Chooper's Guide ... the Internet's most comprehensive substance abuse treatment, prevention and intervention resource directory.

Rethinking the "War on Drugs" Thru The US - Mexico Prism



Attachment Files

PDF | Entire Report | Rethinking the "War on Drugs" Thru The US - Mexico Prism

Summary/Abstract

Yale Center for the Study of Globalization summarization of the conference on the War on Drugs held in 2011.

Content

OVERVIEW ========== Since its inception the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization has had as part of its mission the analysis of problems that, even if not resulting directly from globalization, happen to be global in nature or at least are exacerbated by globalization and can therefore be effectively addressed only through international cooperation. In fulfillment of this goal, in addition to core globalization issues like international trade and investment, over the years the Center has been engaged in topics such as climate change and nuclear disarmament. Within the same category of issues – those not caused by but related to globalization—the problem of illicit drugs and international crime is one in which we engaged only lately. In 2008 we collaborated with the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy [http://www.drogasedemocracia.org/English/ and more recently with the Global Commission on Drug Policy that released its final report in June 2011 - http://www.globalcommissionondrugs.org/. Yet, unlike other international collaborations undertaken by the Center in the past, on the drugs topic we had not organized any academic activity at Yale. That omission was fixed with the celebration on May 12-13, 2011 of a conference titled Rethinking the 'War on Drugs' through the US-Mexico Prism. Of course, the problem is truly global. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) estimates that there were as many as 250 million drug users worldwide in 2009, some 38 million of which were drug dependent. Global drug use has increased significantly over the past half century. In 2004, cannabis was the most widely used illicit substance, accounting for more than 80% of drug use that year, followed by the use of opiates (8%) and cocaine (7%). While recent trends suggest drug use prevalence may be tapering off globally, the sheer number of people affected (approximately 4% of the world's population use drugs) and the widespread social, economic and political impact of drug use continue to rank it at the top of global policy agendas. But few places in the world better characterize the full extent of policy challenges resulting from drug trafficking and consumption than the United States and Mexico. The US is the world's largest consumer of drugs. It comprises just five percent of the global population, yet most estimates suggest that the US accounts for over 25 percent of global demand for illicit drugs. At the same time, Mexico is the US's largest supplier of illicit drugs, and an increasingly significant supplier of drugs to many European nations. Furthermore, in recent years Mexico has been affected by an epidemic of violence stemming from organized crime of unprecedented proportions. Our Center's conference had a modest but critical objective: to take stock and distill the relevant research and empirical evidence generated over the years on the drug problem and confront it with the state of affairs on this issue as seen through the prism of the United States and Mexican experiences. That review is warranted if only because the essence of drug policies – a law enforcement approach – has remained invariant for a long time despite evidence questioning its pertinence. Since the beginning of the 20th century, the government of the United States has pursued a repressive approach toward the control of the supply and demand of psychoactive substances – cocaine and opiate drugs first became criminalized in 1914, followed by marijuana in 1937. But it was on July 14th, 1969 that US President Richard Nixon announced a “national war on drugs” in a message that marked the start of a legislative process that produced the policy framework that has, for the most part, prevailed ever since in the United States. The persistence of that framework is remarkable, considering that even well before it was fully enacted there were questions by expert voices about its validity. For example, the American Bar Association (ABA) and the American Medical Association (AMA) produced a joint report in 1961 expressing “dissatisfaction within the legal and medical professions concerning current policies which tend to emphasize repression and prohibition to the exclusion of other possible methods of dealing with addicts and the drug traffic.” In fact, just as the legal and institutional framework of President Nixon's “war on drugs” was being put together, a National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse established by the President himself and the US Congress was, in March of 1972, issuing its report which, at least in reference to that substance, contradicted the essence of the policy then adopted. The Commission recommended that marijuana use should be decriminalized. Historians tell us that this recommendation “so angered President Nixon that he refused to receive the report publicly, in spite of the fact that the chair of the commission was a Republican governor, Raymond P. Shafer.” It is also suggestive that right after the “war on drugs” was launched, the professionals at the United States Department of Health, Education and Welfare railed against “treating drug abuse solely as a subject of criminal law rather than principally as an object of public health.” Of course, these facts should not be taken to suggest that drug policy in the US and other countries has totally lacked a rational foundation all along. The question is really about the weight that medical and public health – not to mention basic human rights or even economic – concerns have received in the formulation of policy. It seems that politics – attentive on this topic above all else to the goal of reducing crime and condemning disruptive behaviors by certain sectors of the population– has dominated the rationale behind drug policies, leaving little space for health strategies and paying little attention to the secondary effects of the adopted policies. Of course, we must believe that the architects and subsequent followers of the “war on drugs” strategy thought that they were acting on behalf of the public interest, but that is hardly a reason not to examine the basis for and the results of their policies. In this process, we should not ignore the possibility that their idea of public interest might have been distorted by a sense of short-term political urgency. Be that as it may, the “war on drugs” as practiced today basically was put in place in the US by the early 1970's not only as a domestic policy but also as a key component of American foreign policy. It is telling to recall that just a few days after Nixon's “war on drugs” speech, on September 21, 1969 the US government launched Operation Intercept, a massive action involving inspection of vehicles and people crossing the Mexican border, in order to reduce drug traffic. Not surprisingly, Operation Intercept immediately caused an economic disruption and damage so vast on both sides of the border that it had to be scaled back significantly and renamed Operation Cooperation barely two weeks after it started. The reaction to that initial disruption in the relationship between the two countries resulting from the “war on drugs” was just the beginning of a complex story of cooperation and sometimes confrontation on this problem between Mexico and the United States that has proven to be very costly for the two sides. Hence the importance of considering, side by side and with academic rigor at the May 12- 13, 2011 conference, the evidence on how the two countries have fared in the endeavor to deal with the drugs problem, as presented by 20 leading experts from academia and the policy world. This e-book contains the manuscripts that the authors kindly submitted to reflect their respective presentations at the conference. Although the texts included here cannot possibly inform about the entirety of the vast research that these authors have produced on the topic over many years, I am confident that the interested reader will find in the different chapters enough arguments and evidence to be convinced of the importance and urgency to look at the drugs problem from a lens somewhat different than the one that has dominated policy, domestic and international, for more than forty years. It is impossible in this introduction to do full justice to the richness of the contributions presented at the conference and in the texts included in this digital volume. The concerned reader is advised not only to look at all the papers in this publication but also at least glance at the transcription of the debates that took place during the conference, which can be found at [web address of transcriptions]. This introduction can at best only sketch some of the very useful insight left by this conference. Although the focus of the proceedings was about the US and Mexico, we thought that the analysis of this topic could be enriched by looking at the Colombian experience with the “war on drugs” as well as the situation in Central America, a region that is fast and very painfully becoming the latest battleground of such undertakings. Well before the recent Mexican drama, Colombia had become the country endur- ing the greatest pain from the war on drugs. As expressed by former Colombian President and Secretary General of the Organization of American States, César Gaviria, as a result of the US war on drugs: “No other country in the world has paid a higher cost than Colombia in terms of lives lost of its political leaders, judges, law enforcement agents, soldiers, journalists and tens of thousands of innocent civilians as well as in damage inflicted to its democratic institutions.” In part as a consequence of an unprecedented cooperation effort between Colombia and the US first launched in 1999 and known as Plan Colombia, crime and violence stemming from organized crime driven by drug trafficking have been reduced in that South American country during recent years. However, in his contribution to this conference, Daniel Mejía advances a rather skeptical view on the outcome of Plan Colombia, which despite its huge cost, has yielded rather modest results in reducing Colombian cocaine production – decreases in the amount of land cultivated with coca crops have been compensated by large increases in productivity as well as larger production in neighboring Peru and Bolivia – and practically nil effects in the price of coca base prices. Mejía's results presented at our conference, along with other authors' contributions in a seminal volume co-edited in 2011 by Mejía himself, deeply question, at least from the perspective of Colombia, the strategy based on supply control and law enforcement applied over so many years. Mexico's suffering from the violence caused by organized crime has approached Colombian proportions in just a few years. In his contribution, Eduardo Guerrero, based on current trends, estimates that between end-2006 and end-2012, the number of deaths related to the activities of organized crime will reach 64,000 in Mexico. Guerrero as well as Aguilar Camín certainly acknowledge the association between the explosion of violence in Mexico and the extraordinary flow of money, corruption and criminal opportunities stemming from drug trafficking. But they insist on the importance of other factors that have played a role, not least the way in which the Mexican government has combated organized crime since 2006, along with the country's institutional weaknesses. Jorge Hernández Tinajero's criticism of the Mexican government's current strategy extends beyond its use of military force to control the problem. He believes that drug consumption in Mexico has reached a level truly warranting a more enlightened and ambitious public health approach. He is equally troubled by the social impact – biased in his view towards the incarceration of small-scale dealers – of the present strategy. If, sadly, Central America is bound to become the next important battleground for the “war on drugs,” then the picture portrayed by Joaquín Villalobos on violence in Central America should be a very worrisome one. For the developmental, historical and cultural reasons discussed by this participant, it is not hard to infer that a greater presence of drug-related organized crime would cause enormous economic, institutional and human devastation in the Central American Republics, similar to how they suffered when they became a battleground for the cold war during the 1970's and 1980's. It would be a great injustice if Central America were to suffer deeply again from somebody else's policies failures. Although all the authors agreed that the US demand for prohibited substances is a chief cause of the violence and corruption associated with drug trafficking, in Mexico, Colombia and Central America, there are differences of opinion on how to address that root cause and its consequences. Reuter, for example, informs that there is very little evidence that enforcement can raise prices or reduce availability. Over the 25-year period from 1980 to 2005, the number of people incarcerated for drug offences in local jails and state and federal prisons increased by a factor of 10, and this figure does not include those incarcerated for so-called drug-related crimes, such as robbery to get the money to buy the drugs. During this period of massively increased intensity in enforcement, the price of heroin and cocaine fell around 70%. The price declines, he submits, have been parallel, even though those drugs are not good substitutes for one another. Notwithstanding that evidence, some of our authors warned that the status quo in drug policy is still favored by not a few in the United States. Quoting a former head of the White House National Drug Policy Office, Donohue includes in his contribution a typical example of the still-recalcitrant supporters of the “war on drugs.” Another of our authors, Humphreys, who served in the same office but in the Obama administration, places at zero the probability of seeing any time soon a radical change in the policy towards cocaine, the drug whose US market provides at least half of the Mexican drug gangs' total revenue. Caulkins is not only skeptical of the political feasibility of legalization, in general, of illegal drugs, but also provides what he believes are the arguments to sustain that position. He is convinced that prohibition drives prices up far above legal levels; that the taxes necessary to prevent a price collapse, if drugs were legalized, are uncollectable; that the demand for drugs may be more price elastic than what has been estimated with historical data – a concern also shared by Pacula and Reuter in this volume; that legalization is an “irreversible game” in the sense that some drug use induced by legalization would remain even if that policy change were later undone; and finally that after all, present policies have permitted the overall levels of use in the United States to stabilize for a number of years . This author, in short, from the US perspective would not advise policymakers “to roll the dice” on legalization. Furthermore, Caulkins goes so far as to question whether the considerably less impossible endeavor of legalizing marijuana in the US would, in fact, reduce violence in Mexico on the basis that revenues for Mexican crime organizations derived from marijuana exports are much less than conventionally estimated – around 20 percent rather than 60 percent of total revenues. He also believes that legalizing marijuana would only modestly impact drug harms in the US, considering that it represents only about 8% of drug-related imprisonment, one-sixth of user spending, about 16% of treatment admissions, and is even less implicated in other drivers of drug-related social costs, like HIV/AIDS transmission and overdose deaths. Kleiman and Reuter also doubt that legalization constitutes a viable policy option. Donohue, who shares such skepticism, suggests that popular support for Rethinking the “War on Drugs” through the US-Mexico Prism legalization or decriminalization is so low because that policy shift would redistribute the social costs of drug use from the government and those involved in the drug trade – mostly poor and minorities – to the middle and higher income sectors of US society. Miron does not buy the arguments of those opposing legalization and his text reiterates the classical economic case for a laissez faire approach on this issue. It stems from the uncontested fact that prohibition does not eliminate drug markets, but simply drives them underground thus causing a range of highly negative side effects: huge black market rents appropriated by organized crime; illegal and vio-lent conflict resolution mechanisms; massive corruption; fostering of other forms of criminality; severe health, safety, civil liberty and economic risks and costs for drug users; and disrespect for the law, among others. Miron is convinced that there are alternatives to prohibition that can achieve a better balance between positive and negative consequences. In particular, he endorses legalization with a sin tax on drugs sufficiently high to yield a price as high as under prohibition and believes, unlike Caulkins, that evasion of the sin tax can be prevented suc- cessfully through sufficient enforcement. Without endorsing outright legalization, other authors nevertheless do provide sensible arguments for moving away from the status quo in a direction that would address the consequences of black markets, as outlined by Miron. After reporting that 56.6 per cent of the estimated cost of illegal drug use in the US (estimated for 2002 as 217 billion of 2008 US dollars) was due to crime-related costs and only 8.7 per cent was caused by health costs, Donohue admits serious concerns about the balance of overall US drug policy. This author insists on the fundamental question of how can it be possible to have falling prices of illegal drugs in the face of intense enforcement efforts – carrying an annual budgetary cost of more than $40 billon. He also gives at least the benefit of the doubt to Miron's submission that, according to cross-country comparisons, there is a strong connection between criminalization of drugs and violent crime. Interestingly, Donohue evokes an earlier study by Caulkins and others that found that an additional $1 million spent on treatment and demand reduction reduced net cocaine consumption by 103.6 kg while the same amount of money spent on longer sentences reduced consumption by just 12.6 kg. Reuter invites us to recognize that current policies actually cause great harm in the United States and are quite ineffective considering that this country has the worst drug problem in the developed world and has not been able rapidly to reduce it. Babor's succinct and well documented review of the international experience, decanted into eight key findings, not only highlights the significant pitfalls of the present strategy but also points plainly in the direction that policy should move to be more effective. This author makes clear that notwithstanding the fact that large-scale supply-control interventions absorb most of the resources spent on drug control in most nations, there are serious questions about the effectiveness of such policies. In particular, he reports that once drugs are made illegal, increasing enforcement and incarceration yield diminishing returns. On demand-focused policies, Babor offers good evidence that, contrary to claims in other studies, some approaches to prevent, or at least delay, consumption do workand, furthermore, that treatment for drug dependence is effective. Relying on evidence about the ineffectiveness of supply-control strategies, Kleiman is quite critical of the United States government's long-standing demand that Mexico act to reduce the flow of drugs across the border so that US drug consumption will be reduced. He submits that even if Mexico were successful in crippling that traffic, the effects on drug abuse in the US would be modest at best because shipments of drugs would simply be shifted to other routes. Interestingly, some of the very same authors who are skeptical of the possibility – or even the convenience – of any significant drug policy changes in the United States at the same time opine that Mexico should change its strategies and policies to align them more with its own interests and less with those of its northern neighbor. Both Kleiman and Caulkins suggest that the objective of minimizing violence should have a higher priority in the Mexican strategy. To this end, Kleiman proposes a sequential go-for-the-most-violent-organization strategy while Caulkins hints that a policy de-emphasizing interdiction along the routes to the border would create less mayhem for Mexico, a suggestion that no doubt would make more than one law enforcer raise an eyebrow. Hopefully, the reader will find that notwithstanding the reservations expressed by some authors about the inconvenience of “rolling the dice,” the arguments and evidence presented at the conference on balance point very strongly in the direction of a serious reconsideration of the policy approach for dealing with the drug problem over so many years. The economic and human costs paid both in the United States as well as in the countries where the drugs come from, question in a profound way, the validity of such policies. The American colleaguewho tell us that any significant change in the strategy is unlikely to happen in the United States essentially for political reasons may be right. But it doesn't mean that those concerned, for good reason, about this problem should give up. On the contrary, the resistance to change should encourage more and better research and a bigger effort to foster a rational discussion of the drug problem. This e-volume aims to contribute towards these ends.

Comments