Cocaine Nation

by Thomas Feiling

  Despite the gap between the mythical wealth of the cocaine kingpin and the average earnings of an ordinary drug dealer, the drugs business is an equal opportunity employer that offers relatively good pay to the unskilled. Driving a car loaded with cocaine from El Paso to Chicago can earn the driver $10,000.19 Plenty of young city dwellers prefer the crack game to stacking shelves, flipping burgers, or travelling to work in outlying areas populated mainly by people perceived to be unfriendly.20 This reluctance to engage in menial labour has been one cause of a profound generational split. Young white men in the nineteenth century were urged to ‘go west, young man’ to seek their fortunes. During much of the last thirty years circumstances seemed to be urging young black and Hispanic men to ‘go bad, young man’ in pursuit of the same goal.21 ‘When I was young, all I was told was that I was going to end up dead or in jail,’ Marc, who had sold crack cocaine in South Jamaica, Queens, in his teenage years, told me. ‘That was the extent of the conversation. I was a teenager, I was struggling emotionally, all of that stuff, and I was like “Fuck you very much, and let whatever’s going to happen, happen.”’

  The violence of the cocaine economy has waned as the war on drugs has evolved to become a war of attrition. In the early 1990s, drug gangs would often resort to gun-fights with their rivals, but as the most efficient operators came to the fore, relations between suppliers stabilized. A dealer from Chicago told Steven Levitt: ‘We try to tell these shorties that they belong to a serious organization. It ain’t all about killing. They see these movies and they think it’s all about running around tearing shit up. But it’s not. You gotta learn how to be part of an organization, you can’t be fighting all the time. It’s bad for business.’22 A study of Milwaukee’s drug entrepreneurs found that none reported having daily problems with violence. More than a quarter of all the drug businesses in the city see no violence at all.

  Most of them have problems with the police no more than once a month and a quarter reported no problems with police at all. Lance, also from South Jamaica, Queens, had a twenty-five-year run as a cocaine wholesaler. ‘Of course there’s a lot of risk involved, and if you live the fast-money life, being real flamboyant, wearing a lot of loud jewellery and driving the most expensive car you can find, you’re drawing attention to yourself. But if you carry yourself like the average nine to five working person, not dressing extravagantly or wearing Rolexes, you can have your home, your nice car in the garage and your run-around car, and you can remain under the radar.’

  As drug dealers slip under the radar, prohibition has become harder to enforce than ever, but its advocates remain undeterred. In 1973, the Nixon administration declared that the nation had ‘turned the corner on addiction and drug use’. In 1990, drug tsar William Bennett claimed that it was ‘on the road to victory’ over drug abuse.23 An article written by John Burnham and published in the Columbus Dispatch in 2006 went a step further, arguing that the war on drugs had been won. At a reunion on the thirty-fifth anniversary of the appointment of the United States’ first drug tsar in 1971, ‘the seven former tsars held remarkably unanimous views, though they included Democrats and Republicans, and had worked for five very different presidents. The main conclusion—that we won the war on drugs—was the biggest surprise, because advocates of illegal drugs have in recent years filled the media with rhetoric about “the failed war on drugs”.’24 When asked for his reaction to the article, Lee Brown, who served as Bill Clinton’s drug tsar, said, ‘I do not recall anyone, especially me, reaching the conclusion that we have won the war on drugs.’ In response to the article, one columnist wrote: ‘If drug warriors want to declare victory and go home, I’m all for it. But to claim that you’ve won, and maintain the same policy that spends billions and locks up millions and has virtually no effect on either drug use rates, drug-related harm or addiction rates? What have you been smoking?’

  In reality, cocaine, whether in powder or crack form, remains widely available all over the United States. A stable cocaine market, a nascent market in methamphetamines, increasing abuse of prescription drugs, and millions of Americans smoking marijuana grown in the United States, show the war on drugs to have failed on its own terms. Yet the battle goes on. The country’s police officers remain on a war footing, partly because of the onus politicians have put on a militarized response to the inner-city drug economy, and partly because after two decades spent building up armies of paramilitary squads, the police have an apparatus to maintain. Moral crusades lead to wars on abstractions. Once displaced from the ground to the ether, they can be spun to suggest that they have been won, dragged out indefinitely or even that they never existed.

  I have focused on the rise of cocaine in the United States because its government’s influence at the United Nations has ensured that the American experience of cocaine has had an overwhelming influence on how the drug is regarded in other countries around the world. The question of how best to manage recreational and problematic drug use in the United Kingdom rarely inspires the messianic zeal characteristic of the debate in the United States. Unofficially, opinion among the New Labour establishment is blasé about recreational drug use, though official disapproval is as strong as ever. When Cabinet Minister Clare Short suggested a debate over the legal status of cannabis, she was severely rebuked by then Prime Minister Tony Blair, who sensed the public mood rather better: a Mori poll of 1997 found that only 21 per cent of Britons favoured the legalization of marijuana. Tackling Drugs to Build a Better Britain, a policy document published in 1998, remains at the core of the UK’s drug policy. It set clear numerical targets, including, for example, a 50 per cent reduction in drug use among young people by 2008.25 It also established four strategic objectives: to reduce the availability of drugs at street level in the UK; to reduce the prevalence of the use of illegal drugs, particularly among young people; to reduce the crime committed by drug users to fund their purchases; and to increase the number of people receiving treatment for drug problems.

  The purpose of drug policy in the United Kingdom has changed as more drugs are consumed, and the public’s objections to drug use have become less moralistic and more driven by public health concerns. This puts great strain on the existing legislation, precisely because it has so little grounding in science or medicine. The public is increasingly tolerant of all kinds of ‘lifestyle choices’, including the use of soft drugs. The criminalization of drug consumption is taken by growing numbers of people to be counter-productive and ineffectual, notwithstanding their opposition to drug legalization. Once away from the glare of publicity, the prevailing attitude of the authorities in the UK seems to be one of resignation. ‘We manage the drugs problem,’ a local policeman told the authors of a Home Office survey of drug dealing in deprived neighbourhoods. ‘We will never clear this country of drugs, ever. We manage what we’ve got. We tend to react to it so that we can keep a lid on it and it doesn’t get any worse than it already is because it is pretty damn bad now. And we do, we just manage it.’

  The British police enforce the drug laws in an environment of low public confidence. All over the UK, local residents demonstrate a reluctance to trust, an unwillingness to engage with, and a general dissatisfaction with the performance of the police. The situation is worse in the big cities, where the targeting of black people has rebounded on the police, and the police are too timorous to deal with the issues as they relate to black people, having taken a hammering in the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry report and then from critical media coverage of racism in the police force.26

  British counter-drugs operations are also hampered, as in the United States, by the practice of allocating resources according to the police’s success in meeting performance targets. Numerical targets for tackling drug offences are easier to achieve than those for burglary, robbery and car crime, but whereas the arrest of a burglar might lead to a reduction in burglary, the arrest of a drug dealer doesn’t necessarily lead to a reduction in the availability of illegal drugs. In only one in eight neig
hbourhoods known to have a drugs problem has police activity been found to have reduced the supply of drugs.

  The global prohibition of drugs like cocaine rests on a simple theory: by making the supply and possession of a drug illegal, it becomes less available, so prices rise, thereby putting it out of the reach of most consumers. Blind faith in this theory is the only explanation for the United States’ National Drug Control Strategy, which proposed to reduce illegal drug use and availability by 50 per cent over the ten years up to 2007.27 Drug use did fall during the 1980s and 1990s, despite the fact that the drugs were getting cheaper. By 2005, however, Americans were consuming drugs in much the same quantities they were when Nancy Reagan first exhorted them to ‘Just Say No’ in 1984.28 What has changed is not the overall level of drug use, but the drugs Americans choose to take.

  Tougher sanctions have little deterrent effect on those who choose to use or sell illegal drugs.29 Harsher drug law enforcement just increases property crime by hard-core drug users, as the inflated cost of drugs drives their hunger for money, while the marginalization of drug users and ex-offenders keeps them out of the legal job market. The simple, bitter truth is that wherever the demand for illicit drugs has remained constant, the market has adapted to and then overcome law enforcement.30 For example, a large-scale police crackdown on a very public drug market in Vancouver, Canada, led to no reduction in the availability or prices of drugs in the city. Initially, the increase in the number of police officers on the street made it more difficult to buy drugs, but the trade soon moved to other neighbourhoods, where it quickly re-established itself. A study of cannabis users in Amsterdam, Bremen and San Francisco found that cannabis use was very similar in these three cities, despite the local police having radically different drugs policies. In none was the chance of being arrested for smoking cannabis estimated to be very high.31 This finding goes a long way in explaining why so few drug users actively oppose drugs policy in the Netherlands, Germany or the United States. Most cannabis users would welcome a relaxation of the laws regarding cannabis use, but the majority does not think that the law really matters. Anti-drugs laws have had little impact on their drug use, which in all three countries seems to have peaked in the 1970s, declined in the late 1980s, and been on the rise again since the mid-1990s.

  In 1936, August Vollmer, former President of the National Association of Chiefs of Police in the United States, said that ‘drug addiction never has been, and never can be solved by policemen. It is first and last a medical problem, and if there is a solution it will be discovered not by policemen, but by competently trained medical experts whose sole objective will be the reduction and possible eradication of this devastating appetite.’32 A survey of 22,000 chiefs of police in the United States conducted in 2004 found that 67 per cent of them believed that their drug enforcement efforts ‘have been unsuccessful in reducing the drug problem’, and 37 per cent of them called for a ‘fundamental overhaul’ of those policies.33 ‘If you get them off by themselves, about 80 per cent of cops will agree that it ain’t working and that we need to do something else,’ Rusty, the former Department of Corrections narcotics officer told me. ‘But they can’t stand up and say that because it would be political suicide.’

  Agencies trying to describe and address drug use have succumbed to the vocabulary of war, with its enemies, allies, resolutions and victories.34 But there can be no war on drugs, because drug users and sellers are not an army. They cannot win, nor can they be defeated. Successive governments have prided themselves on what can be seen in hindsight to be no more than shifts in the arrangement of players in the drugs trade. Lee Dogoloff, who was President Carter’s principal drug policy adviser, has echoed Vollmer’s assessment. ‘Despite repeated demonstrations that comprehensive treatment-on-demand programs reduce the demand for drugs, we fail to translate that learning into the federal drug strategy budget. Isn’t it time to make drug abuse and mental health treatment available to all who seek it?’

  Suffice it to say, police officers found to have a drug problem are not criminalized. In Chicago, a police officer who tests positive for drug use is regarded as having a medical problem and treated as such. In New York City, an officer who fails a drug test is dismissed. In no police department is a positive drug test result treated as a criminal offence. Politicians and their families have also largely escaped prosecution for using illegal drugs. George W. Bush and Bill Clinton have admitted using illegal drugs, and Barack Obama trumped them both when he admitted that he used marijuana and cocaine as a student. What none will admit is that they tried an illegal drug and enjoyed it. An exception to the rule was the late Betty Ford, the wife of former President Gerald Ford. ‘I liked alcohol. It made me feel warm. And I loved pills. They took away my tension and my pain,’ Ford wrote in her 1987 memoir Betty: A Glad Awakening. In 1978, the Ford family staged an intervention and forced Betty to confront her alcoholism and her addiction to opioid analgesics that had first been prescribed for a pinched nerve in the early 1960s. Betty Ford went on to establish the Betty Ford Center, probably the world’s best-known centre for the treatment of substance abuse.

  Despite these admissions, the privately held opinions of police officers charged with prosecuting this war on drugs and the drug policy reforms adopted at state level, ending the extreme penalization of drug use in the United States has become a ‘third-rail’ issue, one deemed to be too sensitive to broach by any politician. The budget afforded the war on drugs seems to escape any rational scrutiny. Its aims and methods go unquestioned, the roots of illicit drug consumption and distribution are wilfully ignored, and alternatives to the criminalization of drug users are routinely dismissed out of hand. In the run-up to the presidential election of 2008, the Democratic Party leadership made it clear that the party would ‘govern from the centre’. Real change, and the imagination and conviction needed to realize it, was not on the agenda. Neither Barack Obama nor John McCain campaigned for changes in sentencing disparity, the use of marijuana for medical purposes, or US policy towards Colombia, Mexico, Jamaica, or anywhere else affected by the drugs trade.

  Twenty-five years ago, illegal drugs were usually first or second and certainly never lower than fourth in polls of public concerns in the United States. Now the drugs issue trails many others. The country’s political agenda is dominated by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the measures introduced to manage the recession. The only other domestic issues likely to intrude are healthcare reform and illegal immigration. Scare stories about drugs have passed their sell-by dates. In New York City, the crack scare that so gripped the press in the 1980s came to a swift end once the police had been granted the resources to take back the city’s streets. That done, coverage of drug use and drug markets became onerous and unhelpful. After then Mayor Rudy Giuliani adopted a policy of withholding information about drug-related homicides and counter-drugs operations from the press, drug stories fell off the front pages.

  If cocaine is no longer the cause for concern it once was, it is because the ritual punishment of the guilty is complete, the government has run out of ideas to curtail the supply of cocaine, and too many people like things the way they are. I asked Judge James Gray who he thought benefited from the war on drugs. ‘I have five groups. The first is the big-time drug dealers. They’re making billions of dollars a year, tax-free. The second is law enforcement, who are in effect paid huge tax money to fight the first group. It’s unbelievable, but the good guys and the bad guys have a mutual interest in the perpetuation of the status quo. The third group that is winning is the politicians, who talk tough about the war on drugs—which gets them elected and re-elected. The fourth group is those in the private sector who make money from increased crime—the people that build and staff prisons, the people that sell burglar alarms and security services. There’s big money in all of that. And the fifth group is the terrorists, because almost all of the primary funding for terrorism around the world comes from the sale of illegal drugs.’

  Whil
st waiting to meet a DEA press officer in the lobby of their headquarters in Washington DC, I happened across a guide to ‘Target America: Traffickers, Terrorists and You’, an exhibition curated by the DEA Museum in 2002. ‘The exhibit opens with a sculpture composed of rubble and artefacts from the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. It uses the events of September 11th as a starting point for the historic story of the connection between the violent drug trade and terror from the Silk Road in the eleventh century to the present.’ This elision of two very distinct phenomena seems strange, until you consider the inertia and instinct for self-preservation of the huge bureaucracies involved. Drugs policy is no longer a matter for politicians. It is handled by an army of bureaucrats, in jealous defence of their enormous budgets. There are fifty government agencies fighting the war on drugs in the United States.35 The DEA has 227 offices in the United States, and a further eighty-six offices in sixty-three countries around the world. Among the biggest intelligence-gathering agencies are the National Security Agency, the CIA, the State Department, the White House intelligence tsar, and the Defense Intelligence Agency, all of which vaulted from Cold War to War on Terror by making themselves indispensable to the prosecution of the war on drugs.

  The young people of the United States have been raised on a war footing. Both drugs and terror make suspicion and the need for surveillance eternal, because both are nigh on impossible to police, which becomes the very reason for surveillance. Permanent warrant-less wiretaps, one of George W. Bush’s last and most controversial policy proposals, are the fruit of the war on drugs. Blackwater, a company of mercenaries which won its first big contracts from the Department of Defense for operations in Iraq, is now competing for indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contracts for drug law enforcement in the United States.36