Cocaine Nation

by Thomas Feiling

  On the last page of the last chapter, I conjectured that drug prohibition might eventually be repealed not because it doesn’t work, but because the U.S. government can no longer afford it. More telling than the concessions Gil Kerlikowske made and the limits he imposed however, is his acknowledgement that the financial cost of pursing a strictly prohibitionist line has become, well, prohibitive. “We have finite resources,” he has said. “We need to devote those finite resources toward those people who are most dangerous to the community.”1 This might be read as an important concession to the principles of harm reduction: since the prosecution and punishment of all drug users or all drug sellers isn’t practicable, let alone just, the police should focus on the most harmful aspects of the drug economy. If Kerlikowske’s comments suggest that the drug budget might be reduced rather than increased in the years to come, perhaps there might also be a greater willingness to drop what doesn’t work and try what might.

  The problem facing any politician looking for a way out of the drug war quagmire is that prohibition has never drawn its strength from its effectiveness in managing widespread drug use, whether recreational or problematic. It always was a flight of bombast, offering a banner for traditionalists and conservatives to rally around. Drug prohibition worked best when there were hardly any drugs to prohibit, and drug-users were a distinctive minority. But times have changed, leaving policy makers wondering how best to catch up. Illegal drug-taking has not become as normal as alcohol, tobacco or prescription drug-taking, but it has certainly become less of a taboo. As a result, the distinction between legal and illegal drugs has become harder to assert. No less important is the fact that contemporary definitions of addiction acknowledge that we can become dependent on all manner of substances and activities. There are certainly fewer ‘drug-free’ Americans than there were when this war was launched. But perhaps more significantly, the moral value of abstemiousness is more open to question.

  As the political value of prohibition becomes more dubious, the 40-year absence of an effective set of drug policies becomes more glaring than ever. Perhaps Barack Obama will not be remembered for his vision or his idealism, but for shaking Americans awake to face the damage done by his predecessors’ visions and ideals. If his realism and pragmatism are his most valuable qualities, both are urgently needed as Americans consider anew how best to manage drug production, distribution, use and abuse.

  So by what criteria should drug policy be judged, if a drug-free world is now acknowledged to be a chimera? When Gil Kerlikowske says that resources will now be focussed on tackling the players who are most dangerous to the community, he seems to be suggesting that he’s going to put his weight behind policies that reduce the harm done by drugs and the drug market. This sounds laudable, but even if the principles of harm reduction are embraced by the federal government, this only delays the day of reckoning.

  I have tried to show that most of the harm associated with cocaine derives from its illegality. It follows that those problems can only be solved by making it legal. Legalization would do away with the harm done by the drug market and provide a more transparent setting for reducing the harm done by the drug itself. Of course, such an abrupt U-turn in government policy is a hard pitch to sell. The Obama White House will no doubt confine its ambition to scaling back the castigatory rhetoric and making some concession to liberal thinking. This would have put it more into line with European and Latin American governments, had those governments been standing still. But they too have had to make concessions to the notion that drugs and crime are best kept apart, as witnessed by the spate of new laws decriminalising drug possession in Mexico, Brazil and Argentina. Conservatives have always worried that once the tattered ‘drug-free world’ banner is finally lowered, we are set on a road that ends with a legal, regulated market in all potentially dangerous substances. They may well be right.

  Introduction

  In March 2008, the United Nations’ World Drug Report confirmed that the price of cocaine in Europe had fallen to a record low, fuelling record levels of cocaine use. ‘Celebrity drug offenders can profoundly influence attitudes, values and behaviour towards drug abuse, particularly among young people,’ the report warned. The United Nations blamed this on ‘celebrity culture’ and even accused the police of turning a blind eye to rich and famous misusers of the drug.1

  High-profile drug casualties, like the singers Pete Doherty and Amy Winehouse, and the model Kate Moss, vie for space on the front pages of Britain’s tabloids and broadsheets alike with ever-larger drug seizures. In writing this book, I didn’t want to get swept up in the all-too-familiar mix of nosiness, envy and sanctimony that masquerades as the ‘public interest’, or the ritual inflation and deflation of mediocrity that passes for ‘celebrity news’. I have not sought the opinions of commentators, politicians or the drug-taking anecdotes of high-rollers. Instead, I wanted to hear from those who work day to day on the cocaine trade routes that run from London and New York via Miami, Kingston and Tijuana to Colombia. I wanted to see the impact of the war on drugs on the consumers, traders and producers of cocaine, and the impact they have on the soldiers, police officers, customs officials and doctors charged with prosecuting the war. I wanted to bring the tight-lipped mechanics who keep the cocaine economy ticking over on to the stage.

  In 2002, I spent a year working in Colombia, at the end of which I made a documentary called Resistencia: Hip-Hop in Colombia. After a screening at a film festival in Bogotá, a Colombian told me that she was surprised but glad to see that a foreigner had made a film about her country that made no mention of the cocaine trade. Cocaine seemed to be the only thing that outsiders knew or wanted to know about Colombia, she told me, and their depictions of the business invariably ended up trading in stereotypes. Colombia is a fascinating and beautiful country and its tourist board will no doubt be happy to read that I would recommend a holiday there to anyone. But they probably won’t enjoy reading anything else I have to say about their country in this book. Colombians argue that their country is not the only cocaine-producing country in the Andes, that the business exists only because of strong demand for cocaine in Europe and the United States and that no country has paid such a high price for cocaine as theirs. But no other country is as well suited to cocaine production as Colombia. Most commentators never consider why this might be, for while the cocaine business, the war on drugs and Colombia’s civil conflict are tangled and confusing, once prised apart, it is shocking how oblivious each player is to the others. Attitudes, policies and institutions seem to function quite independently of one another. This incoherence is not particular to Colombia: it is characteristic of anti-drug strategies worldwide.

  When I moved back to London from Bogotá, everybody seemed to be complaining about stress, information overload and how expensive everything had become. Why then, I wondered, did sizeable numbers of Londoners regard the strongest stimulant known to mankind as suitable Friday-night entertainment? Expensive, energizing, esteem-boosting, inclining its users to delusions of grandeur and paranoia in equal measure, cocaine seemed to have become the perfect accompaniment to twenty-first-century life. In 1903, the British Committee on the Acquirement of Drug Habits described cocaine users as typically ‘bohemians, gamblers, high and low-class prostitutes, night porters, bell-boys, burglars, racketeers, pimps and casual labourers’.2 By 2008, cocaine had become ordinary. Indeed, its ordinariness was what most perturbed the authorities. According to The Times, ‘police say privately that cocaine is becoming as acceptable in middle-class Britain as cannabis was a generation ago and that they are losing their battle against the drug’.3 On his first day as Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police in February 2005, Sir Ian Blair informed the waiting press pack that ‘people are having dinner parties where they drink less wine and snort more cocaine’.4 In fact, they were drinking more wine and snorting more cocaine. The exotic newcomer cocaine is more often than not consumed in conjunction with alcohol. The two combine in the liver to produc
e coca-ethanol, a whole new buzz which stays active for twice as long as cocaine.

  ‘I’m not interested in what harm it is doing to them personally,’ the new Commissioner of Police went on, ‘but the price of that cocaine is misery on the streets of London’s estates and blood on the roads to Colombia and Afghanistan.’5 The Commissioner’s words echoed those of Nancy Reagan, who in 1988 warned that ‘if you’re a casual drug user, you’re an accomplice to murder’.6 Critics of recreational drug use find themselves in a quandary. Without a social problem to crack down on or helpless victims to whom they might extend their help and compassion, they can only articulate their objections to certain mind-altering substances by invoking the misery that has been caused by driving drug use underground. The source of the problem, it would seem, is the desire for luxury. Cocaine has long been familiar and acceptable to the wealthy and famous. Young British people, aspiring to both wealth and fame, are paying for and enjoying cocaine as never before. Cocaine consumers, whether middle class, working class or lower upper middle class take flack for being uncaring and self-congratulatory, but office work, profligate consumption and a weekly mash-up to make sense of it all have become defining features of life and style up and down the country.

  If the likes of Sir Ian Blair and Nancy Reagan were looking for a social problem, why didn’t they target the daily use of crack by the destitute? Unlike the prostitutes of 1903, most of today’s sex workers are in the business only to raise money to pay for their expensive, compulsive crack and/or heroin use. Casualties of crack cocaine have become part of the street life of my neighbourhood in London and several friends of mine have become compulsive users of heroin and crack. Why are there still so many ‘problematic’ drug users? Why do some people succumb to addiction, while others seem able to treat cocaine as mere ornamentation? And why is ‘addiction’ suddenly being bandied about to explain overeating? If we are all junkies of one potentially harmful substance and/or activity or another, does that mean that double espressos and excessive use of Play Station can also be addictive?

  In 2004, a kilogram of cocaine typically sold for £655 in Colombia. Once smuggled north into Mexico, it was worth £3,940. Once over the border and into the United States, it would sell for £11,750.7 Once divided into a thousand one-gram bags, it would be worth £18,500. Had you adulterated or cut the kilo with 200 grams of laxative powder or glucose, you could increase its value to £22,200. If, on the other hand, you took that wholesale kilo of cocaine to Europe, you’d be able to sell it for an average of £23,845, more than twice the price it would have fetched in the United States.8 These figures come from a book by Sandro Calvani, one-time head of the Colombian branch of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. They sound credible to me, but it should be understood at the outset that when describing any facet of the cocaine economy, supposition can all too easily take the place of fact. Writing objectively about an illegal activity is difficult at the best of times and most observers seem happy to err on the side of wild exaggeration: figures such as $500 billion for world drug sales are thrown around quite glibly.9 You can’t blame harried journalists, since this figure originated in a press release issued by the United Nations. The Colombian economist Francisco Thoumi has since discovered that ‘the $500 billion figure was the result of “research” attempted by the United Nations agency responsible for coordinating the global assault on drug trafficking, when the boss was desperate for a quick number before a press conference’.

  Such laxity is not unusual. The Financial Action Task Force, a multinational organization set up to tackle money-laundering by drugs traffickers, also commissioned a study to calculate the size of the illegal drugs business. When its author reported back that the global trade in illegal drugs was probably worth between $45 billion and $280 billion a year, his employers decided not to publish his findings because ‘some country members expected a larger figure’.10 When even international agencies set more store by what they expect to be true than by what they find to be true, it is no surprise that non-specialists follow suit. The writer of a popular book on the world drug trade claimed that illegal drugs provided Colombia with 36 per cent of its GDP. In fact the cocaine trade has never been responsible for more than 5 per cent of Colombian GDP.11 The United States State Department is required by statute to produce data on the scale of the drugs business, but given the lack of scrutiny of drugs policy by Congress, there is not much incentive to make that data plausible. Perhaps the need to appear authoritative in public discussions is sufficient motivation to produce the numbers, but not reason enough to do the job properly. In ‘The Vitality of Mythical Numbers’, an article published in 1971, Max Singer showed that if one tallied the official figures for the number of heroin addicts in New York City with the price of a heroin habit and an habitué’s dependence on theft to support that habit, New York City did not exist any more—it had been stolen by junkies.12

  Opponents of the international war on drugs are also prone to exaggerating the size of the drugs trade. Colombia’s FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) guerrillas, who generally regard the United States as a nation of gluttonous savages and hopeless drug addicts, say that the drugs trade constitutes between 20 and 30 per cent of the world economy.13 Other critics are convinced that the US economy is a net beneficiary of the drugs business, and that the war on drugs is no more than a façade behind which Wall Street banks enjoy the fruits of prohibition. But there is no reason for US banks and corporations to prefer drugs money over any other kind of money. If people spend their money on drugs, it can only mean that they’re not spending it on something else. Francisco Thoumi has pointed out that if it were true that the illegal drugs business contributed to economic growth in the United States, canny economists would recommend that Colombia declare tobacco illegal, thereby raising cigarette prices and increasing smuggling, which would then generate revenue to buoy the country’s national income. Corporations pay taxes to governments; cocaine dealers do not. Corrupt people and tax havens benefit from the trade in illegal drugs, but a country’s economic system does not.

  Thankfully, there are trustworthy sources of information on the size of the drugs economy. Whatever its size, the economics of the drugs business clearly favours its practitioners. There are thought to be about 300 major drug importers into Britain, 3,000 wholesalers and 70,000 street dealers. Approximately one in 500 Britons works in the business of buying and selling illegal drugs.14 Between them, they turn over sales of £7–8 billion a year, which is about a third of the size of Britain’s tobacco market and two fifths of its trade in alcohol. Annual imports of cocaine have recently been estimated at 33 tons. Given that a gram typically sells for £50, we can safely assume that the retail cocaine market in the United Kingdom turns over 33 million grams of cocaine, worth £1.6 billion a year.15 To put this figure in some perspective, sales of footwear in the UK were worth £5.7 billion in 2005 and soft drinks sales were worth £6.2 billion.

  In the United States, the total value of illegal drug sales is likely to be around £25 billion a year, which amounts to less than 1 per cent of America’s GDP and less than 2 per cent of Americans’ total personal consumption. Given that the United States is far and away the biggest market for nearly all illegal drugs, the global figure is unlikely to be more than twice this. A £50 billion-a-year market is a big market, but in the context of total global trade flows of almost $3 trillion or £1.5 trillion a year, it is a very modest share indeed. The drugs trade’s share of total world trade declines to the trivial when you consider that most of the trade’s value is added only when the drugs cross the United States’ borders. Valuing the drugs trade at import prices reduces its overall value to no more than £10 billion. Besides, there are much bigger illegal businesses than the drugs business. Americans made roughly £350 billion from illegal activities in 1998, equivalent to about 8 per cent of the country’s GDP. The biggest earner was tax evasion, which was worth £131 billion a year, making the £25 billion a year drugs-traff
icking business look paltry by comparison.16

  I crunch these numbers to demonstrate that the subject of drugs is replete with inaccuracies. As we will see in Chapter 1, the first restrictions on cocaine use were imposed by politicians with moral objections to drug use, but their objections were informed by ignorance, prejudice and caricature. I urge the reader to proceed with an open mind. By giving airtime to those involved in the cocaine business, I hope to puncture some of those stereotypes and draw the reader’s attention to the motives and rewards that sustain both the supply of and demand for cocaine. A drugs policy fit for the twenty-first century will only emerge when these hidden stories are revealed, read and acted on.

  PART ONE

  How Did We Get Here?

  1

  From Soft Drink to Hard Drug

  The only answer to increased crime is increased punishment: as long as there are witches, enchanters and sorcerers in the world, there must be fire! fire! fire!

  Hugh Trevor-Roper, The European Witch-Craze of the 16th and 17th Centuries1

  In a scene from a documentary film entitled Coca Mama (2001), an indigenous Peruvian gives a telling introduction to the story of how the coca plant became the subject of an American war. ‘When the whites came, our ancestors consulted the Sun God,’ he tells the viewer. ‘He told them to trust in the coca leaf. “The coca will feed and cure you”, he said, “and will give you the strength to survive.”’ He also said that the white men would discover its magic force, but that they wouldn’t know how to make use of coca. The Sun God told our ancestors that coca would turn the white men into brutes and idiots.’2