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Fri, 12 Sep 2003 - The Economist (UK)
Book Review: Bad Neighbour Policy
Washington's Futile War On Drugs In Latin America
by Ted Galen Carpenter
MORE than 30 years ago, President Richard Nixon declared war
on the use of illegal drugs in the United States, and their supply
from abroad, especially from Latin America. Over the intervening
decades that war has become an increasingly serious and costly
one, as Ted Galen Carpenter succinctly shows in a timely book.
At home, Americans have seen their civil liberties eroded in
its name, while the federal government now spends some $11.7
billion a year fighting drugs. Abroad, the drug warriors have
bullied and bribed Latin American governments into sullen co-operation.
Under Plan Colombia, the Americans are now deeply involved in
that country's internal conflicts, spraying coca fields and training
army battalions. And yet the flow of drugs reaching the United
States is undiminished. While casual cocaine use has declined,
heroin consumption has increased.
This adds up to a "colossal failure", argues Mr
Carpenter, who works at the Cato Institute, a libertarian group
in Washington, DC. That failure is inevitable, in his view. As
long as drugs are demanded, the only effect of making them illegal
is to drive up their price, providing an unbeatable economic
incentive for their production. It is time for the United States
to abandon its "experiment with drug prohibition" which
began with the Harrison Act of 1914.
Mr. Carpenter's conclusion is one that many students of the
drug war, including this newspaper, have long endorsed. The problem
is that most Americans do not. Several European countries, and
Canada, have recently shifted away from a penal approach to drugs,
and towards one of decriminalisation and "harm reduction".
But none has contemplated legalising cocaine, the use of which
is soaring in Europe. Beyond a timid movement to allow the medical
use of marijuana, America remains tightly wedded to prohibition.
Mr Carpenter is right, too, that the Latin American countries
which are the source of drugs, or through which they are trafficked,
pay a disproportionate share of the costs of failed prohibition.
More's the pity, then, that he shows no sign of having visited
any of them in researching his book -- or even of setting foot
outside his office in Washington.
This gives his book some disfiguring weaknesses. The central
one is that his review of three decades of American policy fails
to distinguish sufficiently between the cost to Latin America
of the drug war, on the one hand, and of the illegal drug industry
itself on the other. The drug war has indeed inflicted obvious
damage; America's support for Peru's disgraced spy chief, Vladimiro
Montesinos, is one unedifying example.
But the drug industry has itself wreaked havoc in the Andean
countries. That is because prohibition makes drug production
highly lucrative. This gives the drug industry enormous economic
and military power, which it exercises through corruption and
violence to undermine already weak democratic states. Colombia's
guerrillas, for example, would almost certainly have made peace
at least a decade ago had drug money not given them and their
paramilitary opponents a new, extended, lease of life. As a result,
Colombia's governments have had little choice but to seek American
military aid -- and have every right to it as long as American
(and European) drug consumers are financing the assault on democracy,
however unwittingly.
In other words, unless and until drugs are legalised, Latin
American governments have no choice but to try and tackle the
monster engendered by prohibition. But such policy dilemmas are
too subtle for Mr. Carpenter's polemic. He leaves ungrasped,
too, the many nettles that spring from legalisation, ranging
from who might produce the drugs to whether consumption could
be restrained. In a different way, he is as out of touch with
reality as are the drug warriors. That is a shame, for his main
argument is an intelligent one.
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