that efforts at eradicating the production and distribution of currently illegal drugs suffer from a “sausage effect.”As he puts it, “squeeze one end, the other end expands.”Just released United Nations figures show $5.4 billion spent on drug eradication in Latin America has done nothing to decrease availability of cocaine in the U.S. Coca cultivation in the Andes instead increased by 2% in 2004. This should not be surprising. And, to the extent that there was a temporary measure of success in reducing coca cultivation in the late ‘90s, methamphetamine use has skyrocketed. After all, if addicts can’t get cocaine, they’ll use meth, even though it is a far more destructive drug.
And yet, U.S. federal drug czar John P. Walters told Congress in June, “We are winning”the war on drugs.
McNamara grasps the idea that it cannot be won. Further, he understands the basic economics of criminalizing use. He points out that decriminalization would lead to dramatically reduced profits and far more civilized behaviors on the part of drug providers. The shareholders and corporate captains of Jim Beam, Jose Cuervo or Corona and, for that matter, the makers of Oxycontin and Vicodin (legal forms of heroin) have never forced a President from office or gunned down a law enforcer (or anyone else). Nor have they ever paid others to do so.
Worse, extraordinary profits accrue to those willing to take enormous risks from criminal enterprises, which is particularly disconcerting in an age of terrorism. These are typically people you wouldn’t want to run into in a dark alley or trust with a nuclear weapon. Because alcoholics tend to take far greater risks than others, the odds are excellent that people involved in the drug trade, particularly at the top, are highly functional alcoholics. Since practicing alcoholics are capable of anything — including terrorism — we can predict that prohibition might increase national security concerns. North Korea’s ruler Kim Jong Il may at some point provide us with proof of this. At the very least, part of the cost of doing business in an illegal enterprise is funding violence and payoffs needed to secure turf and protection from law enforcers. One consequence is corruption on an unimaginable scale. When Mexican President Vicente Fox sent federal agents to Nuevo Laredo after the second top-cop murder, some 40 Nuevo Laredo law enforcers fired upon them, providing clear evidence of the connection between the drug trade and local police.
By criminalizing the drug rather than the person on the drug who acts badly, we deny the right of ownership and abrogate responsibility. The drug war cannot be won by focusing on drugs, but instead on the behaviors of addicts and, when society can connect use and misbehaviors, by coercing abstinence. This requires a new paradigm: we need to narrow the focus of the war on drugs.