Pubdate: Fri, 30 Nov 2007
Source: Slate (US Web)
Copyright: 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
Contact:  http://www.slate.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/982
Author: Jack Shafer
Referenced: How America Lost the War on Drugs 
http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v07.n1387.a02.html

SMARTEST DRUG STORY OF THE YEAR

Rolling Stone on the War on Drugs.

If I were maximum dictator, I would force every newspaper editor, 
every magazine editor, and every television producer in the land to 
read Ben Wallace-Wells' 15,000-word article in the new (Dec. 13) 
issue of Rolling Stone, titled "How America Lost the War on Drugs."

Wallace-Wells captures the complete costs of the drug war better than 
any journalist I've read in a long time. He documents how the federal 
government has dropped about $500 billion combating illicit drugs 
over the past 35 years. Nearly 500,000 people sit in jail or prison 
for drug crimes, "a twelvefold increase since 1980," Wallace-Wells 
writes. For all the money the government has spent and all the people 
it's jailed, it's still failed to make a long-term impact on the 
availability of drugs. The militarized drug-control techniques 
favored by the Bush administration, he reports, have increased 
violence and political corruption abroad, violated human rights, and 
destabilized several Latin American nations.

Wallace-Wells' accomplishment, while formidable, didn't require the 
back-channel confidential sources that Bob Woodward relies on or the 
mildewed library stacks of obscure documents that made up I.F. 
Stone's arsenal. Wallace-Wells gets the story and gets it well by 
approaching the much pawed-over topic with an open mind and a smart 
set of questions. Like an auditor called in to assess the wreck of a 
Fortune 500 company, he asks what the government has gotten for the 
half-trillion dollars it has spent on the drug war and takes the 
question to the limits.

There is no reason that this project couldn't have been conceived and 
executed by any newspaper in America. No reason except that too many 
editors, most of whom have indulged in illicit substances, fear the 
consequences of telling their readers the truth about drugs (canceled 
subscriptions, invective from Limbaugh and O'Reilly, loss of respect 
at the country club or university club).

Wallace-Wells believes that a heavily subsidized drug-treatment 
program, think-tanked to the top of the Clinton administration's 
policy pile, could have reduced crime and drug use if Newt Gingrich 
and the Republicans hadn't taken complete control of Congress. We'll 
never know. He writes that Clinton acquiesced to the Republicans 
because he didn't want to appear soft on crime or drugs, letting 
Clinton off too easy in the process unless, of course, Newt put a gun 
to Clinton's head and forced him to appoint the tyrannical Barry 
McCaffrey to the drug czar throne in 1996.

Wallace-Wells' skillful illustration of the international 
repercussions of the repressive Nixon-Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush war on 
drugs, which threatens to turn Peru and Mexico into narco-states, 
inspired me to revisit economist David R. Henderson's findings on the 
effects of stringent drug control. In a working paper circulated in 
the late 1970s and finally in a 1991 paper published in the 
University of California-Davis Law Review (1991. 24: 655-676) titled 
"A Humane Economist's Case for Drug Legalization," Henderson shows 
how increased penalties never have the effects on drug markets 
predicted by governments.

Henderson looks at drug markets as rational, which they are, and 
writes that increased drug penalties tend to drive "more civilized 
dealers" out of the market and reduce supply. "Competition by buyers 
for a lessened supply must cause the price to rise," he writes, and 
as "the price rises, profits will increase and in the long run 
eventually will return to their precriminalization levels." As the 
civilized dealers exit, the most vicious dealers rise. He continues:

Profits of dealers will look higher than normal because the cost of 
imprisonment, fines, and bribes is not subtracted. Also, profits of 
successful dealers who are never caught will be higher than normal, 
just as profits of lottery winners are higher than normal. Looking 
only at the profits of dealers who successfully avoid capture, 
however, and concluding on that basis that the illegal drug business 
is abnormally profitable is like looking at the fortunes of only 
lottery winners and concluding that buying a lottery ticket is 
abnormally profitable.

Henderson's insights help explain the phenomenal violence of the 
cocaine trade described by the Rolling Stone piece. A DEA veteran 
explains that in the 1970s, "swashbuckling entrepreneurs" with small 
planes smuggled drugs into the United States through the 
Caribbean--"guys who wouldn't have looked out of place at a Jimmy 
Buffett concert." Increased militarization of drug interdiction by 
the United States failed to eliminate drugs--it only moved their 
staging grounds to other Latin countries and enlisted more ruthless 
drug entrepreneurs, such as Pablo Escobar.

After the drug warriors killed Escobar in 1993, Wallace-Wells writes, 
the Medellin cartel didn't dissolve. Instead, it cleaved into smaller 
operations that obtained protection for their coca crops from the 
Colombian and U.S. armies from FARC, the ultraviolent and well-armed 
rebel army in Colombia's jungles. Smuggling to the United States 
through Mexico, the microcartels partnered with local drug gangsters 
who compromised police, the army, and politicians as they cut them in 
on the action.

The end result is a more violent and better-established drug trade 
than before, and much more than ever before. The old-school 
Colombians were "civilized" compared with the Mexicans, as this 
recent Reuters report shows. One Mexico anecdote in Wallace-Wells' 
piece reads like a lost paragraph from Blood Meridian. He writes:

Last year, gunslingers wearing military uniforms walked into a 
popular nightclub in Uruapan and dumped the severed heads of five 
rivals on the dance floor, like soccer balls.

A piece doesn't have to be perfect to win my admiration, and 
Wallace-Wells' isn't. Although Mexican drug operations came to 
dominate the U.S. illicit methamphetamine market, I think he gives 
them a tad too much credit for popularizing and spreading the drug. 
The drug was very well-established in the U.S. West before the 
Mexicans pushed their way into the market in the early 1990s.

For example, Nexis tells of a 1,000-pound methamphetamine bust in San 
Francisco in 1989; a 125-pound methamphetamine bust in Fullerton, 
Calif., in 1987; a 1978 lab bust in Toronto with chemicals on hand to 
make 200 pounds of the drug; and much more. An Aug. 20, 1988, Los 
Angeles Times article reports the seizure of three chemical-supply 
plants in Los Angeles and San Diego counties that supplied upward of 
2,000 other meth labs with chemicals.

"Federal agents said there were enough chemicals in the plant to make 
more than 50 tons of methamphetamine, which over the years could 
wholesale for millions of dollars," the Los Angeles Times reported.

But I'm quibbling. Read Wallace-Wells' fine feature, and if you know 
any journalists, buy them a copy.

But when Rolling Stone botches a drug story, it's just as bad as the 
rest of the pack. See this feature about methamphetamine from 2003, 
which Reason's Nick Gillespie rightly condemned. 
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake