53. For some examples of official exaggeration and falsehood, see International Crisis Group, ‘Guerra y Droga en Colombia’, p. 12.
54. ‘United States charges 50 traders of narco-terrorist FARC in Colombia with supplying more than half the world’s cocaine’, DEA press release, 22 March 2006.
55. International Crisis Group, ‘Latin American Drugs I: Losing the Fight’, Latin America Report, No. 25, 14 March 2008.
56. ‘Armas siguen llegando a FARC, pese a estrictos controles en área de operaciones del Plan Patriota’, El Tiempo, 7 June 2005.
57. Joaquín Villalobos, ‘FARC: un amenaza transnacional, de Robin Hood a Pablo Escobar’, El País, 24 March 2008.
58. According to Alfredo Rangel, director of Fundación Seguridad y Democracia, cited in Marin, El Opio de los Taliban y la Coca de las FARC, p. 63.
59. Daniel Pecault, Guerra Contra la Sociedad (Bogotá: Espasa Hoy, 2000).
60. Jamaica Gleaner, 16 March 2007.
61. Center for International Policy, ‘Plan Colombia: Six Years Later’, November 2006. Plan Colombia has been a boon for defence contractors, albeit nothing compared to what they get from supplying US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. See ‘The Lost War,’ Washington Post, 19 August 2007, citing data from the Government Accountability Office.
62. Cited in ‘Nos daban cinco días de descanso por cada muerto’, Semana, 26 January 2008 (my translation).
63. ‘Corrupcion hasta el tuétano’, Semana, 13 August 2007.
64. Salazar, Drogas y Narcotrafico en Colombia, pp. 83–4.
65. According to Professor Jenny Pearce, who visited Sincelejo in 2005, and described her time there in ‘The crisis of the Colombian state’, Open Society, 14 May 2007.
66. Interview published as ‘El Hombre del Cartel’, Semana, 16 June 2007, my translation.
67. According to a study, Mauricio Romero (ed.), Para-politíca: la ruta de la expansión paramilitar y les acuerdos políticos (Bogotá: Corporacion Nuevo Iris, 2007).
68. The scale of his production was confirmed by fellow trafficker Fabio Ochoa Vasco in an interview published as ‘El Hombre del Cartel’, Semana, 16 June 2007.
69. According to Gustavo Gallon of the Colombian Commission of Jurists, cited in ‘Ex paras podrian vivir en tierras que AUC usurparon’, El Tiempo, 14 February 2006. The figures on the total number of demobilized paramilitaries come from Washington Office on Latin America, ‘Chemical Reactions: Fumigation’, p. 8.
70. Pearce, ‘The crisis of the Colombian state’.
71. International Crisis Group, ‘Colombia’s New Armed Groups’, Latin America Report, 20, 10 May 2007, p. 5.
72. His conviction was overturned on a legal technicality, but in May 2009, a fresh warrant for his arrest was issued, this time in connection with the murders of a politician, a journalist and a trade union official. ‘Ex-director del DAS Jorge Noguera Cote, a juicio por crimen de colrea de Andreis’, El Tiempo, 14 May 2009.
73. Fabio Castillo, Los Jinetes de la Cocaína (Bogotá: Editorial Documentos Periodísticos, 1987), p. 225.
74. ‘La Fibra Íntima’, Semana, 23 April 2007.
75. ‘Because both the source of the report and the reporting officer’s comments section were not declassified, we cannot be sure how the DIA judged the accuracy of this information,’ said Michael Evans, director of the National Security Archive’s Colombia Documentation Project, ‘but we do know that intelligence officials believed the document was serious and important enough to pass on to analysts in Washington.’ See 23 November 1991 (Date of Information 18 March 1991), Narcotics—Colombian Narcotrafficker Profiles, Defense Intelligence Agency, Intelligence Information Report, Confidential, 14 pp. Declassification Release Under the Freedom of Information Act, May 2004.
76. Castillo, Los Jinetes de la Cocaina, p. 72.
77. ‘Free Trade in Thugs’, The Economist, 15 May 2008.
78. Interview published as ‘El Hombre del Cartel’, Semana, 16 June 2007.
79. Salvatore Mancuso, for example, sold his South of Bolivar front to drug lords in Putumayo. For more on this, see International Crisis Group, ‘Colombia’s New Armed Groups’, p. 4. Also Marin, El Opio de los Taliban y la Coca de las FARC, p. xv.
80. ‘Asi siguen mandando los paras’, El Tiempo, 5 March 2006.
81. Salazar, Drogas y Narcotráfico en Colombia, pp. 75–6.
82. Center for International Policy, ‘Plan Colombia: Six Years Later’.
83. Cited in International Crisis Group, ‘Guerra y Droga en Colombia’, p. 25.
8. Globalization
1. C. Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (New York: Crown Trade Paperbacks, 1980, reissued), preface to the edition of 1852.
2. United States House of Representatives, speech by Rep. Mark Souder (R-Indiana), Congressional Record, Washington, 23 May 2002, H3001; also available online at
3. Cited in Daniel Scott-Lea, ‘Descubriendo Petróleo debajo de la Guerra contra las Drogas y el Terror’, Masters degree thesis in Latin American Studies, Universidad Javeriana, Bogotá, unpublished, October 2005.
4. Interview conducted in 2002; cited in Doug Stokes, America’s Other War: Terrorizing Colombia (London: Zed Books, 2005), p. 90.
5. Francisco Ramirez Cuellar, The Profits of Extermination: How US Corporate Power is Destroying Colombia (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 2005), p. 73.
6. Ethan A. Nadelmann, ‘The DEA in Latin America: Dealing with Institutionalized Corruption’, Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs, Vol. 29, No. 4, Winter 1987–88, pp. 1–39.
7. Jamie Dettmer, ‘Family Affairs: Mexican businessman and politician Carlos Hank Gonzalez allegedly involved in drug trade’, Insight on the News, 29 March 1999.
8. Frank Smyth, ‘The Untouchable Narco-State: Guatemala’s military defies the DEA’, Texas Observer, 8 November 2005.
9. See his autobiography, Celerino Castillo III, Powderburns: Cocaine, Contras and the Drug War (Oakville, Ontario: Mosaic Press, 1994), p. 124.
10. Cockburn and St Clair, White Out: the CIA, Drugs and the Press, p. 289.
11. Nadelmann, ‘The DEA in Latin America’, pp. 1–39.
12. Crime, Violence, and Development: Trends, Costs, and Policy Options in the Caribbean, March 2007, p. 23.
13. Cited in Nadelmann, ‘The DEA in Latin America’, pp. 1–39.
14. ‘Rio governor says legalize drugs to fight crime’, Reuters, 2 March 2007.
15. Jamaica Gleaner, 13 May 2007.
16. Adriano Oliveira, ‘Trafico de drogas e crime organizado, pecas e mecanismos’, in M. O. Campos, Estado Bandido e as Mulheres no Trafico, fazendomedia.com.
17. Tijuana also has ten times the number of pharmacies you would expect to find in a city of its size; see National Drug Intelligence Center, ‘National Drug Threat Assessment 2007’, US Department of Justice.
18. Interview with Benito Azcano Roldán of La Carpa Hogar Integral de Juventud, Mexico City, March 2008.
19. According to the US Justice Department’s National Drug Intelligence Center, cited in The Economist, 25 October 2007.
20. National Drug Intelligence Center, ‘National Drug Threat Assessment 2007’.
21. Peter Andreas, ‘Free market reform and drug market prohibition: US policies at cross-purposes in Latin America’, Third World Quarterly, Vol. 16, No. 1, 1995.
22. Williams, ‘Consequences of the War on Drugs for Transit Countries: the Jamaican Experience’, p. 34. The author was once Jamaica’s Chief of Narcotics Police; the Colombian cartels offered a $1 million bounty to anyone who would kill him. He stayed alive long enough to leave his post.
23. Jamaica Gleaner, 21 September, 2007, reports that from January to August 2007, the authorities destroyed 387 hectares of ganja.
24. Medical cannabis refers to the use of the
cannabis plant as a physician-recommended herbal therapy. Cannabinoids have been found to be useful in the treatment of a wide variety of oxidation associated diseases, such as ischaemic, age-related, inflammatory and autoimmune diseases. They can be used as neuroprotectants, for example in limiting neurological damage following stroke and trauma, or in the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and HIV dementia.
25. Center for International Policy, ‘Below the Radar: US Military Programs with Latin America 1997–2007’, 2007, p. 6.
26. Brecher et al. (eds.), ‘The Consumers Union Report on Licit and Illicit Drugs’, 1972.
27. Office of National Drug Control Policy, The Price and Purity of Illicit Drugs: 1981 Through the Second Quarter of 2003 (Washington DC: Executive Office of the President, November 2004), Publication Number NCJ 207768, p. 58, Table 1 and p. 59, Table 2.
28. United Nations Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention, Global Illicit Drug Trends 1999 (New York, NY: UNODCCP, 1999), p. 86. Also Office of National Drug Control Policy, The Price and Purity of Illicit Drugs, p. 62, Table 5 and p. 63, Table 6.
29. C. P. Rydell and S. S. Everingham, ‘Controlling Cocaine’ prepared for the Office of National Drug Control Policy and the United States Army (Santa Monica, CA: Drug Policy Research Center, RAND, 1994), p. 6.
9. The Demand for Cocaine
1. Data from the 2001/2002 sweep of the British Crime Survey 2001/02.
2. European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, Annual Report 2005: The State of the Drugs Problem in Europe (Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, 2005), p. 12.
3. ‘Spain Drug Situation 2000’, Report to the European Monitoring Center on Drugs and Drug Addiction by the Reitox National Focal Point of Spain, Plan nacional sobre drogas (Madrid, Spain: Ministerio del Interior and EMCDDA, November 2000), pp. 18–19. (DGPNSD 2000a: Delegación del Gobierno para el Plan Nacional Sobre Drogas, Encuesta Domiciliaria Sobre Use do Drogas 1999, Ministerio del Interior. 2000d: DGPNSD, Encuesta Sobre Drogas a Poblacion Escolar, Ministerio del Interior.)
4. European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, Annual Report 2005: The State of the Drugs Problem in Europe, p. 17.
5. BBC News, ‘Half City’s Youth Take Cocaine’, 9 May 2008; study conducted by Professor Mark Bellis at the Centre for Public Health at Liverpool John Moore’s University.
6. UN World Drug Report 2006, from p. 24.
7. In 1993, among those who had used cocaine in the last year, 77 per cent had snorted it, 26 per cent had smoked it and 7 per cent had injected it; see National Drug Intelligence Center, ‘National Drug Threat Assessment 2007’, US Department of Justice, citing National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) and Monitoring the Future (MTF) data.
8. See the Serious Organized Crime Agency website.
9. Niskanen, Economists and Drug Policy, p. 237, citing Gill and Michaels, ‘Drug Use and Earnings: Accounting for the Self-Selection of Users’, Working Paper 11–90, California State University at Fullerton, 1990.
10. See
11. E. Joël and F. Fränkel, Der Cocainismus: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte und Psychopathologie der Rauschgifte (Berlin: Julius Springer, 1924), p. 18.
12. Cited in Ernest Jones, Sigmund Freud: Life and Work (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–7), Vol. I, p. 91.
13. R. A. Johnson and D. R. Gerstein, ‘Initiation of use of alcohol, cigarettes, marijuana, cocaine, and other drugs in US birth cohorts since 1919’, American Journal of Public Health, 88, 1997, pp. 27–33.
14. J. Schedler and J. Block, ‘Adolescent Drug Use and Psychological Health’, American Psychologist, 45, May 1990, pp. 612–30.
15. P. Clifford, ‘Drug Use, Drug Prohibition and Minority Communities’, Journal of Primary Prevention 12 (4), 1992, pp. 303–16.
16. UN World Drug Report, p. 96.
17. Harry Levine, citing data from http://www.nida.nih.gov/infofacts/cocaine.html.
18. This was the conclusion reached at an international conference on municipal cannabis policies, organized by the Dutch Minister of Justice in 2001 and attended by 120 participants from 50 European cities from 20 countries; Trimbos Institute, Report to the EMCDDA by the Reitox National Focal Point, The Netherlands Drug Situation 2002 (Lisbon, Portugal: European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, November 2002), p. 23, citing Ministerie van Volksgezondheid, Welzijn en Sport, 2002a, pp. 17–18.
19. Patricia G. Erickson, The Steel Drug: Cocaine and Crack in Perspective (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1987).
20. Noah Mamber, ‘Harm Reductive Drug Legalization’, Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy, Summer 2006, p. 629.
21. Ibid., p. 630.
22. J. O’Connor and B. Saunders, ‘Drug Education: an appraisal of a popular preventive’, International Journal of the Addictions, 27, 1992, pp. 165–85; also N. Dorn and K. Murji, Drug Prevention: A Review of the English Language Literature (London: Institute for the Study of Drug Dependence, 1992); Julian Cohen, ‘Drug Education: Politics, Propaganda and Censorship’, International Journal of Drug Policy, Vol. 7, No. 3, 1996.
23. Ian Binnie et al., ‘Know the score: cocaine wave 3: 2005 post-campaign evaluation: summary’, Scottish Executive, 2006, based on 466 interviews.
24. Interview with Anthony Henman, Chepstow, August 2007.
25. Van Dyck and Robert Byck, as cited in Jorge Hurtado Gumucio, Cocaine, the Legend: About Coca and Cocaine, 2nd revd edn (La Paz: Editorial Hisbol, 1995).
26. Niskanen, Economists and Drug Policy, p. 229.
27. Patricia Erickson and Glenn Murray, ‘Cocaine and Addictive Liability’, Social Pharmacology, 3, 1989, pp. 249–70.
28. Peter Cohen, Cocaine Use in Amsterdam in Non-Deviant Sub-cultures (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam, 1989).
29. Sheila Murphy, Craig Reinarman and Dan Waldorf, ‘An 11-year follow-up of a network of cocaine users’, British Journal of Addiction, 84, 1989, pp. 427–36.
30. Mike Jay, ‘A Snapshot History of Coca, Cocaine and Crack’, on the Transform Drug Policy Foundation website:
31. Peter Cohen, Peter and Arjan Sas, Ten years of cocaine: a follow-up study of 64 cocaine users in Amsterdam (Amsterdam: Department of Human Geography, University of Amsterdam, 1993), p. 24.
32. Cited in Ken McLaughlin, ‘This Case Could Make Losers of Us All’, 20 February 2008; available to view at
33.
Withdrawal: Presence and severity of characteristic withdrawal symptoms.
Reinforcement: A measure of the substance’s ability, in human and animal tests, to get users to take it again and again, and in preference to other substances.
Tolerance: How much of the substance is needed to satisfy increasing cravings for it, and the level of stable need that is eventually reached.
Dependence: How difficult it is for the user to quit, the relapse rate, the percentage of people who eventually become dependent, the rating users give their own need for the substance and the degree to which the substance will be used in the face of evidence that it causes harm.
Intoxication: Though not usually counted as a measure of addiction in itself, the level of intoxication is associated with addiction and increases the personal and social damage a substance may do.
Source: Dr Jack E. Henningfield for NIDA National Institute on Drug Abuse, cited in Philip J. Hilts, ‘Is Nicotine Addictive? It Depends on Whose Criteria You Use’, New York Times, 2 August 1994.
34. Martin Fackler, ‘In Korea, a Boot Camp Cure for Web Obsession’, New York Times, 18 November 2007.
35. S. Roe and L. Mann, ‘Drug Misuse Declared: Findings from the 2005/06 British Crime Survey England and Wales’, Home Office Statistical Bulletin, 2006.
36. Criminal Policy Research Unit, ‘On the Rocks: A Follow-up
Study of Crack Users in London’, South Bank University, 2003.
37. Interview with Tony D’Agostino of Coca, a London charity working at an international level to increase knowledge and understanding of cocaine and crack use, August 2007.
38. Antonin Artaud, ‘Appeal to Youth: Intoxication-Disintoxication’, reproduced in Susan Sontag (ed.), Selected Writings, pt. 24 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988).
39. C. P. Rydell and S. S. Everingham, Controlling Cocaine, prepared for the Office of National Drug Control Policy and the United States Army (Santa Monica, CA: Drug Policy Research Center, RAND Corporation, 1994), p. xvi.
40. Ibid.
41. Abt Associates, What America’s Users Spend on Illegal Drugs 1988–1998 (Washington, DC: ONDCP, Dec. 2000), p. 9, citing data from the Substance Abuse Mental Health Services Administration.
42. See Ministry of Health, Drug Policy in the Netherlands, September 2003.
43. Canadian Senate hearing from Peter Cohen in 2001. Proceedings of the Special Committee on Illegal Drugs, Issue 3, Evidence for 28 May, Morning Session, Ottawa, Canadian Senate; available online at
44. Trimbos Institute, Report to the EMCDDA by the Reitox National Focal Point, p. 8.
45. As reported in Drugs in Deprived Neighbourhoods, Home Office Research Study 240, 2002.
46. Katherine Griffiths, ‘Xenova sees hope for cocaine treatment’, Independent, 18 June 2003; also see the company’s website at
10. Legalization
1. British police arrested 4,400 people on charges of possessing cocaine in 2000, up a third from the previous year, but that still left 745,000 cocaine users who escaped all censure.
2. Criminal Policy Research Unit, ‘On the Rocks: A Follow-up Study of Crack Users in London’, South Bank University, London, 2003. And from Beckley Foundation/Drugscope, Assessing Drug Policy Principles and Practice, London, 2004, p. 5.
3. Eric Sterling, Eleven Ways the Drug War is Hurting Your Business (Silver Spring, MD: Business Council for Prosperity and Safety, 2007).
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