Pubdate: Wed, 16 May 2001
Source: National Review (US)
Copyright: 2001 National Review
Contact:  http://www.nationalreview.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/287
Author: David Boaz, executive vice president of the Cato Institute 
and editor of The Crisis in Drug Prohibition and The Libertarian 
Reader

THE HYDRA-HEADED DRUG BUSINESS

There's No Killing It

At last we've turned the corner in the war on drugs.

A Coast Guard crew has seized more than 13 tons of cocaine in what 
authorities are calling "the largest cocaine seizure in U.S. maritime 
history."

But careful news watchers have heard those words before. Back in 1998 
Attorney General Janet Reno and Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin 
announced more than 100 indictments and the seizure of some $150 
million from Mexican banks, representing a successful conclusion to 
"the largest, most comprehensive drug money laundering case in 
history."

Indeed, it seems not a week goes by without a report of "New 
Hampshire's biggest drug bust," "the biggest drug bust in middle 
Georgia history," "the largest drug bust ever in the United States 
outside of Florida," or - drum roll, please - "the largest drug bust 
in history." According to Nexis, in the past year newspapers have 
reported 66 "biggest drug busts."

Law-enforcement agents and journalists both love those stories - they 
publicize the "success" of the war on drugs, and they offer the 
journalists great visuals and great numbers. Helpful police flacks 
always provide some sexy dollar figures - cocaine with a street value 
of $3.3 million, $20 million, $73 million, $2 billion.

In a 1991 San Francisco case, billed as the biggest heroin bust ever, 
television cameras panned over 59 boxes containing 1,080 pounds of 
heroin - enough to supply each of the country's estimated 500,000 
heroin addicts for a month. Drug-war officials said the street value 
of the heroin was $2.7 billion to $4 billion.

It's true that the drug warriors are interdicting more drugs at our 
borders all the time. Seizures of cocaine rose from 9,000 kilograms 
in 1983 to 80,000 kilograms in 1989 to 108,000 kilos in 1997. But 
does that indicate success? More likely, it means that more drugs are 
crossing our borders, and officials are interdicting about the same 
percentage as before. The street prices of cocaine and heroin have 
been falling for years, a pretty good indication that plenty of both 
are still crossing our borders.

As Mark A. R. Kleiman, a specialist on drug policy at Harvard 
University, said about the California raid, "For any shipment like 
this that you catch, you can assume that many more get through."

When Americans read about ever-larger drug busts, or when we watch 
television shows about drug enforcement, we get the impression that 
drug-enforcement agents are clever and innovative, always staying one 
step ahead of the sinister pushers. But in reality the drug 
distributors are the innovative ones - because they have a financial 
incentive to be. The DEA and other law-enforcement agencies are 
bureaucracies, and like all bureaucracies they tend to be 
inefficient. Police officers and drug agents get paid whether they 
slow drug traffic or not. In fact, they may receive more funding if 
the drug problem gets worse. Drug dealers, on the other hand, are 
entrepreneurs. If they outwit the officers, they make big money. That 
economic incentive spurs creativity, innovation and efficiency.

Every week brings reports of innovations in drug smuggling: people 
who swallow heroin and carry it into the United States in their 
stomachs; drugs placed in the luggage of unaccompanied children on 
international flights; cocaine implanted in a passenger's thighs - 
and those are just the methods police have discovered.

When the Supreme Court approved surveillance flights over private 
property to search for marijuana fields, marijuana growers began 
moving indoors and underground. In November 1990 five subterranean 
marijuana farms were found by law enforcement officials in Southern 
California and Arizona; imagine how many were not found. One near 
Lancaster, Calif., cost about $1 million to build, police said, and 
had the potential to produce an annual profit of $75 million from 
8,500 plants harvested four times a year.

Around the world, drug enforcers face what Ethan Nadelmann of the 
Lindesmith Center calls the "push-down/pop-up factor": push down drug 
production in one country, and it will pop up in another. Marijuana 
and opium can be grown almost anywhere, and coca is being grown in 
places previously considered unsuitable. As long as Americans want to 
use drugs and are willing to defy the law and pay high prices to do 
so, drug busts are futile. Other profit-seeking smugglers and dealers 
will always be ready to step in and take the place of those arrested.

"We've cut off the head of the dragon," said Robert Bender, head of 
the Drug Enforcement Administration's San Francisco office, in 
announcing that 1991 heroin bust.

But in decade since, the DEA has discovered that it had cut off the 
head, not of a dragon, but of a Hydra - the nine-headed monster in 
Greek mythology that couldn't be killed because whenever one of its 
heads was cut off, two more grew to replace it. Is there any reason 
to hope that today's "largest cocaine seizure in U.S. maritime 
history" will be any different?
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