Reprinted by permission of the author
The Drug War is Killing Us
by Daniel Lazare
Interdiction Has Made Hard Drugs
Cheap and Violence Plentiful.
There's a Better Way.
After 20 years of troop sweeps, police actions, and military
rhetoric, the evidence is all around us. The war on drugs has flopped.
It's been more than ineffective--it's actually made things worse. It has
caused street crime to mushroom and the murder rate to soar. It has
intoxicated ghetto kids wiht visions of gold chains, black Mercedes, and other fruits of an underground economy. Rather than stopping drugs, it
has ensured a flow of harder and harder substances onto the street.
In the 1960s, an estimaed 69,000 Americans were addicted to heroin. Today, there may be 250,000 junkies in New York City alone. Meanwhile, the cities are struggling to dig out from under a blizzard of
low-priced cocaine. New and far more potent drugs are flooding the
ghettos--due largely to interdiction policies that penalize traffickers in
soft bulky drugs like marijuana while actually increasing the supply of
coke. In the late 1970s, federal drug prosecutors were congratulating
each other the arrest and conviction of Nicky Barnes, sentenced to life
in for selling 43 pounds of heroin and coke a month out of a West Harlem
garage. Barnes is small potatoes compared to Rayful Edmond, recently
convicted of distributing 440 pounds of coke a week in Washington,
D.C.
This explosion did not occur despite the drug war, but because of it. Putting away druglords like Barnes backfired by disrupting a stable
system, replacing it with something worse, and persuading Barnes' many
imitators that they would have to be more aggressive, more ruthless, more sophisticated if they were to take his place. No matter how hard the cops crack down, drug producers, importers, and street dealers manage to keep
one step ahead.
"When I first started in the early '80s, a big coke seizure
was 70 pounds," muses a former federal prosecutor in Miami. Nowadays, he
says, busts that size are so commonplace as to be hardly worth
mentioning. In 1981, federal drug agents confiscated 4,263 pounds of
cocaine. By late 1989, the haul was approaching 171,000 kilos--not
because the Drug Enforcement Administration was getting better at its
job, but because smugglers have gotten better at theirs and are pushing
so much more stuff through. This is the sort of private sector initiative
any free market economist can appreciate. Although the feds have succeeded in pushing marijuana prices up--from $20 an ounce in the 1960s
to $200 and up today--coke has plummeted from $50,000 per kilo in the
late 1970s to under $10,000 early last year. As a result of this interdiction-driven price structure, marijuana-once a "poor man's drug"--is now a gourmet item; cocaine, once reserved for the media elite, is now the lumpen proletariat's drug of choice.
The cheap, smokeable form of cocaine known as crack--said to have
been invented in a Los Angeles kitchen in 1983--is simply the latest
product of a process of research and development, along with ever-more
sophisticated marketing that governemnt policies foster. Interdiction
places a premium on portability and potency, encouraging dealers to
switch to products that give more bang for the buck, while being easier
to conceal from the police. The result: hard drugs push out soft drugs,
pushers get smarter, and as cops up their firepower, dealers up theirs.
Once the crack fad blows over, as undoubtedly it will, other drugs--even cheaper, more mind-blowing and more toxic--will arise to take its place.
Who knows what strange fruit the drug war may bear?
This is a record of failure that's hard to beat--not that the government doesn't try. In the late '60s, New York's governor, Nelson Rockefeller, unveiling what he called the toughest drug law in the world,
vowed to go after not just drug lords, but users and low-level as well.
As a result, the courts ground to a halt as a long line of petty
offenders, facing stiff prison sentences, ceased plea bargaining and
demanded full-blown trials instead. Last September, drug czar William J.
Bennett, unveiling the Bush's administration's latest master plan, also
vowed to go after...petty users and dealers. The consequence,
predictably, is that plea bargaining has declined, court dockets are
overcrowded, and juries are increasingly reluctant to send people to
prison for minuscule amounts of dope. With drug busts running at 750,000 a year nationwide--mostly for pot--prisons ar bulging. In New York, where
city officials are so desperate for lockup space they've displaced
first-degree robbery as the number of all felony indictments.
So the drug war has led to more drugs, which in turn have led to more arrests and ever more feverish rhetoric out of Washington. "The more
it's demonstrated that authoritarian responses don't work," observes ACLU
Director Ira Glasser,"the more authoritarian they become. It feeds on
itself in a way that is almost classically a form of hysteria."
The self-defeating nature of the drug war is clear from something
called Operation Intercept, a massive effort launched by the Nixon
administration to stop the flow of marijuana across the Mexican border.
Billed as the largest peacetime search-and-seizure operation in history,
Operation Intercept sent customs agents rifling through hundreds of
thousands of cars and trucks for nearly three weeks in the fall of 1969. Yet while the campaign snarled traffic and tied up cross-border tourism and commerce, the drug haul turned out to be small. It did succeed,
though, in triggering far-reaching changes in the marijuana business.
Stepped-up border controls forced distributors to upgrade their methods. While previously they had relied on peasants riding public buses, in the aftermath of Operation Intercept they began switching to
backcountry routes and eventually to DC-3's. As a U.S. customs agent pu
it in Elaine Shannon's 1988 best-seller, Desperados, Operation
Intercept "caused the smugglers to learn to use airplanes. They started
hiring pilots. And the loads got bigger." The trade also grew more
professional and better capitalized. Paraquat, the herbicide that Mexican
officials sprayed on marijuana fields in large quantities at American
behest in the late '70s triggered another commerical revolution. The
poison knocked Mexican pot off the market. But instead of stopping the
marijuana trade, it caused it to shift south to Guajira Peninsula in northern Colombia, source of the the Colombi Gold that would soon become
famous among American tokers. Large-scale sweeps by the Colombian military followed, whereupon marijuana cultivation, like the jet stream encountering a local storm center, shifted once again. This time it retreated deeper into the Colombian interior where it came to the
attention of drug dealers in the city of Medellin.
Medellin had functioned as a heroin smuggling center in the
1950s. It was also close by the coca fields of Bolivia and Peru. As the
U.S. Coast Guard and Customs Service clamped down and smuggling costs
rose, it wasn't long before the major marijuana families realized there
was more money in the local white powder. Cocaine began finding its way
to the U.S, market in increasing quantities. The changing nature of the
drug trade is illustrated by a story about Carlos Lehder. In the late
'70s, this ambitious young Medellin drug entrepeneur arrived at Norman's Cay in the Bahamas to set up a trans-shipment station for drugs bound for
Florida. He was irritated to find, however, a small mom-and-pop operation
flying planeloads of pot. Lehder and his heavily armed associates permitted the ring to continue, but only if space was cleared on each flight for a shipment of coke. Each planeload of marijuana was worth perhaps $300,000 wholesale; the same worth in cocaine was worth $26
million. Pot was by now small-time. Coke was where the smart money was
heading.
In 1982, Ronald Reagan appointed vice-president Bush director of
the South Florida Task Force, a super-agency aimed at controlling the
flood of hot money and drugs in and around Miami. The task force was
highly effective in intercepting rusty freighters loaded with pot, but
less effective against smugglers bearing valises full of cocaine. The
result was to tip the market decisively in favor of coke. In 1985, the
Reaganites did coke smugglers by launching a massive eradication program, Operation Delta-9, complete with troops and military helicopters, against domestic marijuana growers in all 50 states. Although pot growers tried
to recoup by moving their crops indoors to greenhouses and basements, market share was lost. With a major competitor out of the way, the boys from Medellin now had the field to themselves. At some point in the mid-'80s, amid mounting horror stories of broken marriages and ruined
careers, cocaine began showing signs of losing favor with the middle
class. The results might have been a market glut of disastrous
proportions for the cocaine cartels were it not for crack. For a few
dollars a vial, it created an intense, short-lived high that proved
immensely popular with the ghetto masses.
For cocaine businessmen, the day was saved. For urban blacks and
Latinos, the nightmare was just beginning. By embarking on a crusade
against pot, federal narcs triggered a series of events that eventually
laid the basis for a cocaine catastrophe.
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