Drug-Pharma Monday | The True Cost of the War on Drugs

The illegal drug market is one of the most profitable in the world. It is extremely difficult to know the global value of the drug trade since it is a business that is illegal, underground, and hard to trace. The United Nations Drug Control Program estimates that it is worth $400 billion per year, equivalent to 8% of world trade. In the United States, alone, the drug trade is worth upwards of $100 billion per year. It is now close to 20 years since the U.S. government has been fighting the “War On Drugs,” but despite the billions of dollars spent, an enormous amount of drugs continues to flow into the country.

The drug trade in the United States has had extremely negative consequences in terms of violence and corruption. But its effect on Latin American countries has been even more severe. It has led to violence, corruption, and social dislocation on such a scale that in many cases the very viability of the state as an institution has been threatened. Domestic drug consumption in Latin America is relatively low. The vast majority of the drugs produced in Latin America are intended for the U.S. market. When talking about the negative effect of drugs, it is important to look at the overall effect throughout the continent, not just in the United States.

This article examines changes in the narcotics industry over the past 20 years. It focuses particularly on the negative effects of the drug trade on the countries of Latin America. Finally, the article explores some of the implications of the drug trade for our border community here in El Paso/Ciudad Juarez and forms an argument for the legalization of the production and sale of drugs.

Developments in the Drug Trade During the 1980s

One of the most significant trends in the drug trade during the 1980s was the growth in the trafficking of cocaine and its synthetic derivatives. This development led to the infamous appearance of crack cocaine on the streets of U.S. cities, which enormously affected the drug market for users as and fueled violent gang wars between the suppliers. Although Bolivia and Peru were the largest coca and cocaine base producers, it was Colombia that dominated the actual processing of the drug. By the 1980s, Colombian trafficking organizations were supplying approximately 50% of the cocaine to the U.S. market, primarily by way of maritime and air routes through the Bahamas and other parts of the Caribbean. During this time, Colombian drug organizations were firmly entrenched in the South Florida area.

Also during the 1980s, Colombia was the primary source of foreign-produced marijuana in the United States, supplying approximately 80% of the market. Mexico and Jamaica were responsible for a further 10%, while domestic production supplied the rest. During the same decade, Southwest Asia was the primary source (60%) of heroin to the United States. The other 40% was Mexican-produced heroin, which supplied the western half of the United States.

The 1980s was the first time that the power of drug trafficking organizations to seriously disrupt civil society was witnessed. The 1980 coup in Bolivia, led by Garcia Meza and apparently backed by one of the country’s drug organizations, undermined drug control policies in that country. In 1981, the Colombian M-19 guerilla group kidnapped the sister of the head of the Medellin drug cartel. The cartel responded by organizing death squads that systematically killed guerillas and their families until the sister was released. These death squads went on to intimidate and murder journalists and politicians in an effort to repeal Colombia’s extradition treaty with the United States.

It was also during the 1980s that the drug trade was first perceived as a threat to the national security of the United States. As a response, the resources of the CIA and the military were put at the disposal of the anti-drug effort that was to become known as the War on Drugs.

Emergence of Mexico’s Role During the 1990s

The 1990s saw a significant shift in where drugs were produced and how they were brought into the United States. Because of increased surveillance of the Caribbean area by the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), Colombian drug traffickers began to rely upon Mexican organizations to smuggle cocaine into the United States, making Mexico the main transshipment point for U.S.-bound drugs. Central America was also increasingly used as an arrival destination for Colombian cocaine. Colombian organizations paid Mexican drug cartels with portions of the smuggled cocaine, sometimes up to half of the load. Usually small, twin-engine planes were used to transport drugs from Colombia as far as northern Mexico, but there were occasions when large, ex-service commercial jets brought in multi-ton quantities.

Drug-related violence continued unabated in South America. Over 150 groups loosely organized into cartels dominated the cocaine trade in Colombia. Guerilla groups such as the FARC and the ELN became more powerful and wealthy as they taxed drug producers, while right-wing paramilitary groups, often funded by the drug cartels, carried out murders and kidnappings in support of the drug cartels’ objectives.

Mexican heroin continued to supply the western half of the United States during the 1990s, while Colombian heroin replaced the supply from Southeast Asia. Colombian heroin was of an extremely high quality and could be snorted, avoiding the stigma of injecting Southeast Asian heroin with a needle.

Partly due to the success of marijuana eradication programs in Colombia, production there was severely disrupted, so Mexico stepped in as the major supplier to the United States. According to U.S. government figures, the number of marijuana users in the United States declined sharply between 1980 and 1990, but it was still extremely attractive to Mexican traffickers because of the high profit margin. The 1990s also saw the beginning of production in Mexico of synthetic drugs such as methamphetamine, which until then had been produced mainly inside the United States.

Mexico’s development as the main transshipment point for Colombian cocaine entering the United States, and largest supplier of marijuana to the U.S. market, led to an enormous increase in wealth and power for the Mexican drug cartels. This growth has had serious consequences for Mexican society. In 1994, the Mexican Attorney General’s office estimated that the drug trade contributed around $30 billion annually to the Mexican economy. Only $7 billion was generated that year by oil earnings. The amount of money laundered in Mexico from drug trade was thought to represent between 4% and 20% of the GDP. The drug trade directly employed directly approximately 360,000 Mexicans and occupied as many as 20,000 soldiers in drug eradication efforts on a daily basis.

The enormous income generated from the drug trade is used to build and buy houses, cars, and ranches, and is invested in legitimate businesses such as hotels, factories, and stores. Much of the large tourist development in states such as Jalisco and Yucatan is funded in part with proceeds from the drug industry. Analysts have argued that drugs are Mexico’s most successful export. They also assert that the drug industry has softened the blow of economic restructuring programs and financial crises experienced by Mexico and other Latin American countries over the past 20 years. In the face of an agricultural crisis brought on by the import of cheap foreign food imports, Mexican farmers are turning to the cultivation of poppies or marijuana as alternative cash crops. Many involved in the drug trade are poor people with limited economic opportunities, tempted by the ease with which large amounts of money. This is not to excuse their participation in what is an illegal and dangerous occupation. But the widespread poverty and deprivation that exists in Mexico and the rest of Latin America cannot be discounted as a factor in the growth of the drug trade.

Drug Trade and the Border

Today, the southwest border has become the main entry point for illegal drugs into the United States. The long, rugged, and in many places, isolated, 2,000 mile border is an ideal place to smuggle narcotics. Seventy-two percent of the cocaine consumed in the United States is brought across it. Colombian organizations continue to use the Mexico-Central America corridor to transship cocaine into the United States. Increasingly, they use the Pacific Ocean as the preferred maritime route as it is much larger than the Caribbean and an easier place to evade detection. Fishing boats and speedboats transport multi-ton quantities of cocaine to southern Mexico, where it is broken down into smaller loads and transported through Mexico and into the United States. Nonetheless, the Caribbean continues to be an important transit point for cocaine, by way of countries such as Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti.

After almost 20 years since the initiation of the War on Drugs, and despite a current annual budget of $20 billion, an enormous amount of narcotics continues to enter the United States. In 1996, 120 tons of cocaine a month was being brought into the country from Chihuahua, Mexico, alone—1,440 tons a year (El Diario de Juárez, March 2004). In the same year, according to DEA statistics, almost 45 tons of cocaine was seized nationwide. Officially, the DEA estimates that it seizes between 20% and 25% of drugs brought into the country. Unofficially, the figure is put at 1% to 2%. Only 13 truckloads are required to supply the United States with cocaine for a year. With almost 20,000 kilometers of coastline, 300 ports of entry, and 7,500 kilometers of land border, stopping illegal drugs from entering the United States has been compared to looking for a needle in a haystack.

According to the DEA, southern New Mexico plays a major role in the laundering of drug revenue. Much of this money passes through Native American casinos that are unregulated by the state. The DEA also points to the large number of banking institutions in Las Cruces, New Mexico as evidence of the economic benefits of the drug trade. A city of Las Cruces’ side would typically have five to six banking institutions, but the city actually has over 200. El Paso also reaps considerable benefit from the trade in drugs. The Federal government estimates that $3.5 billion of drug money is laundered through the El Paso economy each year—more than twice the $1.7 billion budget of the military base at Fort Bliss, which itself represents 10% to 15% of the local economy.

Negative Effects of the Drug Trade

Anti-Drug Laws in the United States

A distinction can be made between negative effects caused by government policy to combat drugs, and negative effects caused by the actual trafficking of the drugs. In the United States, one of the government responses to the drug trade has been increasingly harsher sentences for those convicted of drug offenses. These measures, however, are generally seen as having failed since they have not led to a noticeable decrease in drug use and are extremely expensive. In 2001 it was estimated that the 55% of prisoners convicted for drug offenses were costing the taxpayer $3 billion per year. Some of these prisoners are untreated drug addicts stuck in a cycle of constant re-imprisonment in the criminal justice system. Others are people who have been convicted for minor offenses, such as possession of small amounts of narcotics. In 2002, over 45% of arrests for drug offenses involved marijuana, the vast majority for possession. The decision to introduce mandatory minimum sentences for the possession, sale, and use of drugs has made the U.S. prison population balloon to two million people. On a per capita basis, that is the largest prison population in the world. Many people argue that harsher drug sentences have had little effect on drug use.

One of the most controversial aspects of the War on Drugs is how anti-drug laws have disproportionately impacted the minority population. Almost 77% of prisoners are from minority populations (56.7% African-American and 19% Latino). In the early 1990s, there were more young African-American men in prison than in college. According to the federal Household Survey, 72% of illicit drug users are white, a slight over-representation given that they make up 69% of the population. Yet 52% of prisoners convicted of drug-related offenses in state prisons are African- Americans. African-American and Latino populations are more likely to be arrested for drug offenses than whites, and much more likely to receive prison sentences.

Drug-Related Violence

Another negative effect of the drug trade is the enormous amount of violence that accompanies it. It is difficult to estimate, but the majority of murders and other types of violence in Mexico are linked to the trade in narcotics. It is estimated that in Sinaloa, a state in western Mexico where a large amount of marijuana and poppies are grown, close to 16,000 people have died over the past 20 years as a result of drug-related violence. The vast majority of the violence is between and within the cartels, sometimes between cartels as they struggle for control of a share of the drug trade. In other cases, factions within a cartel dispute control of a particular area, theft of drugs, or other conflicts. Occasionally, drug-related violence spills over and innocent people are targeted or affected. The mere existence of such a high level of violence, even when it doesn’t affect the average citizen, is extremely detrimental to the overall well being of the society.

Much of the drug-related violence in the U.S. occurs in poor, inner city areas. Although these areas have average drug use rates, they are often used as drug distribution points because of their lack of social capital, and thus become battle grounds for gangs and factions that seek to control the drug market. Indeed, the majority of gang violence in U.S. cities is related to the drug trade. Inner cities areas subsequently experience a higher level of violence and crime than they otherwise would.

Economic Effects and Government Corruption

Although the drug trade in Latin America does create a large influx of money into generally unstable and impoverished economies, many analysts argue that the overall economic effects are negative. For example, taxes are often not paid on the income generated by the drug trade. Also, businesses funded by drug money are able to operate at a loss, which undercuts legitimate businesses selling the same products.

The trade in drugs in Mexico and the United States also causes enormous amounts of corruption and lawlessness. Mexican sociologist Luis Astorga argues that since the beginning of the drug trade in his country, drug traffickers have had a very close relationship with the political elite. It is not an exaggeration to say that many politicians in Mexico are directly benefiting from the drug trade. Probably the most famous example is General Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo, who in 1996 was installed as the equivalent of the Mexican Drug Czar with great fanfare. It was felt at the time that the military was Mexico’s most uncorrupted institution. By early 1997, however, General Rebollo had been arrested and charged with actually being a paid employee of the Carrillo Fuentes, or Juárez drug cartel.

This does mean that all politicians are corrupt. But it does mean that political institutions are so intertwined with and compromised by drug cartels that they are incapable of bringing them under control. In Mexico, organizations that produce and traffic drugs have penetrated the political, law enforcement, and judicial institutions to such an extent that they are able to carry out their business with a minimal amount of interference from the authorities. Many drug cartels actually employ police officers and soldiers, both active and retired. There are numerous cases in which the soldiers or police officers that are supposed to be fighting the drug trade are actually working with the drug traffickers themselves. President Fox has a reputation as an honest politician. But the fact that cocaine seizures by Mexican authorities were down from 33.5 tons in 1999 to 12.5 tons in 2002 suggests that as a whole, the Mexican government is unwilling or unable to stem the flow of illegal drugs in to the United States.

Despite changes in government, the production and trafficking of drugs is relentless. From 1986 to 2004, three governors from different political parties were in power in Chihuahua, Mexico. During their respective administrations, the cultivation and trafficking of drugs in Chihuahua was constant. In 1984, 11,000 tons of marijuana was seized from El Bufulo, a plantation in Jimenez, Chihuahua covering 200 hectares and employing 12,000 men. Obviously, the existence of a plantation of this size employing so many people was not a total surprise. El Bufulo was “discovered” by the Mexican authorities after it was revealed by DEA agent Enrique Camarena. According to a government report, the plantation was run not only by the Juárez drug cartel, but also by Mexican police organizations that offered protection and safe passage up to the northern border. During the early 1990s, the Juárez drug cartel would regularly fly into Chihuahua and other northern states multi-ton loads of cocaine aboard large ex-commercial planes. The Carrillo Fuentes cartel alone is alleged to have operated 22 ex-service Boeing 727 jets.

In 1994, two more large marijuana plantations were “discovered” in Chihuahua, one of 90 hectares and the other of 103 hectares. In 2004, Jesus Solis Silva, Chihuahua’s attorney general resigned, partly because of accusations that he was directly benefiting from the trafficking of drugs. There are allegations that the governors of Chihuahua were directly benefiting form the drug trade. Either way, the scale of drug trafficking in Chihuahua, and the fact that it continued despite changes in the government, are astounding.

In January, 2004, police in Juarez uncovered the bodies of 12 men in the small back yard of a house in a middle class area of the city. The men were all victims of the drug trade and all involved in trafficking. The extent of police involvement in the murders in Juárez is incredible. Many of the murders were carried out by a unit of the Chihuahua state police while their were on duty, in uniform, and using police vehicles. They would identify their victims, stop them, kidnap them, torture them, and then murder them. In El Diario of Juárez there are photographs of the state police commandante at the scene of murder investigations. He is standing with other police officers purportedly investigating murders that he himself committed. This unit of the Chihuahua state police was not an isolated rogue unit. Such actions by law enforcement are terrifyingly common. Some of the people who were murdered at this site had gone to a federal police unit, the Agencia Federal de Investigaciones (AFI), the equivalent of the FBI. They had gone to denounce a drug safe house, then found themselves detained and eventually murdered. Reporting crime in Mexico can be dangerous. Being a police officer in Mexico can be deadly. Police are faced with a stark choice: la plata o el plomo—silver (money) or lead (bullets). Many times even turning a blind eye is not an option.

Obviously the drug trade cannot be blamed for causing corruption nor the smuggling of contraband products. These are structural problems that have existed in all societies since the beginning of time. Eradicating them is a process that requires much time and effort. Many people argue that if it weren’t drugs that were being trafficked, another illicit product would take its place. But a strong argument can be made that drugs are a special case because of the ease with which they are cultivated and transported and the enormous profit margin that can be obtained with them. Officials estimate that a drug smuggler can lose 90% of his or her load and still make a profit. Additionally, one of the factors that make the drug trade so powerful in Latin America is that it is such an extremely lucrative and powerful industry, taking place in fragile societies where there are huge disparities of wealth and severe lack of economic opportunities. From the highlands of Peru and Bolivia to the shantytowns that skirt the cities of the U.S./Mexico border, the poverty is fertile ground for the growth and development of an illegal narcotics industry.

Although the United States is the richest society in the world, and by and large its institutions are well run and respected, the enormous wealth generated by the drug trade means that even here there is corruption involving law enforcement officials. Although U.S. customs agents are well paid (earning on average $40,000-$50,000 per year, the amount of money offered by the drug cartels is often too much of a temptation to resist. The immigration and customs agencies of the United States investigate about one case of corruption per week. It is hard to understand how such large quantities of drugs are able to enter the United States without some collusion by customs, immigration, and other law enforcement officials on the U.S. side.

Destructive Effects of Violence and Corruption

Probably the most destructive impact of the drug trade in Mexico and Latin America is the general destabilizing effect that the violence and corruption has on the society. Of the almost 400 murders of women in Juárez since 1993, it is estimated that around 25% were directly related to the drug trade.

When such a high level of drug-related violence is experienced by a society, violence and crime in general start to be tolerated and accepted; so, when other crimes are committed, there is less outrage and less expectation that the crimes will be solved. Also, when there is a general understanding that police officers are to some extent complicit in the trafficking of drugs and other illegal activities, law enforcement is not trusted. In Juárez, it is estimated that 95% of crimes go unsolved and unpunished. There are widely held perceptions that crimes can be committed with no consequences, and that if someone is inclined to report a crime, the police is the last place to go. At best, nothing will be done about it; at worse, you could pay for it with your life. People are often scared of reporting even mundane crimes, fearful of where it may lead. All this has extremely negative consequences for the smooth and orderly functioning of any society. The trade in drugs has simply become far too powerful, and far too lucrative, to be brought under control by the Mexican government and other governments in Latin America.

The power of the drug cartels and the influence that they exert on countries such as Mexico has never been greater. The Mexican drug cartels now exist as institutions more powerful than the state itself. This has had an enormous impact on our border region. The former director of the DEA, Thomas Constantine, has publicly stated that Mexico is in danger of becoming a narco-democracia, where the drug cartels are in control and lawlessness and violence are the norm. Mexican soldiers are patrolling the streets of Nuevo Laredo in northern Mexico. In Juárez, a unit of the state police has been accused of operating as a hit squad for the local drug cartel.

Examples like this show how the drug trade is destabilizing the countries of Latin America to such an extent that the very fabric of their society is seriously threatened. The vast majority of the violence and corruption that these societies experience is directly caused by the drug trade. The United States as a society bears great responsibility for this situation since it is our fellow citizens who are consuming the products of the drug trade. One of the reasons that the drug trade is so entrenched in Latin America is because there is simply not a viable economic alternative to it. Until there is, it seems likely that the trade in illegal drugs will continue to act as a subsidy to the legal economy. Mexico has struggled in the ten years since the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Its agricultural sector is devastated, and its manufacturing sector is subject to the whims of the U.S. consumer. The United States is currently attempting to create a similar free trade zone throughout Latin America. These free trade agreements are structured to benefit the wealthy in both the United States and Latin America. Unless there is a serious effort to restructure trade and to reorient the current economic model so that society as a whole benefits, the drug trade will continue to flourish, to the detriment of the entire continent.

The Case for the Legalization of Drugs

In the meantime, there is a strong case for the legalization of the drug trade. The benefits are that the drug trade would be taken out of the hands of the powerful criminal organizations responsible for so much violence and corruption. It would be regulated by the government and subject to taxation. In the United States, legalization is still very much a fringe issue, but in Europe and Latin America it is starting to become part of public debate.

There are many arguments about the best way to legalize the drug trade. The most popular public perception of legalization is a free market distribution of all drugs. Some people advocate the legalization of soft drugs such as marijuana; hard drugs such as cocaine and heroin would have restrictions put on them, much like alcohol and tobacco. Others advocate a regulated distribution of drugs through public health facilities, where they would be legal but monitored and where addicts would be in regular contact with health professionals.

The actual form that legalization would take would be the product of extensive discussion and negotiation. But it is at least time to start to have a public debate about the legalization of drugs. To do otherwise is to ignore the grave injustice that the drug trade is inflicting on all of the American continent, but especially in Latin America.

In the fall of 2003, Maria arrived at Casa Peregrina in Juárez with her two small boys. She had been referred by a local domestic abuse organization. Maria was different from most of the guests we receive at Casa Peregrina. She had money, her children were well educated, and she had traveled widely in both Mexico and the United States. Maria had been subjected to serious domestic abuse and was seeking a separation from her husband. The problem was that her husband was a member of the Juárez drug cartel. Maria could not go to the authorities to report what had happened to her because the police regularly visited her husband at home and could not be trusted. Maria’s only option was to go to the international bridge and request political asylum. She did this and is presently in hiding in the United States.

In the spring of 2004, Rosa Emma Carbajal was given a parking ticket in the small town of Palomas, Chihuahua for double parking. Because of this she attempted to run over the police officer and was subsequently charged with resisting arrest. Shortly after being released on bond, she returned to the police station with between 30 and 40 people. The mob assaulted the police station, smashing windows and destroying equipment. Fearing for their lives, the police commander, along with six colleagues managed to flee. They dispersed the crowd by firing into the air and managed to reach the US Border where they immediately requested political asylum. The day after the incident we received the police commander’s wife and child at Annunciation House where they stayed for a few days until family members in the US could be contacted.

Drugs-Pharma Monday | Biting the Bullet: The Case for Legalizing Drug

The drug war is over. We lost it long before the latest declaration of war by President Bush. Whatever the other factors, we lost primarily for spiritual reasons. We merely repeated the mistake of Prohibition: the harder we tried to stamp out the evil, the more lucrative we made it. We should know that prohibition doesn’t work.

Forcible resistance to evil simply makes it more profitable. Our attempts to stamp out drugs violate a fundamental principle that Jesus articulated in the Sermon on the Mount: “Resist not evil.” The Greek term translated “resist” is antistenai. When it is used by the Greek Old Testament or by the first-century Jewish historian Josephus, however, the word is usually translated, “to be engaged in a revolt, rebellion, riot, insurrection.”

It is virtually a synonym for war. It means to stand up against an enemy and fight. So Jesus’ words should be translated, “Do not resist evil by violent means. Do not fight evil with evil. Do not mirror evil, do not let evil set the terms of your response. Applied to the drug issue, this means, “Do not resist drugs by violent methods. “When we oppose evil with the same weapons that evil employs, we commit the same atrocities, violate the same civil liberties and break the same laws as do those whom we oppose. We become what we hate. Evil makes us over into its mimetic double. If one side prevails, the evil continues by virtue of having been established through the means used. More often, however, both sides grow, fed by their mutual resistance, as in the arms race, the Vietnam war, the Salvadoran civil war and Lebanon. This principle of mimetic opposition is illustrated abundantly in the drug War.

Bush’s drug-war strategy has three elements. First, it requires cutting off the drug source in Colombia, Peru and Bolivia. Yet this appears to be impossible. Already we see signs that Colombia is collapsing into civil war. Officials and journalists are being gunned down on the streets, civilian homes are being raided and seized, civilian government is increasingly being taken over by the military — and so far the drug lords have only engaged in selective terrorism.

Moreover, the Colombian army has seldom confronted the 140 paramilitary private armies of the drug lords, or raided their training bases. For in certain areas of the country the military has formed a marriage of convenience with drug traffickers and landowners in a common front against a 30-year-old leftist guerrilla insurgency. With an income in the billions of dollars, drug leaders are able to buy generals, judges and police. In one week last fall, the Colombian national police fired 2,075 officers for having links with the cartels. The drug lords have also bought limited public acceptance by sponsoring the national soccer league, diversifying into legitimate businesses, supporting charities and offering to pay off the government’s $10 billion external debt.

To test public reaction, the Bush administration may talk about sending in U.S. troops. But even if only military advisers are sent, they will soon discover in the field what our advisers found in Vietnam: an army not really committed to a fight. And even if those producing countries could be rid of coca tomorrow, production would simply be moved somewhere else, and the eradication effort would have to be started all over again in Southeast Asia, Turkey, Afghanistan and other countries far less likely to let us call the shots. So far, cocaine cultivation uses only 700 square miles of the 2.5 million square miles suitable for its growth in South America. There is simply no way the U.S. can police so vast an area.

Second, the Bush strategy calls for interdicting cocaine at our borders. We have been trying that for years, and it simply cannot be done short of militarizing the borders. According to a Government Accounting Office study, the U.S. Air Force spent $3.3 million on drug interdiction, using sophisticated AWACS surveillance planes over a 15-month period ending in 1987. The grand total of drug seizures from that effort was eight. During the same period, the combined efforts of the U.S. Coast Guard and Navy, sailing for 2,512 ship days at a cost of $40 million, resulted in the seizure of a mere 20 drug-carrying vessels. Drugs are easy to smuggle. The entire country’s current annual import of cocaine would fit into a single C-5A cargo plane.

Even when interdiction works, it does nothing to reduce drug availability. On September 29, 1989, 21.4 tons of cocaine was seized in Los Angeles; within a week nine tons was taken in Harlingen, Texas, and five more at sea off Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. The almost 36 tons netted in the three seizures was valued at $11 billion. Yet ten days later undercover agents were able to buy cocaine in bulk at the same price as before the seizures.

William Bennett, director of the National Office of Drug Control Policy, hopes that interdiction will raise drug prices. In fact, however, cocaine has become more available, while its wholesale price has dropped by 80 percent during the past decade. Increased prices would not deter addicts anyway; it would simply increase their rate of criminal acts. In Dade County, Florida, a mere 254 young addicts accounted for 223,000 crimes in a single year — almost 2.5 per youth per day. Multiply that by a nation and you see why the drug war was lost before it began.

As Senator John Kerry’s subcommittee on narcotics reported in December 1988, increased cooperation with foreign governments has neither cut the amount of cocaine entering the U.S. nor led to the destruction of the major smuggling organizations. Fifteen percent of the drugs entering this country are being confiscated, but “for the drug cartels, whose production capacities stagger the imagination, a 15 percent loss rate is more than acceptable.”

Third, the Bush plan calls for arresting drug dealers and casual users. There are already 750,000 drug arrests per year, and the current prison population is overtaxing facilities. At an average of $51,000 per inmate per year, just to incarcerate the 750,000 arrested annually would cost $38 billion. There are 35 to 40 million Americans who have used illegal drugs within the past year. To jail all users would run a tidy $1.785 trillion.

As for using the death penalty for deterrence, it seems unlikely that this country is ready to execute drug dealers by the hundreds of thousands. If so many millions are flouting the law, Prohibition style, is there really a political will for harsh enforcement? And how sincere is our anti-drug effort going to be when the financial community realizes that the cash flow from the drug trade is the only thing preventing a default by some of the heavily indebted Latin American nations or major money-laundering banks? Cocaine trade brings Bolivia’s economy about’ $600 million per year, a figure equal to the country’s total legal export income. Revenues from drug trafficking in Miami are greater than those from tourism, exports, health care and all other legitimate businesses combined.

It is not drugs but rather drug laws that have made drug dealing profitable. Drug laws have also fostered drug-related murders and an estimated 40 percent of all property crime in the U.S. Ethan A. Nadelmann, whose article “Drug Prohibition in the United States” in the September 1, 1989, issue of Science has been a major catalyst for public discussion of legalization, argues that “the greatest beneficiaries of the drug laws are organized and unorganized drug traffickers. The criminalization of the drug market effectively imposes a de facto value-added tax that is enforced and occasionally augmented by the law enforcement establishment and collected by the drug traffickers.” Rather than collecting taxes on the sale of drugs, governments at all levels expend billions of dollars in what amounts to a subsidy of organized criminals.

The war on drugs creates casualties beyond those arrested. There are those killed in fights over turf, innocents caught in cross fire, citizens terrified of city streets, escalating robberies, children fed free crack to get them addicted and then enlisted as runners and dealers, mothers so crazed for a fix that they abandon their babies, prostitute themselves and their daughters, and addict their unborn. Much of that, too, is the result of the drug laws. Cocaine, after all, has been around a long time and was once sold over the counter in tablet form and consumed in Coca-Cola. What makes it so irresistible today is its lucrativeness. And it is lucrative only because it is illegal.

The media usually portray cocaine and crack use as a black ghetto phenomenon. This is a racist caricature. The New York Times reported on October 1, 1989, that there are more crack addicts among the white middle and upper class than any other segment of the population and far more such occasional cocaine users. The typical user is a single white male 20 to 40 years old who generally obtains his drugs from black dealers. The white demand makes the drugs flow. Americans consume 60 percent of the world’s illegal drugs — too profitable a market for dealers to ignore.

In the drug war, we are blindly fighting what we have become as a nation. Some observers say that drugs are the ultimate consumer product for people who want to feel good now without benefit of hard work, social interaction, or making a productive contribution to society. Drug dealers are living out the rags-to-riches American dream as private entrepreneurs trying desperately to become upwardly mobile. That is why we cannot win the war on drugs. We Americans are the enemy, and we cannot face that fact. So we launch a half-hearted, half-funded, half-baked war against a menace that only mirrors what we have ourselves become as a nation.

The uproar about drugs is itself odd. In 1987, according to the Kerry subcommittee, there were 1,400 deaths from cocaine; in 1988, that figure had increased to 3,308. Deaths from all forms of illegal drugs total under 6,000. By contrast, 320,000 to 390,000 people die prematurely each year from tobacco and 100,000 to 200,000 from misuse of alcohol. Alcohol is associated with 40 percent of all suicide attempts, 40 percent of all traffic deaths, 54 percent of all violent crimes and 10 percent of all work-related injuries.

None of the illegal drugs are as lethal as tobacco or alcohol. If anyone has ever died as a direct result of a marijuana overdose, no one seems to know about it. Many people can be addicted to heroin for most of their lives without serious consequences. Cocaine in powder form is not as addictive as nicotine; Nadelmann points out that only 3 percent of those who try it become addicted. Crack is terribly addictive, but its use is a direct consequence of the high cost of powdered cocaine. Crack was a cheap ghetto alternative, and its spread to the middle and upper classes has in part been a function of its low price. Severely addicted humans may in some ways resemble those experimental monkeys who will starve themselves to death if supplied with, unlimited cocaine, but the vast majority of users are not in such danger (and alcoholic humans also will drink themselves to death)

We must be honest about these facts, because much of the hysteria about illegal drugs has been based on misinformation: All addiction is a serious matter, and the churches are right to be concerned about the human costs. But many of these costs are a consequence of a wrongheaded approach to eradication. Our tolerance of the real killer drugs and our abhorrence of the drugs which are far less lethal is hypocritical, or at best a selective moralistic reflecting fashions of indignation.

Drug addiction is singled out as evil, yet we are a society of addicts living in an addictive society. We project on the black drug subculture profound anxieties about our own addictions (to wealth, power, sex, food, work, religion, alcohol and tobacco) and attack addiction in others without having to gain insight about ourselves. New York City Councilman Wendell Foster illustrated this scapegoat attitude when he suggested chaining addicts to trees so people could spit on them.

I’m not advocating giving up the war on drugs because we cannot win. I am saying that we cannot win as long as we let drugs dictate the means we use to oppose them. The only way to win is to ruin the world market price of drugs by legalizing them. When drug prices plummet, drug profits will collapse — and with them, the drug empire.

Some people have called for decriminalization, but they probably mean legalization. Decriminalization would mean no more laws regulating drugs, no governmental restraints on sales to minors, no quality controls to curtail overdose and no prosecution of the inevitable bootleggers. Legalization, however, means that the government would maintain regulatory control over drug sales, possibly through state clinics or stores. Advertising would be strictly prohibited, selling drugs to children would continue to be a criminal offense, and other evasions of government regulation would be prosecuted. Driving, flying or piloting a vessel under the influence would still be punished. Taxes on drugs would pay for enforcement, education, rehabilitation and research (Nadelmann estimates a net benefit of at least $10 billion from reduced expenditures on enforcement and new tax revenues) Street users would be picked up and taken to hospitals, like drunks, instead of arrested.

Legalization would lead to an immediate decrease in murders, burglaries and robberies, paralleling the end of alcohol prohibition in 1933. Cheap drugs would mean that most addicts would not be driven to crime to support their habit, and that drug lords would no longer have a turf to fight over. Legalization would be a blow to South American peasants, who would need support in switching back to less lucrative crops; but that would be less devastating than destruction of their crops altogether by aerial spraying or biological warfare. Legalization would enable countries like Peru to regularize the cocaine sector and absorb its money-making capacity in the taxable; legal, unionized economic world. Legalization would be a blow to ghetto dealers, who would be deprived of their ticket to riches. It would remove glamorous, Al Capone-type traffickers who are role models for the young, and it would destroy the “cool” status of drug use. It would cancel the corrupting role of the drug cartels in South American politics, a powerful incentive to corruption at all levels of our own government and a dangerous threat to our civil liberties through mistaken enforcement and property confiscation. It would free law-enforcement agencies to focus on other crimes and reduce the strain on the court and prison systems. It would nip in the bud a multibillion-dollar bureaucracy whose prosperity depends on not solving the drug probe. It would remove a major cause of public cynicism about obeying the laws of the land.

Legalization would also free up money wasted on interdiction of supplies that are needed desperately for treatment, education and research. Clinics in New York have room for only 48,000 of the state’s estimated half-million addicts. Only $700 million has been earmarked by the Bush administration for treatment, out of a total expenditure of $8 billion for the drug war. Yet nationally, approximately 90 percent of the addicts who apply to drug treatment and rehabilitation Centers are turned away for lack of space, resources, and personnel. For those who do persist, the waiting period is six to 18 months. Even then, one-third to one-half of drug abusers turned away do reapply after waiting the extended time.

The worst prospect of legalization is that it might lead to a short-term increase in the use of drugs, due to availability, lower prices and the sudden freedom from prosecution. The repeal of Prohibition had that result. Drugs cheap enough to destroy their profitability would also be in the range of any child’s allowance, just like beer and cigarettes. Cocaine is easily concealable and its effects less overt than alcohol. The possibility of increased teenage use is admittedly frightening.

On the other hand, ending the drug war would free drug control officers to concentrate on protecting children from exploitation, and here stiff penalties would continue to be in effect. The alarmist prediction that cheap available drugs could lead to an addiction rate of 75 percent of regular users simply ignores the fact that 35 to 40 million Americans are already using some drugs and that only 3 percent become addicts. Most people have strong reasons not to become addicts. A major educational program would need to be in effect well before drug legalization took effect.

Fighting the drug war may appear to hold the high moral ground, but this is only an illusion. And while some have argued that legalization would place the state’s moral imprimatur on drugs, we have already legalized the most lethal drugs — and no one argues that this constitutes governmental endorsement. But legalizing would indeed imply that drugs are no longer being considered satanic like “demon rum.” It’s time we bit the bullet. Addicts will be healed by care and compassion, not condemnation. Dealers will be cured by a ruined world drug market, not by enforcement that simply escalates the profitability of drugs. Legalization offers a nonviolent, nonreactive, creative alternative that will let the drug menace collapse of its own deadly weight.