Pubdate: Wed, 20 Jun 2001
Source: National Review (US)
Issue: Vol. LIII, No. 13, 09 Jul 2001
Copyright: 2001 National Review
Contact:  http://www.nationalreview.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/287
Author: Richard Lowry

THIS IS A BUST: THE FUTILITY OF DRUG INTERDICTION

The drug war works, at least in Bolivia. Between 1995 and 2000, the amount 
of land in Bolivia with coca cultivated on it declined from almost 50,000 
hectares to fewer than 20,000. In Peru, during the same period, land under 
cultivation for coca declined from 115,000 hectares to roughly 30,000. It 
was a nice winning streak for the American policy of coca eradication in 
the Andes, except for the minor matter of Colombia, where the coca crop 
doubled-keeping the level of production in the Andes approximately the same 
as it had been before those victories in Bolivia and Peru.

In the drug war, the victories never end, because they never last. Last 
year's annual report from the Office of National Drug Control Policy noted 
progress in the Caribbean: A "decline in the cocaine trafficking in 
Jamaica, the Bahamas, and Cuba followed the execution of several joint 
interdiction operations in the area." But wait: "There were . . . increases 
in overall drug trafficking in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto 
Rico as well as smuggling through fishing vessels in the Eastern Pacific." 
It's a wonder that drug warriors make even this "one-step forward, one-step 
back" progress.

The report notes, matter-of-factly: "Drugs coming to the United States from 
South America pass through a six million square-mile transit zone roughly 
the size of the continental United States." Oh, is that all?

As a Council on Foreign Relations report on drug-eradication and 
- -interdiction policies puts it, "For twenty years, these programs have done 
little more than rearrange the map of drug production and trafficking." 
There is more rearranging yet to come. Bush drug-czar nominee John Walters 
is, in drug-war terms, a die-hard supply-sider, convinced that more aerial 
spraying and harsher measures against traffickers will squeeze the drug 
supply in America, force up prices, and prompt addicts to drop their habit.

Together with his mentor and czarist predecessor Bill Bennett, Walters 
champions a kind of drug-war Brezhnev doctrine in which no drug-policy 
excess-the tougher penalty for crack compared with powder cocaine, 
mandatory-minimum sentencing laws, the ban on the medicinal use of 
marijuana-is ever to be rolled back. The current American escalation in the 
Andes, pushing the drug war further toward a real shooting proposition, is 
just another step in this hard-line logic.

The $1.3 billion Plan Colombia, originally funded by the Clinton 
administration and now being refashioned into a broader, even more 
expensive Andes-wide initiative by the Bush administration, will throw a 
massive amount of military aid, including Black Hawk helicopters, into the 
breach in Colombia. It will likely succeed the way so many other drug-war 
initiatives do-fitfully and temporarily, if it all. To examine the 
supply-side drug policies in behalf of which American money, materiel, and 
prestige will be expended in Colombia is to see the free (in this case, 
black) market working in all its marvelous and appalling ingenuity, 
frustrating the drug warriors, whose efforts constantly double back on 
themselves like a cat chasing its tail. In its dishonesty and strategic 
confusion, Plan Colombia is-to paraphrase Omar Bradley-the wrong war, at 
the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy.

The economics of drug production will always bedevil drug warriors.

Take efforts to destroy coca leaf through eradication. Such efforts will 
have little effect on consumption in the U.S., since the price of coca leaf 
is such a tiny fraction of the street price of cocaine.

Expecting eradication to drive up retail drug prices is like increasing the 
cost of dashboard cupholders in hopes of raising the showroom price of 
automobiles. "Indeed," University of Maryland drug-policy expert Peter 
Reuter argues in an article in The Milken Institute Review, "leaf prices 
have varied enormously over the last decade, while the retail price of 
cocaine has steadily fallen."

Then, there's the sheer perversity of raising the price of something as a 
way to discourage its production. As Patrick L. Clawson and Rensselaer W. 
Lee write in their book The Andean Cocaine Industry, "It is not clear why 
Washington thinks that a crop reduction program raises the income of 
Midwestern wheat farmers but lowers the income of Andean coca farmers." 
Crop eradication also can't be much of an obstacle to the captains of the 
drug trade, because they have an enormous incentive to pay whatever it 
takes to keep coca in production, given the enormous retail bonanza 
awaiting them on U.S. streets (which, of course, is itself a product of the 
drug war-otherwise, there's no reason heroin, say, would cost more than gold).

This is the nub of the problem: The very illegality of drugs makes the drug 
business so lucrative that new actors will be drawn to it, no matter what. 
Imagine, by way of comparison, setting a $100 million lottery prize, then 
expecting people never to try to buy a ticket.

According to a recent RAND study on Colombia, "By one gauge, the 520 metric 
tons of cocaine that Colombia produced in 1999 could, at an average retail 
street price in the United States of one hundred dollars a gram (or $100 
million per metric ton), have netted as much as $52 billion-more than the 
gross domestic product of many nations."

The other supply-side policy, besides eradication, is targeting 
traffickers. The idea here is both to collapse the price of coca leaf, 
since there will be less demand for it from the dead, jailed, or scared-off 
traffickers, and to raise the retail price, since there will be less of the 
product on the streets. Thus, coca farmers and addicts will be discouraged 
all at once. This theory has arguably been demonstrated a few times, for at 
least a few months after major disruptions in trafficking networks.

But the market always bounces back. And, as in the case of the price of 
coca leaf, the costs to traffickers of seized drugs, abandoned or shot-down 
airplanes, etc., is minuscule compared to the eventual retail payoff.

So, the cat never catches its tail. "Interdiction, in fact, seizes a quite 
high share-perhaps one-third-of the cocaine that is destined for the United 
States," argues Peter Reuter. "Nonetheless, this still leaves plenty of 
product to support the large United States cocaine market at prices that 
are modest by historical standards." All the splashy successes, all the 
record-setting busts, fade away in the relentless reality of an insatiable 
and highly profitable market. Take the high-profile smashing of the 
Medellin and Cali cartels in Colombia. "The weakening of the cartel 
structure in Colombia and the impressive U.S. seizures of more than 760 
tons of cocaine between 1990 and 1996 have had no discernible effect on the 
underlying traffic infrastructure and on the availability of the drug 
domestically," report Clawson and Lee. "Indeed, the price per pure gram of 
cocaine in the United States reached a 15-year low in 1996, declining 37 
percent since 1990."

Crushing the cartels, which may have been a worthy goal in its own right 
since they were massive and corrupting criminal organizations, has just-in 
typical drug-war fashion-created another, in some ways more difficult, 
problem in Colombia. The drug trade is now dominated by smaller, looser 
groups that have been more difficult to fight, and that include the various 
guerrilla forces-both the Marxist FARC and the paramilitary vigilantes-in 
Colombia's civil war. Hence, Plan Colombia. It will throw everything in the 
drug-war arsenal at the problem, disrupting trafficking networks, 
eradicating crops, and promoting alternative development. The essential 
dishonesty of the plan is that it pretends to be just a war on drugs when 
it is really meant to be a war on FARC (the hideous paramilitaries, also 
involved in the drug trade, won't get the same attention).

Plan Colombia has a two-step strategic thrust of starving the guerrillas of 
drug funds and, consequentially, forcing them to the bargaining table.

Both steps are flawed.

Although FARC reaps major benefits from the drug trade, it's not clear 
exactly how dependent it is on drug money.

Even if all drug funds were to dry up-which is extremely unlikely, given 
the progress of the drug war in the Andes to date-there would still be 
plenty of financing available through various protection rackets and 
kidnapping, Colombia's other explosive growth industry. (By one estimate, 
according to the RAND study, Colombian guerrillas account for up to 30 
percent of all kidnappings in the world.) Indeed, another, smaller 
guerrilla group, ELN, has managed to prosper in Colombia without much 
connection to the drug trade.

The second step speaks of a deeper problem.

In Colombia, it's as though a particularly gruesome Aeschylus play were 
continually in production; it features the most vicious and extensive 
carnage this side of the Congo. FARC is soaked in this bloody culture, 
which is why it has been in the field for four decades.

For them, negotiations are just another stop on the way to more fighting.

FARC won't go away unless it is beaten, but the Colombia elite seem to have 
little taste for that. The military budget is still relatively small, and 
the country's most prominent families have all been victimized by 
kidnapping, and so are accustomed to trying to cut deals with thugs.

Vanquishing FARC might well require a dose of Fujimorism, but that would 
probably prompt a cutoff of U.S. aid. As it is, Washington is backing a 
policy that is likely to fail, will require an increased U.S. commitment, 
and eventually will force us to admit the fight in Colombia has little to 
do with whether American high-school kids will snort cocaine.

Indeed, the larger deception behind Plan Colombia is that the drug war, as 
currently conceived, is winnable.  And because people readily believe this, 
U.S. entanglement in a nasty, decades-long civil war is an easy political 
sell.  Bill Bennett, in a recent op-ed piece entitled "The Drug War Worked 
Once-It Can Again," wrote, "According to a national drug survey, between 
1979 and 1992, the most intense period of antidrug efforts, the rate of 
illegal drug use dropped by more than half, while marijuana use decreased 
by two-thirds. Cocaine use dropped by three-fourths between 1985 and 1992." 
But in Bennett's telling, after all of Reagan and Bush's hard work, Bill 
Clinton threw the drug-war machinery into reverse: "Between 1992 in 1999, 
rates of current drug use-defined as using once a month or more-increased 
by 15 percent.

Rates of marijuana use increased 11 percent."

This interpretation-endorsed by John Walters as well-just doesn't add up. 
As Jacob Sullum points out, drug use peaked in 1979, two years before 
Reagan took office and three years before any of his policies could have 
had any effect. Drug-taking habits move with fashion and in epidemic 
boom-and-bust trends that policymakers may have some influence over, but 
not as much as Bill Bennett press releases suggest.

That the amount of cocaine consumed in the U.S. rose into the mid 1980s, 
then leveled off (was Reagan "soft on cocaine" in his first term?), may 
have as much to do with the 1986 death of basketball star Len Bias as with 
any public policy.

As for the increases Bennett attacks in the Clinton administration, they 
have been small in absolute terms, and mostly involve high-school kids 
smoking more marijuana, the least harmful illegal drug and one about which 
attitudes have been softening (marijuana use by high-schoolers has also 
declined since 1997).

Indeed, the last two decades should have been fatal to the Walters theory 
that a supply-side crackdown reduces supply and increases price, thereby 
curtailing use. About half of high-school seniors reported that cocaine was 
readily available to them in 1999, roughly the same figure as in 1991, and 
the number for marijuana-80 percent or more-has remained steady since the 
mid 1970s. As for price, Peter Reuter reports in a new book written with 
Robert MacCoun (Drug War Heresies) that "during the period of increasingly 
tough enforcement, prices for cocaine and heroin have fallen steadily since 
1981; by 1995, after adjusting for inflation, they were only about 
one-third of their 1981 levels. For marijuana, prices rose steadily and 
substantially from 1981 to 1992 and then fell in the next four years back 
close to their 1981 level."

And what Bennett and Walters don't ever dare acknowledge, since it is 
fatally inconvenient to their case, is the boom in arrests that has 
continued to roll right through the supposedly lax Clinton years.

Reuter and MacCoun again: "The total punishment levied for drug control 
purposes has increased massively since 1981, when concern with cocaine 
became prominent . . . The number of commitments to state and federal 
prison has risen over tenfold during the same time period. By 1996, there 
were over 400,000 people in prison or jail serving time for selling or 
using drugs; the comparable figure for 1980 was about 31,000." According to 
the authors, "arrests for simple [marijuana] possession have doubled in the 
last five years." If this is an insufficiently vigorous drug war, what 
would ever be an adequate one?

This is the deeper point.

Skepticism about the drug war is often associated with libertarianism. But 
it also reflects a conservative distrust of utopian schemes, with 
impossible goals (eliminating certain forms of intoxication in the United 
States) to be pursued by nearly limitless means.

Government can't straighten the crooked timber of humanity, the impulse for 
euphoria and/or oblivion constituting one form of that crookedness. By what 
silly presumption does John Walters think he can set the fashion at 
nightclubs and raves all over America?  By what bizarre fantasy does he 
think he can do it with Black Hawks and pesticides? With enough resources, 
the United States may yet succeed in disrupting coca production and 
trafficking in Colombia-before they reassert themselves in some new, 
unexpected way.

Poor John Walters. He has many victories in front of him.
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MAP posted-by: Beth