Via the WSJ: Latin American Panel Calls U.S. Drug War a Failure
U.S. law-enforcement officials — as well as some of their counterparts in Mexico — say the explosion in violence indicates progress in the war on drugs as organizations under pressure are clashing.“If the drug effort were failing there would be no violence,” a senior U.S. official said Wednesday. There is violence “because these guys are flailing. We’re taking these guys out. The worst thing you could do is stop now.”
This is a depressingly representative example of drug war logic.
The basic situation is quite simple: take a substance that is cheap and easy to manufacture for which there is a high level of demand, and therefore a good deal of money to be made selling said substance. Then, make the substance illegal so as to jack up the price so that the amount of money to be made is astronomical in its proportions. Place the nexus of the business in developing world where poverty is rampant and the states weak and voilà! you have a massive business that frequently is violent. That violence will occur when drug traffickers seek to protect their profits from the states seeking to stop the trade and that there will be violence between rival groups seeking to acquire ever larger portions of the aforementioned astronomical profits should surprise no one.
This is not difficult to figure out, and yet prevalent anti-drug policies utterly ignore this very simple and straight-forward set of parameters. In even simpler terms: how can it possibly be surprising that human beings might be willing to behave violently when hundreds of millions of dollars are to be had, especially when other human beings are trying to stop them from acquiring said millions?
And yet, we constantly (and by “constantly” I mean “for many decades now”) get asinine evaluations like the one noted above: that the violence is to be seen as a sign of the success of the anti-drug effort. I constantly think of Orwell sitting in a corner shaking his over the tortured usage of the language by drug warriors.
Of course, this is the same policy apparatus that thinks that continued (i.e,. year after year after year) record seizures of drugs is a sign of success as well, rather than a continual indication that more and more drugs are being moved through international networks (and despite the billions that have been spent to stop those drugs).
This is also the policy apparatus that doesn’t understand that if the stated goal of US policy is successful (i.e., supply reduction) then that will directly result in making the drug business all the more profitable (you know, basic economics: if demand remains constant and supply decreases, the result is an increase in price. If price goes up, the seller benefits). Indeed, drug-related violence (at least as manifested in the past by things like urban gang conflict) tends to increase when supply decreases, as they have to fight over supply and the higher profits that are available for selling said supply.
The bottom line in all of this continues to be as follows: we have spent, and will continue to spend, billions of dollars and yet at the end of the day, the basic availability of the drugs in question remain about the same, and indeed, cocaine in particular is as cheap, or cheaper, than it was when we started funneling large amounts of cash into stopping its flow into the country. Certainly despite “successes” at crop eradication in various countries (e.g., Bolivia, Peru and Colombia), the overall amount of coca cultivation remains roughly the same.
In reality, if one spends mountains of cash and engages in massive action and the problem one is trying to solve remains the same (if not gets worse, see: Mexico), then there ought to be a massive rethinking of the effort.
However, reality doesn’t tend to affect drug war thinking (even if the consequences of those policies have devastating real world effects).
(The WSJ piece is worth reading in its entirety, btw).
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February 12th, 2009 at 9:57 am
Nice commentary.
Have you seen the news about Obama’s Drug Czar pick: Gil Kerlikowske?
He is he Chief of Police in Seattle. I don’t know too much about him, but apparently he is more of a “community policing” guy than an over-the-top crackdown cop.
I would have like to have seen Obama pick a public health advocate; but given the political sensitivity of the “drug war,” this seems like a positive step.
Most big city cops I know actually have a pretty nuanced view of the drug problem since they see that it is essentially impossible to stop supply. The whole doctrine of community policing is in line with taking a multi-pronged approach to urban crime problems.
This might turn out to be a brilliant move by Obama–moving away from the purely militaristic approach to drug control while still having someone schooled in crime prevention (which could help him get past Senate confirmation hearings)
February 12th, 2009 at 10:38 am
Thanks.
And no, I was unaware of Kerlikowske–I need to look into him.
And yes, any movement away from straight up militarism would be helpful, although politically it is clear that baby step are all that can be taken, as movement to pure public health wouldn’t fly with the general populace.
February 12th, 2009 at 10:11 pm
And there’s the rub, as long as the voters want a drug war, the politicians will direct the bureaucracy and military to produce one.
February 16th, 2009 at 7:21 am
[...] Steven Taylor takes us on “Yet Another Foray into Drug War Logic” in which we learn that, no matter the outcome, it’s evidence that we’re winning the war on drugs. Which we’ve been just this close to winning for decades now. [...]
February 19th, 2009 at 8:41 am
[...] are successful in any significant way (although some people quite familiar with the situation delude themselves otherwise). addthis_url = ‘http%3A%2F%2Fwww.poliblogger.com%2F%3Fp%3D15118′; addthis_title = [...]