The Andean Cocaine Industry. - book reviews

ORBIS, Fall, 1997 by Patrick Lloyd Hatcher

Today California is at the center of the debate over legalization thanks to its Proposition 215 authorizing doctors to prescribe marijuana. Citizens there (and in Arizona) approved the measure in November 1996, and the Clinton administration, citing "family values," threatened to file suit to block it.(7) Will Proposition 215 open the back door to legalization of marijuana and other drugs? And would that have pernicious effects on American society? Most of the authors under review think not. As Riley indicates, marijuana is the most widely used illicit drug in the United States: roughly twenty million Americans smoked it at least once during 1991 despite the fact that nearly one-fourth of the nation's drug-fighting budget is spent on attempts to restrict its supply. In other words, those who wish to smoke pot already do so, while the funds spent on its control might be better spent reducing demand for hard drugs.

An Unwinnable War

So what is to be done? The only demonstrably successful methods for combatting narcotics verge on the totalitarian. For instance, ever since the British subverted the society of coastal China in the nineteenth century through their importation of opium no Chinese leader was able to rid his people of that curse - until, as Stares recounts, Mao Zedong launched a comprehensive anti-opium campaign that included land reform designed to eliminate poppy cultivation and propaganda to alter radically public attitudes toward consumption. Communist power and indoctrination also drove the notorious Shanghai-based drug triads (secret societies) to Hong Kong or further abroad, and put remaining drug dealers to death. Now Hong Kong has to reverted to Chinese control, and speculation is rife as to where the drug gangs will flee next. Not to Singapore, for there, too, the sentence for drug pushing is summary execution.

In America, the prevalent culture of hedonism and individualism, and understandable fears about the impact on civil rights, prevent such draconian measures to end drug dealing and consumption. That is why American efforts have focused on the supply rather than demand side. But as Clawson and Lee document and eloquently argue, American efforts abroad stand little chance of success. Between 1981 and 1995 the federal government spent $125 billion on drug control programs and made virtually no progress. To be sure, only a miniscule 4 percent of that money was devoted to international programs, but the other burden of The Andean Cocaine Industry is that the fate of the drug cartels in places like Colombia and Peru will depend far more on their local government's efforts than on anything the United States can do. Unfortunately, those local governments are not inclined to do much - and not because the drug trade is too lucrative to shut down. Rather, cocaine accounts for no more than 4 or 5 percent of the gross domestic product of Peru or Colombia. The real reasons are that those South American (not to mention Southeast Asian) governments are too weak, and their countries too vast and rugged, to "invade" their own hinterlands and impose law and order on the anti-states in their domains. Secondly, eliminating the drug trade is not a high national priority to governments beset by poverty, unemployment, and left-wing insurgencies and terrorism (only 8 percent of Colombians name the drug traffic a serious national problem). Thirdly, those governments rightly believe that drugs are a North American problem: no one is forcing the gringos to snort coke, so let Washington deal with it. Finally, there is a perverse self-defeating aspect to government wars against the producers of drugs: the more effective they are in reducing supply the more they drive prices up and attract new players into the industry.