Cocaine Nation

by Thomas Feiling

  In the film Layer Cake, which was released in 2004, Daniel Craig’s character advises the viewer to ‘always remember that one day all this drug monkey business will be legal. They won’t leave it to people like me, not when they finally figure out how much there is to be made. Not millions. Fucking billions!’ Despite its obvious appeal, the legalization of the drugs trade has long been the elephant in any room in which the future of drugs policy comes up for discussion. Until recently, most advocates of legalization were to be found working in drug users’ organizations, in the provision of front-line treatment, or among those who have experienced the war on drugs in transit countries such as Colombia, Brazil and Mexico. But now, many war-weary police officers in the United States are also arguing for a fundamental change in the law.

  Jack Cole is executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition and spent most of his career working as an undercover narcotics police officer. ‘Let’s legalize these drugs like we did alcohol in 1933. The day after we got rid of that law, Al Capone and all his smuggling buddies went out of business. They were no longer out there killing one another, or killing us cops. They were no longer killing our children, caught in drive-by shootings. We could take all the violence out of the equation by legalizing drugs.’ If cocaine were legalized, the millions of people around the world who work in the cocaine business would lose their jobs. Some might enter legal drug production, transport and distribution. Pound and ounce men would become regional sales managers. Runners and jugglers would become shop assistants. Fences, money launderers and hit-men would be no more.

  ‘Then we could do two very important things,’ Jack went on. ‘We could keep drugs out of the hands of our children, who have been telling us for the past ten years that it’s easier for them to buy illegal drugs than it is legal beer and cigarettes. They go to buy cigarettes, and someone is going to ask them “hey, are you old enough to buy these?” All the unregulated market is going to ask is “where’s the money?” We could take drugs off the streets. We could also stop overdose deaths. People don’t die of overdoses because they shoot more and more dope. They die because they don’t know how much of that little packet of powder is the drug and how much of it is the cutting agent. Once we start treating drug abuse as a health problem instead of as a crime, we can actually start helping some of those 38 million people that we’ve arrested. We can bring them back into society. And we can save $69 billion a year by doing it!’

  Kurt Schmoke, the former mayor of Baltimore, Maryland (or as viewers of The Wire have come to know it, ‘Body More, Murderland’), has seen the flaws inherent in the war on drugs at first hand. He is convinced that the legalization of drugs is a vital first step in developing effective treatment for problematic drug users. ‘I would change the law to allow physicians to be certified as drug treatment providers, so that I could walk into a doctor’s office and have my substance abuse treated as a health problem. I’d also let doctors make the decision as to what legal drugs to give you to help you get over the problem and I’d even let doctors provide cocaine, if they thought that it was necessary, as they step you down from your addiction. Our experience of needle exchange in Baltimore was that when addicts out on the streets thought they had an opportunity to get help without arrest and without stigma, they came forward. As a society, there are ways of communicating that we don’t support the use of these substances, without making it a crime.’

  Sir Keith Morris, once the British government’s most senior representative in Colombia, is another convert from the war on drugs, now convinced that legalization is the only viable way of drawing the venom from the drugs trade. ‘The majority of people who use illegal drugs cope with them pretty well, but in the UK we have something like 250,000 people who are problematic users of various drugs. These are people with problems—problems that are being exacerbated by the fact that what they want to do is illegal. They very often have to resort to illegal and violent means to meet that need, and the costs of this run to many billions of pounds. It seems inconceivable to me that we couldn’t produce a system which would have lower costs in lives and money than the present one. I think society could look after those with a problem, instead of stuffing them in jail, where they’re only going to get even more drugs. Disastrous!’

  Politicians of all loyalties have recognized the failure of prohibitionist drug policies. In 2005, David Cameron, the leader of Britain’s parliamentary opposition, showed the extent of the dissatisfaction with the status quo, when he admitted that ‘politicians attempt to appeal to the lowest common denominator by posturing with tough policies and calling for crackdown after crackdown’, and that ‘drugs policy has been failing for decades’.13 As a member of the Home Affairs Select Committee inquiry into drug misuse in 2002, Cameron voted in favour of the recommendation that ‘the Government initiate a discussion within the Commission on Narcotic Drugs of alternative ways, including the possibility of legalization and regulation, to tackle the global drugs dilemma’.14 ‘I think all drugs should be decriminalized,’ former mayor of London Ken Livingstone has been quoted as saying. ‘Addicts could register with their GP so organized crime could be driven out of drugs.’15 In 2001, Lord Ramsbotham, the retired Chief Inspector of Probation, told the BBC that ‘there is merit in legalizing and prescribing [drugs] so that people don’t have to go and find an illegal way of doing it. The more I think about it and the more I look at what is happening, the more I can see the logic of legalizing drugs.’16

  The patience of even the United States’ most loyal allies in the war on drugs seems to be wearing thin, as demonstrated by an editorial in Colombia’s leading daily, the otherwise conservative El Tiempo, in March 2006. ‘After several years, billions of dollars and thousands of Colombian lives lost, the same quantities of cocaine reach the United States, while our country is more deforested and more hampered by the conflict, and the narco-traffickers more buoyant than ever. In an editorial of October 2000, we said that should the recently launched Plan Colombia fail, “the United States would have the historic responsibility to find and travel the road to the legalization of drugs.” Isn’t it time to reconsider a strategy that is clearly failing? Legalization is unpopular, but perhaps it’s time to start thinking about it seriously.’17

  Legalization is what American pundits term ‘a third-rail issue’, meaning that it is judged to be politically suicidal for anyone in public office to openly advocate it. Once away from the scrutiny of the international press, however, cities and states around the world have been decriminalizing drug use. Back in 1994, Colombia’s Constitutional Court decriminalized the personal possession of up to 20 grams of marijuana, and/or a gram of cocaine. Judge Carlos Gaviria argued that it made no sense to penalize drug users but not drinkers, who were much more likely to commit acts of violence. He reasoned that ‘legislators can proscribe certain forms of behaviour towards others, but not how a person behaves towards himself, as long as this doesn’t interfere with the rights of others’.18 His ruling went against a century of legislation which took for granted that drug users were by definition either delinquents or deviants. In his place, Judge Gaviria posited the free individual, sovereign of his own body. The onus was now on Colombia’s citizens to accept responsibility for their new rights, and on the authorities to ensure that drug users’ decisions were well informed.

  Judge Carlos Gaviria went on to become the leader of Colombia’s main opposition party. He has since been cited as saying that the United States is the principal obstruction to the international community committing itself to the legalization of drugs.19 While there is no reason to think that the legalization of cocaine would benefit the poor, usher in land reform, challenge the extreme concentrations of money and political power in Colombia, or end its fratricidal conflict, it would certainly make it easier for the state to regulate supplies, enforce contractual obligations, and decide where the coca fields should be. Thousands of poor farmers would have legal work, and pristine jungle could remain pristine. The polic
e would be able to focus on enforcing laws other than those that ban cocaine production, and Colombia’s Mafia, paramilitaries and guerrillas would be deprived of their principal source of funds. Politicians would no longer need to be bribed, and the whole sorry façade of strong-arm posturing veiling sly back-handers could be pulled down.

  In June 2005, Brazilian Minister of Culture Gilberto Gil also came out in favour of legalization. ‘I believe that drugs should be treated like pharmaceuticals,’ he said. ‘They should be legalized, although under the same regulations and monitoring as medicines.’ Sérgio Cabral, the Governor of the state of Rio de Janeiro, has also come out of the drug war closet, saying of the sea change that legalization represents, ‘I know that people are very conservative in Brazil, but I’m willing to engage in this fight. I’m not a coward.’20

  Legalization is regarded as a modern-day heresy by many, but it is probably the least radical of the viable, long-term solutions to the chaos engendered by the cocaine trade in Caribbean and Latin American countries. It would be far more radical were their governments to create professional police forces and judiciaries and pay them professional salaries. A second option might be to invest in making their rural economies viable so as to offer productive employment to far more of their people. Or perhaps the United States could tighten controls on gun sales, fund the rebuilding of poor neighbourhoods and provide education and decent healthcare to all its citizens. Compared to such utopian prospects, the legalization of the drugs trade looks like a pragmatic response to a multi-faceted problem that has outlived all the solutions that have been tried to date.

  Unfortunately, those suffering the collateral damage of the war on drugs also happen to be those with the least power to challenge it, a conundrum encapsulated by Colombian psychiatrist Luis Carlos Restrepo, when he said that ‘if the people of the United States had lived through the war on drugs that we’ve lived through, they’d already be pushing their government to change its stance’.21 Francisco Santos, the current Vice-President of Colombia, echoed this widely held perception that producer countries are carrying the can for European and American governments’ failure to address the demand for drugs. ‘Look five years ahead, and you see that this cancer is going to spread to other countries in Latin America and the Caribbean,’ he told me. ‘But for developed countries drug production is a footnote. It is a security problem, but one that poses a minimal threat to the state and one with a relatively low cost. Frankly, until the problem becomes less manageable for the developed countries, the debate is not going to change much.’ To date, Western cocaine consumers have been unmoved by the Colombian government’s efforts to raise awareness of the environmental damage caused by the cocaine trade. ‘My generation is going to be reaching for the mirror after a dinner party for the next twenty years,’ Bridget told me. ‘Maybe we’ll all be demanding fair-trade coke, but our society is not too concerned about fucking up the environment. The loss of a tree frog is not going to faze me.’

  The appeals of Third World governments fall on deaf ears because Washington regards even the most timorous reforms as the thin end of a wedge that ends with crack cocaine being as readily available as Krispy Kreme doughnuts. In April 2006, the Mexican Congress approved a law that would have decriminalized the possession of small quantities of drugs for personal use. The law was backed by then-President Vicente Fox, but under intense pressure from the United States he vetoed it the following month. A spokeswoman for the US Embassy in Mexico City confirmed that officials had urged the Mexican government to re-examine the law ‘to ensure that all persons found in possession of any quantity of illegal drugs be prosecuted or sent into mandatory drug treatment programmes’.22 Defending his back-tracking, President Fox argued that ‘the day that the consumption of drugs is freed from punishment, it will have to be done all over the world. We are not going to win anything if Mexico does it, but the production and traffic of the drugs to the United States continues.’23

  Like prohibition, legalization can only work if it is accepted at the highest levels. While the United States government enforces the global ban on cocaine, the law-makers responsible for any future move to legalize the drugs trade are to be found at the United Nations. No human behaviour is governed by such comprehensive and severe global treaties as drug use and drug trafficking, and few treaties are as impervious to revision. The UN’s Single Convention suffocates any local autonomy or inventiveness in solving problems associated with drug use. The United Nations General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) of 1998 was supposed to consider how the Single Convention might be made less onerous to the producer and transit countries. Instead, the United States and its allies smothered UNGASS in a stifling embrace. Far from revising the Convention, the Special Session reaffirmed its commitment to ‘eliminating or significantly reducing the illicit cultivation of coca bush, the cannabis plant and the opium poppy by the year 2008’, under the rallying cry of ‘A Drug-Free World: We Can Do It’. Their self-imposed deadline has since been extended to 2009, when a new UNGASS is due to meet to measure progress. It is hard to avoid speculating that they will have failed to have made any.24

  The United Nations’ promise of a drug-free world is as illusory as that of the forty virgins waiting for Islam’s martyrs in heaven.25 Indeed, the best way to understand the respect that the UN’s Single Convention continues to command is to regard it as a religious text. It has acquired a patina of unquestioned value, protected by a clique of true believers, hired not for their knowledge of sociology, pharmacology or epidemiology, but for their conformity.26 The vocabulary they use to address drug-related problems is unimaginative, belligerent and depressingly repetitious.

  In 2002, the House Government Reform Committee convened a hearing to consider ways to improve Plan Colombia. Republican Congressman Dan Burton asked the sixty-four-million-dollar question. ‘What would happen if they couldn’t make any money out of selling drugs? Would [the number of people addicted to drugs] go up or down?’27

  In struggling to answer that question, proponents of legalization have long been lampooned for having fallen for a superficially attractive, but dangerously naive proposal. Mark Kleiman, author of Against Excess: Drug Policy for Results, has argued that ‘freely available cocaine is likely to give rise to self-destructive habits for an unacceptably large proportion of users’.28 Opponents of legalization argue that because drugs like crack are highly addictive, making them legally available and thereby cheaper would inevitably lead to huge increases in drug use. More drug addicts would support themselves by committing more crimes and claiming more welfare. The accumulation of violence and destruction in the United States, Jamaica, Mexico and Colombia would surely be as nothing compared to the chaos that would follow the legalization of drugs. It is a fear that overwhelms all comers. As Gabrielle told me, ‘cocaine won’t be legalized because there are too many people with too much control to lose, or what they think is control. They have no idea what would happen. There would certainly be casualties along the way and I don’t think anyone is willing to have that on their hands. “It was your decision and now my son is dead” is reason enough to chuck someone out of office.’

  This is a maddeningly trite conclusion to an increasingly shop-worn debate. It assumes that were it not for anti-drugs laws, the people of the world would launch themselves into a collective frenzy of nasally induced self-destruction. In reality, the law is regularly flouted by anyone who wants to buy cocaine. David is a former police officer with South Bureau Narcotics in Los Angeles. When I met him, he made it plain that ‘anybody who wants to use crack is already using crack, because it’s so available now. But once you allow people to go to the hospital, or wherever it’s regulated, to get their crack, then they can have more stable lives.’ I thought that this solution might be overly optimistic, but in fact David’s suggestion was based on hard-won experience. ‘We worked a lot of heroin addicts down in Wilmington, and a lot of them were dock workers on methadone. They’d get their methadone a couple of t
imes a day, and they’d work the docks. They were productive, they could work a job without having to hustle or burglarize, or whatever else they have to do to get money for drugs. If drugs were legalized, I don’t think drug abuse would deviate much from that 1.3 per cent that is going to be addicted no matter what.’

  Government regulation of the distribution of class A drugs would make it easier to monitor problematic users and provide effective health services. But that still leaves the question of how to supply the market for recreational drug use, and how much it might expand if cocaine were legal. Wouldn’t people currently dissuaded from trying cocaine by its illegality inevitably regard legalization as a green light? Opponents of legalization argue that for all its failings, the prohibition of drug use has at least restricted access to drugs by keeping prices relatively high. ‘I don’t think they should legalize drugs,’ Alan told me. ‘There are a lot of vulnerable people who don’t take cocaine because they perceive it as socially unacceptable. If you legalize it, they’d end up taking it as well. Everyone would try it.’

  But would they? A poll conducted in Arlington, Virginia, asked respondents: ‘If cocaine were legalized, would you consider buying it?’ Only 1 per cent of them said they would.29 Admittedly, this finding might just as easily be taken as proof of the coyness of the people of Arlington as of their love of drug-free living, but in the few instances in which cocaine use has been depenalized, its popularity has remained essentially unchanged. Police in Amsterdam have adopted a policy of not intervening in individual cocaine use or small-scale distribution. This hasn’t created a large group of cocaine consumers unable to control their use. In fact a survey of cocaine use in the city found that price had little bearing on how many people used cocaine or how much they chose to use. When asked whether a substantial drop in price would increase their consumption, a majority of cocaine users said it would have no bearing.