The unwinnable war on the drug trade

ORBIS, Fall, 1997 by Patrick Lloyd Hatcher

Where does the electronic drug money go? It often finds its way to financial centers in northern Italy where, in per capita terms, cocaine use is the highest in Europe and a money-laundering Lombard League employs postal money orders, travellers' cheques, and certificates of deposit from nonbank (and hence less regulated) financial institutions. Clawson and Lee tell a story reminiscent of Francis Ford Coppola movies about the Ecuadorian freighter Cinta docked at the Italian port of Livorno. Its hold carried a container of frozen fish at the bottom of which lurked 526 kilograms of cocaine. This was a Cali-connected shipment to powerful allied families based in the Sicilian town of Corleone [sic]. But complications arose when Italian customs officials detained the fish because they were found to contain unhealthy levels of mercury. To salvage the deal the smugglers bribed the officials while the putative owners of the fish promised to deliver them to starving people in Bosnia as a humanitarian gesture. The cargo was then loaded onto trucks supposedly bound for Bosnia via Trieste. Instead, the tracks made a long detour south to Rome, where the traffickers extracted the cocaine. Only then did the cargo of fish, now rotten as well as contaminated, make its way to Trieste.

William Walker's Drugs in the Western Hemisphere takes the reader on similar odysseys by way of tracing the progress of drugs from Mexico through Honduras to the Andes, then over to Cuba and finally into the United States. Faithful to his perception of the drug war as a case of "cultures in conflict," Walker describes how ancient, and arguably beneficial, is the native Andean practice of chewing the leaves of the coca plant, el coquero. But similar practices, exported to the streets of American cities and pushed on children, can be devastating. As an African American from North Carolina attests: "I smoked reefers and used a little cocaine when I was nine years old." He was a dealer by his teens.

Walker, himself a teacher, lays stress on demand-reduction efforts rather than on wasteful "wars" on foreign suppliers. He especially recommends showing American youth films such as Frank Sinatra's The Man With the Golden Arm, Gene Hackman's The French Connection, Al Pacino's Scarface, and Harrison Ford's Clear and Present Danger. But soft propaganda from the film industry hardly seems credible so long as Hollywood itself feeds Americans' appetites by example and titillating depiction. In fact, the new breed of California bootlegger sports, not bib overalls and robber boots, but designer jeans and Gucci loafers, or else tries himself to cook up methamphetamine (known as speed, crystal, crank, tweak, or ice) in kitchen countertop chemistry sets. Neighborhood explosions attest to such household brews gone bad. To be sure, most hard drug production is carried out in more or less modern Mexican factories (druggies in fact refer to NAFTA as the North American Free Tweak Association), but the biggest market remains the United States where methamphetamine overdoses rose 125 percent from 1993 to 1995, accounting for 10 percent of all overdose deaths in the nation).(6)