April 16, 2001

The Drug War: An Exercise in Futility

by Garry Leech

Paramilitary leader Carlos Castaño recently offered to broker a deal in which Colombian drug lords would surrender and be extradited to the United States in return for leniency. Some 70 drug traffickers are reportedly interested in accepting Castaño's offer if it is approved by Washington. But would such a drug war coup have any effect on the amount of cocaine and heroin flowing to the United States? If history is anything to go by, the answer is clearly, "No."

The Medellín cartel was eliminated in the early 1990s and the demise of the Cali cartel followed shortly thereafter. Also, during the past decade, coca eradication campaigns in Peru and Bolivia dramatically decreased the amount of coca cultivated in those countries. And yet, in spite of these drug war "successes," cocaine and heroin are as readily available in the United States today as they were ten years ago.

Washington's initial response to Castaño's offer has been muted. But if an agreement is worked out between the traffickers and the U.S. justice system it won't be long before U.S. drug warriors once again begin espousing the virtues of their drug war strategies. This was the case in the late 1980s when Washington's focus was on Pablo Escobar and his Medellín cartel. Many in Washington claimed that capturing or killing Escobar would devastate Colombia's narcotrafficking network. Eventually Escobar negotiated his surrender, but later fled his luxury prison only to be killed by security forces in 1993. However, Colombia's narcotrafficking continued unabated.

The focus of U.S. drug warriors then turned to the Cali cartel--whose leaders had helped track down Escobar--as they attempted to destroy Colombia's new dominant drug trafficking organization. By the mid-1990s the Cali cartel had been defeated, but this "victory" also failed to slow the flow of drugs to the United States. In fact, it resulted in a de-monopolization of the illicit drug industry.

It has been estimated that as many as 300 small cartels are now involved in the drug trade in Colombia. They realize that the flaunting of wealth and power by the Medellín cartel during the 1980s had made it both an embarrassment and an easy target for the Colombian government and U.S. authorities. The Cali cartel also learned from Escobar's mistakes and maintained a lower profile.

Unlike Escobar--who was elected to Congress as an alternative and often used violence against the government--Cali's leaders used their drug profits to discreetly buy influence with many of Colombia's politicians, including former President Ernesto Samper. But the Cali cartel's size and the scope of its operation still left it vulnerable.

Consequently, the new cartels are smaller and harder to infiltrate. While the Medellín and Cali cartels controlled most of the drug trade from cultivation to processing to trafficking to selling the finished product on the streets of U.S. cities, the new drug lords outsource many of their operations. They contract pilots to pick up the coca leaves or paste and deliver them to processing labs. They use individuals and other organizations to ship the drugs north, usually to Mexico, where local groups handle the distribution of cocaine and heroin to U.S. cities. As a result, it has been much more difficult to infiltrate the new cartels because the trafficking network now consists of many individuals and groups several steps removed from Colombia's drug lords.

Each victory over Colombia's drug traffickers has resulted in the emergence of new, more efficient and obscure organizations. There is little reason to believe that the consequences of a new deal in which dozens of narcotraffickers turn themselves over to U.S. authorities will be any different. There are plenty of enterprising Colombians who will immediately fill the void.

This balloon effect (squeezing the drug trade in one place results in expansion elsewhere) also occurred during the 1990s as a result of the "successful" coca eradication operations in Bolivia and Peru. For much of the past 20 years, these two South American nations were the principal producers of coca. The raw coca leaves or paste were purchased by the Medellín and Cali cartels and transported to Colombia for processing into cocaine. The aerial fumigation campaigns in Bolivia and Peru drastically reduced the amount of coca cultivated in those countries.

However, by the end of the 1990s the amount of coca cultivated in South America remained at the same level as before the implementation of the eradication campaigns. Coca cultivation had simply moved to Colombia where it doubled between 1995 and 2000.

The eradication campaigns in Bolivia and Peru actually made it easier for the traffickers who no longer have to transport raw coca leaves through remote jungles and across rugged mountains to their Colombian processing labs. The entire operation is now consolidated in one country. And yet, Washington insists on pointing to the "success" of the campaigns in Bolivia and Peru as an example of what Plan Colombia can achieve in southern Colombia. But if the goal of eradication in Bolivia and Peru was to reduce the flow of cocaine to the United States, then the policy was clearly a dismal failure.

The huge demand for cocaine and heroin in North America and Europe doomed the campaigns in Bolivia and Peru, and Plan Colombia now faces the same fate. As long as this demand in the developed nations persists, there will be poor campesinos in South America who will turn to coca and poppy cultivation in order to survive. It has been estimated that only two percent of the land suitable for coca production in South America has so far been used. There are still millions of acres and campesinos available for production in other parts of Colombia, Ecuador, Brazil, Venezuela, Panama, as well as back in Bolivia and Peru.

Washington's drug warriors have targeted the growers and traffickers in Colombia. They have also targeted the dealers and users in the United States. In Colombia, the consequences of these policies have been environmental and economic devastation, while in the United States they have created an enormously expensive drug war bureaucracy that includes virtually every law enforcement agency in the land.

As a result, sixty percent of the nation's two million prisoners have been incarcerated for drug-related offenses, many for nothing more than possession. What these policies have failed to achieve is any significant decrease in the availability and use of drugs in the United States. In fact, cocaine and heroin are more plentiful, purer and cheaper today than ever.

In recent years there has been a dramatic increase in heroin and designer drug use. The growth of "home-made" drugs like methamphetamines and their variants, such as Ecstasy, illustrates that even if the flow of cocaine and heroin to the United States were to cease, illegal drug use would not be diminished.

There are several reasons why Washington insists on continuing its ineffective militaristic approach to the drug problem both at home and abroad: politicians don't want to appear soft on drugs; federal law enforcement agencies are recipients of huge amounts of drug war funding; local communities receive funding for having prisons and can also include the inmates in their population census in order to receive even more federal money; prison inmates have become de-facto slave laborers in the United States; defense contractors are benefiting from Washington's drug war spending in Latin America; and forfeiture laws increase funding for both federal and local law enforcement agencies. The U.S. strategy of "waging war" on drugs has been a failure on all counts except for those who are profiting from drug war funding.

It is time Washington followed the lead of several western European countries by treating drug addiction as a health problem--much the same way we now view alcoholism--and by focusing on harm reduction strategies. Studies have repeatedly shown that education, prevention, treatment and even partial legalization are far more effective and cheaper than interdiction and attacking drugs at their South American source. A Rand Corporation study shows that treatment is 10 times more cost effective than interdiction when it comes to reducing cocaine use in the United States.

There are also many social benefits that result from treatment and harm reduction policies: needle exchange programs limit the transmission of the HIV virus and Hepatitis C to people who often end up receiving healthcare paid for by taxpayers; supplying methadone to heroin addicts reduces the level of crime resulting from users seeking money to fund their habit; and providing methadone and legalizing marijuana would reduce the financial profits gained by illegal organizations and likely result in a decrease in drug-related violence.

These are humane policies that recognize the reality that millions of Americans will always use and abuse drugs, both legal and illegal. In fact, while Washington wastes billions of dollars combating illegal substances, many legal drugs have proven far more deadly than their illegal counterparts. Studies show that alcohol and tobacco kill almost one hundred times as many people in the United States every year than all illegal drugs combined.

Past victories over Pablo Escobar and the Medellín cartel, the Cali cartel, and the coca growers of Bolivia and Peru all failed to reduce the flow of drugs to the United States. And imprisoning hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens for victim-less crimes like possession have not brought us any closer to victory on the drug war's domestic front.

As regards Colombia, Castaño's proposal leaves the United States in the same situation it found itself ten years ago: eradicating coca at the source and negotiating the surrender of Colombian drug traffickers. Only this time, let's hope Washington realizes that the imprisonment of 70 Colombian traffickers does not mean the drug war's militaristic policies are working.

This article originally appeared in Colombia Report, an online journal that was published by the Information Network of the Americas (INOTA).

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