Seven years have passed since an editorial in the Economist suggested that drugs might be legalized by the second decade of the new millennium. Yet the campaign for the legalization and regulation of the drugs trade remains marginal. In the cities of the developed world, a denouement of sorts has been reached between drug users and the police. Users find it relatively easy to circumvent the law and moralists get to vent their spleen. The anti-prohibitionist movement, if it warrants such a name, has always been a strange amalgam of interests. It strays outside left-right political lines, attracting everyone from authoritarian Colombian senators to libertarian ecologists. Its affiliates argue over whether drugs should be legalized or only depenalized, whether the global ban on drugs should be repealed or just reformed, and never agree on any other issue.
Policy makers in Washington D.C. have been quick to nip any talk of legalization in the bud. United States Congressman Larry Smith once said that ‘the most dangerous people in America are those who believe in legalizing drugs. They’re traitors.’7 As Judge James Gray was at pains to stress, ‘you have to understand that our policy of drug prohibition includes a policy of debate prohibition. The people in the drug tsar’s office will not appear for a debate.’ Calls for legalization are seen as a non-starter by nearly all political parties, even in countries where the prohibition of drugs threatens to make some regions near ungovernable. In Jamaica, Mexico, Colombia and many other countries on the supply routes, smugglers, traffickers, capos and cartels show up the state. They challenge its physical and political power, make a travesty of its commitment to the lawful protection of its citizens and corrupt its officials. And they pay better. At best, this encourages careers in crime, at worst it makes the police, the law and the state look irrelevant. Unless there is a fundamental reassessment of the problem and a willingness to consider novel solutions, prohibition can only make for bigger problems in the future.
Thankfully, most of the real work of dealing with mass drug abuse in the United States takes place at city level, and many city and state governments have moved away from a punitive approach to the illegal drug economy. In 2000, voters in California passed a ‘treatment-not-incarceration’ initiative known as Proposition 36. Rather than being sent to prison, more than 150,000 Californians have been given places on state-funded, community-based drug treatment programmes, thereby saving state taxpayers more than $1.5 billion over seven years.8 Encouraged by the success of Proposition 36, law-makers proposed a Nonviolent Offender Rehabilitation Act (NORA) to transform California’s dysfunctional, $10 billion-a-year prison system by developing a comprehensive public health approach to substance use. NORA was projected to save at least $2.5 billion on future prison construction costs by rendering new prisons unnecessary, but in the elections of 2008, NORA was voted down by Californians, largely thanks to an advertising campaign that was heavily subsidized by the prison guards union.9
Police and public health officials in many of Europe’s largest cities have also come round to the idea that instead of trying to create a drug-free society, they should limit their ambition to reducing the negative consequences of drug consumption, like acquisitive crime, blood-borne illnesses and overdoses. In the Netherlands, individual drug use and small-time drug dealing are never prosecuted. But the increasing involvement of the medical profession in dealing with drug problems has not undermined the official policy of total drug prohibition. In fact, there has been a substantial increase in drug arrests all over Europe since 1985. In the UK, drug offence arrests went from 44,000 in 1990 to 104,000 in 2000. In France they’ve gone up three-fold over the same period, and in Germany they’ve gone up fourfold. In all three countries, more than half of those arrests were for possession of cannabis. Europe is clearly caught between the prohibitionist model and the harm reduction model, and is failing to resolve the contradictions implicit in both.10 The pressure to break this stalemate is coming from cities with large drug-using populations, where the local authorities are straining at the leash to reform their drugs policies.
In 2001, Portugal introduced a pioneering law which decriminalized the possession of all illicit substances for personal use.11 Law 30/2000 did not legalize drug use or possession, but it did put an end to the use of penal sanctions. Some users face fines, others are recommended for treatment through Commissions for the Dissuasion of Drug Addiction. The thinking was that if the authorities could divert problematic users into treatment, police resources would be freed up to tackle the traffickers. Prior to decriminalization, Portuguese courts were overburdened, there were long delays in processing cases, and the prisons were overcrowded. Since 2001, overcrowding rates have fallen and there have been crucial reductions in drug-related health problems. Until 2001, the Portuguese authorities usually had little to suggest to anyone who wanted help in overcoming their dependence on drugs, aside from abstinence. Now health workers have a better understanding of who the users are, and how and why they take drugs. Drug users feel less stigmatized, and are more willing to turn to treatment services for help when they want it.
Some Portuguese say that decriminalization has encouraged young people to use hard drugs. Cannabis use has certainly gone up in Portugal since 2001, but the same trend is evident in neighbouring Spain and Italy too. Seizures of all drugs have doubled since passage of Law 30/2000, but cocaine trafficking was likely to rise with or without decriminalization because Portugal is the European country closest to Colombia and cocaine seizures have gone up across European countries with quite different drug laws. The extent to which increases in occasional use can be attributed to decriminalization remains unclear, but it might be ventured that decriminalization has reduced problematic use of drugs like heroin, while it has increased recreational drug use.
The decline of religion, the spread of democratic market-based economies, the integration of global trade, mass education and access to information are all likely to corrode national peculiarities in the twenty-first century. The ideology of the drug warriors of the United States is one such peculiarity. To say that drugs should be legalized, or that prohibition can never work would be to trade in abstractions. What is easier to assert is that, given the world in which cocaine production, distribution and consumption has found a home, prohibition is unworkable and counter-productive. Jack Cole told me ‘to just think about what a terrible metaphor a “war on drugs” is for policing in a democratic society. When you train your police to go to war, they’ve got to have an enemy. In 1970, 4 million Americans had tried an illegal drug. By 2003, 112 million Americans had tried an illegal drug. That’s the majority of the adults in the United States. So it’s not a war on drugs, it’s a war on us.’ Criminalizing drugs has not reduced drug use. It has only made criminality as widespread as drug use, and made a mockery of the law.
Those in authority are unwilling to admit their addiction to control, or the illusion of control. The United States government should face up to its inability to devise a workable response to the demand for drugs. It should concede that some countries are making progress and that their own zealous defence of prohibition is constraining further progress. That would open the way for repeal of the United Nations’ Single Convention. Individual countries would then be free to draw up new legislation in response to the particular demand for drugs in their country. The scape-goating and demonization of drugs would doubtless continue, but there are many activities that meet with the approval of the law yet the disapproval of much of society, including abortion, atheism and homosexuality. They are all in the process of being normalized, as is drug use. Assuming this normalization process takes place in a context in which drugs remain illegal, cocaine will eventually go the way of cannabis. The law will become irrelevant, at which point it will probably be quietly dropped.
Legalization will not solve the ongoing crisis of compulsive drug use. Only when nations produce responsible citizens with stakes in conventional society and in their communities will they truly have pulled up the roots of compulsive consumption. In
The Post-American World (2008), Fareed Zakaria says that ‘America has become a nation consumed by anxiety, worried about terrorists and rogue nations, Muslims and Mexicans, foreign companies and free trade, immigrants and international organizations. The strongest nation in the world now sees itself as besieged by forces beyond its control.’12 In this intoxicating atmosphere of all-pervading fear, it becomes all the more difficult to persuade Americans that the legalization of drugs would supply more, not less, peace and order.
However dramatic the failure to prohibit the use of certain drugs, the lack of a sober appraisal ensures that prohibition is unlikely to be repealed on the grounds of health, ethics or human rights. As countering terrorism, preventing illegal immigration and staving off economic decline come to dominate the political agenda, all three are going to demand greater resources and manpower. The war on drugs will most likely be abandoned for financial reasons, as the United States government is forced to accept that it doesn’t have the resources to prosecute this war to its logical conclusion.
It is just a week since the election of Barack Obama to the White House. The hope that he embodied was not just that white Americans might be prepared to vote for a man of mixed race. It was also the hope that the concerns of the black electorate might, for the first time, be comprehensively addressed. Since 1970, when the war on drugs was launched by Richard Nixon, its principal targets have been black Americans and its gravest consequence has been to cement the poverty and neglect on which the cocaine trade thrives. The chorus of calls for renewal, honest appraisal and perspicuity that greeted Barack Obama as he campaigned for the Presidency should now be addressed to the authors and directors of the United States’ war on drugs. Their paranoia, gnat-like attention span and general indifference to the consequences of their actions are more characteristic of crack addicts than of officials responsible for managing public health. Finding a workable alternative to prohibition has to begin in the United States, because it is the ultimate guarantor of the United Nations’ conventions on drug use. So it rests with young Americans to ensure that future drug policies are grounded in science and the protection of public health and to recognize that knowledge is the prerequisite for free choice. Once made, we have no choice but to respect it.
Notes
Introduction
1. Richard Ford and Adam Fresco, ‘UN condemns Britain’s celebrity cocaine culture’, The Times, 5 March 2008.
2. Marek Kohn, ‘Cocaine Girls: sex, drugs and modernity in London during and after the First World War’, in Paul Gootenberg (ed.), Cocaine: Global Histories (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 108.
3. Ford and Fresco, ‘UN condemns Britain’s celebrity cocaine culture’.
4. Stewart Tendler, ‘Police chief clamps down on dinner party cocaine’, The Times, 2 February 2005.
5. Leo Benedictus, ‘Cocaine, Anyone?’, Guardian, 3 February 2005.
6. Cited in Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair, White Out: the CIA, Drugs and the Press (London: Verso, 1999), p. 76; also accessible through the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library at
7. The last figure refers to 2001 prices; United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, World Drug Report 2006, Vol. 2, Statistics (Vienna, Austria: UNODC, 2006), pp. 369–70; Calvani estimates wholesale prices per kilo in the US in 2006 to be between £7,700 and £9,200, see Sandro Calvani, La Coca: pasado y presente, mitos y realidades (Bogotá: Ediciones Aurora, 2007), p. 125.
8. Ibid., p. 119.
9. By the UNDCP and the Washington Post, among others; see Peter Reuter, ‘The Mismeasurement of Illegal Drug Markets: The Implications of Its Irrelevance’, in S. Pozo (ed.), Exploring the Underground Economy: Studies of Illegal and Unreported Activity (Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University, W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Policies, 1996).
10. The author of the report was Peter Reuter. This anecdote is cited in Francisco Thoumi, ‘The Numbers Game: Let’s All Guess the Size of the Illegal Drugs Industry,’ Journal of Drug Issues, Winter 2005, pp. 185–200.
11. The larger number comes from B. Freemantle, The Fix: Inside the World Drug Trade (New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 1986); the smaller number comes from Ricardo Rocha García, La Economía Colombiana tras 25 Años de Narcotráfico (Bogotá: Siglo del Hombre Editores, 2000).
12. Max Singer, ‘The Vitality of Mythical Numbers’, Public Interest, Spring 1971.
13. Ivan Rios, ‘Fenómeno y efectos del capitalismo salvaje: El narcotráfico’, in Conversaciones de paz: Cultivos ilicítos, narcotráfico y agenda de paz (Bogotá: Mandato Ciudadano por la Paz, la Vida y la Libertad, 2000), pp. 153–7.
14. Guardian, 20 November 2007.
15. The estimates are based on prison interviews with 222 convicted high-level drug dealers. S. Pudney, ‘Estimating the size of the UK illicit drug market’, in N. Singleton et al. (eds.), Measuring different aspects of problem drug use: methodological developments (London: Home Office Online Report, 16 June 2006). The assumptions and calculations that follow are mine.
16. Non-tax evasion crimes included trafficking in illicit drugs, human trafficking, burglary, larceny-theft, motor vehicle theft, robbery, fraud, arson, non-arson fraud, counterfeiting, illegal gambling, loan sharking and prostitution. Tax evasion crimes included federal income, federal profits and excise tax evasion.
1. From Soft Drink to Hard Drug
1. Hugh Trevor-Roper, The European Witch-Craze of the 16th and 17th Centuries (London: Pelican, 1969), p. 78.
2. From the documentary, Coca Mama: the War on Drugs, an Icaro and Jan Thielen production, 2001.
3. Cited in Andrew Weil, ‘The New Politics of Coca’, New Yorker, 15 May 1995.
4. ‘Colombian Coca Trade’, Trade and Environment Database paper 136, American University, 1997.
5. Sandro Calvani, La Coca: pasado y presente, mitos y realidades (Bogotá: Ediciones Aurora, 2007), p. 20.
6. Anthony Henman, Mama Coca: un estudio completo de la coca (Lima: Juan Gutemberg Editores, 2005), p. 115.
7. Anibal Prado, cited in Jorge Bejarano, Nuevos capitulos sobre el cocainismo (Bogotá: Editorial Iqueima, 1952).
8. Cited in Weil, ‘The New Politics of Coca’.
9. Coca Cultivation in the Andean Region: A Survey of Bolivia, Colombia and Peru (Vienna: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, June 2006).
10. David F. Musto, ‘Opium, Cocaine and Marijuana in American History’, Scientific American, July 1991, pp. 20–27.
11. Cited in Weil, ‘The New Politics of Coca’.
12. Calvani, La Coca: pasado y presente, mitos y realidades, p. 63.
13. ‘7X’ refers to the seven ingredients of Coca-Cola: caffeine, vanilla extract, aromatizing substances (orange, lemon, nutmeg, cinnamon, coriander and citron blossom), citric acid, lemon juice, sugar, water and ‘X’, which is liquid coca extract; as revealed in Mark Pendergrast, For God, Country and Coca-Cola: the history of the world’s most popular soft drink (London: Orion Business, 2000).
14. Alonso Salazar, Drogas y Narcotráfico en Colombia (Bogotá: Planeta, 2001), p. 30.
15. Joseph Spillane, ‘Making a Modern Drug: the manufacture, sale, and control of cocaine in the United States 1880–1920’, in Paul Gootenberg (ed.), Cocaine: Global Histories (London: Routledge, 1999).
16. Cited in Musto, ‘Opium, Cocaine and Marijuana in American History’.
17. Salazar, Drogas y Narcotráfico en Colombia, p. 31.
18. Eric Sterling, ‘Beyond Just Say No’, Sojourners magazine, May 2003, p. 40.
19. Mike Jay, Emperors of Dreams: Drugs in the Nineteenth Century (Sawtry, Cambs: Dedalus, 2000), p. 181.
20. Ibid., p. 178.
21. Charles B. Towns, ‘The Peril of the Drug Habit’, Century Magazine, 84 (1912), p. 586.
22. Cockburn and St Clair, White Out: the CIA, Drugs and the Press, op. cit., p. 71.
23. Musto, ‘Opium, Cocaine and Marijuana in American History’.
24. Philip Guy, ‘Race
and the Drug Problem: more than just an Enforcement Issue’ available online at
25. Daily Mail, 22 July 1901, cited in Kohn, ‘Cocaine Girls: sex, drugs and modernity in London during and after the First World War’, in Gootenberg (ed.), Cocaine: Global Histories, p. 107.
26. World’s Pictorial News, 26 April 1926.
27. Daily Express, 14 March 1922.
28. Data from 1933 comes from Gary F. Jensen, ‘Prohibition, Alcohol, and Murder: Untangling Countervailing Mechanisms’, Homicide Studies, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, February 2000), p. 31. The data for 1980 comes from US Census Data and FBI Uniform Crime Reports.
29. Jeffrey A. Miron and Jeffrey Zwiebel, ‘Alcohol Consumption During Prohibition’, American Economic Review, vol. 81, No. 2, Papers and Proceedings of the Hundred and Third Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association, May 1991, pp. 242–7.
30. W. A. Niskanen, Economists and Drug Policy, Carnegie-Rochester Conference Series on Public Policy 36, 1992, p. 234.
31. St Clair Drake and Horace Roscoe Cayton, Black Metropolis (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1970).
32. Jay, Emperors of Dreams, p. 239.
33. Sterling, ‘Beyond Just Say No’, p. 40.
34. Musto, ‘Opium, Cocaine and Marijuana in American History’.
35. Cited in Rick Curtis, ‘Crack, Cocaine and Heroin: Drug Eras in Williamsburg, Brooklyn 1960–2000’, Addiction Research and Theory 2003, vol. 11, No. 1, p. 50.
36. Ibid.
37. Drug Enforcement Agency: A Tradition of Excellence 1973–2003, US Department of Justice, Drug Enforcement Agency, 2003.
38. Harry Levine, ‘The Secret of Worldwide Drug Prohibition: the varieties and uses of drug prohibition’, Independent Review, Fall 2002.
39. Cited in Cockburn and St Clair, White Out, p. 291.
40. Cited in Hugh O’Shaughnessy and Sue Branford, Chemical Warfare in Colombia: the Costs of Fumigation (London: Latin American Bureau, 2005), p. 21.
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