SURVEY: ILLEGAL DRUGS
Stopping it
Jul 26th 2001
From The Economist print edition
How governments try—and fail—to stem the flow of drugs
WHEN, 80 years ago, America prohibited the sale of alcohol, it
imposed a milder policy than it currently applies to drugs, since
people were allowed to possess alcohol for home use. Yet the
13-year experiment showed how easily a ban could distort and
corrupt law enforcement, encourage the emergence of gangs and
the spread of crime, erode civil liberties, and endanger public
health by making it impossible to regulate the quality of a widely
consumed product. The drugs war has achieved all these things
but, since the business is global, it has done so on an international
scale. In the United States particularly, and in those developing
countries that supply it, the attempt to stamp out drugs has had
effects more devastating than those of the drugs themselves.
The main targets of American supply-reduction campaigns over the
years have been Bolivia, Peru, Colombia and Mexico. The net
effect appears to have been a relocation and reorganisation of
production, not a cutback. Dramatic falls in coca cultivation in
Peru and Bolivia in the late 1990s coincided with an equally
dramatic rise in Colombia, even though almost all the top people in
Colombia's notorious Cali cartel had been jailed in the mid-1990s.
Estimates are sketchy, but the area under cultivation may have
doubled. The decline in the price of cocaine in America has led the
industry to look for new markets in Europe, and to diversify into
the even more profitable opium.
Given the right conditions, it is clearly possible to suppress
drug-growing in some regions. A country can shift the problem
elsewhere, at least temporarily. However, the real factors that
lead countries into or out of drug production seem to have much
less to do with policy or prosperity than with culture and social
institutions. As Mr Thoumi, author of the work on drugs in the
Andes, points out, every country in the world that can produce
bananas does so. Yet, in spite of a much larger gap between the
export and import price of cocaine or heroin than of bananas, by
no means every potential grower is in the business. He sees the
explanation for Colombia's booming business in its tradition of
individualism, with few social controls. By contrast, Ecuador, a
much poorer country that does not produce cocaine, has a
stronger religious tradition.
If Mr Thoumi is right,
government policy may
have little durable impact on
drug production. Basic
economics suggest the
same thing. Last year
Congress voted $1.3 billion
of emergency funding to
Colombia to step up crop
eradication over the next
three years. But there are
good reasons, spelled out in
a recent article by Mr
Reuter in the Milken
Institute Review, why
cutting off supply is
doomed. The stuff is simply
too profitable. Production is
cheap. If a kilogram of
cocaine retails for upwards
of $110,000, the exporter
can easily afford to double
the few hundred dollars paid
to the grower without much damage to his overall margin.
Attempts to persuade growers to switch to planting pineapples are
equally doomed: the cocaine exporters can readily outbid any
reasonable scheme.
The same logic applies to shipping. American policy at the Mexican
border concentrates on trying to stop the torrent of drugs that
passes mainly through the Tijuana crossing, the world's busiest
border. But in Tijuana, once a dirt-poor town, drugs pay for smart
new homes and cars. Some youngsters go to school with packets
in their backpacks to sell at lunchtime.
The costs of seizure are small compared with the profits. Earlier
this year, the US Coastguard seized two vast shipments of
cocaine, one of 8 tonnes and the other of 13 tonnes. Together,
they could have supplied 21m retail sales. To the astonishment of
law-enforcement officers, the retail price of cocaine did not
appear to budge. The enormous street value of the product makes
it extremely cheap to ship. As Mr Reuter puts it, “A pilot who
demands $500,000 for flying a plane with 250 kilograms is
generating costs of only $2,000 per kilogram—less than 2% of the
retail price. Even if a $500,000 plane has to be abandoned after
one flight, it adds only another $2,000 to the kilogram price.”
The power to corrupt
A profit margin such as this leaves enormous scope for corruption.
Victor Clark Alfaro, a doughty human-rights campaigner in Tijuana,
insists that: “Corruption goes from the police on the street to the
top officials.” The federal police, understaffed and underpaid on
$700-800 a month, are no match for the big cartels. Francisco
Ortiz Franco, an editor on Zeta, a newspaper that has had several
run-ins with Mexican drug gangs, guesses that at least 20% of the
agents fighting the drug trade are paid by the gangs; one dealer
captured a couple of years ago put the figure for state and federal
police officers at 80%. The problem is not that the police are
particularly greedy: their option is usually to accept drug pay or
risk retribution from the gangs.
Faced with such economics,
the Bush and Fox
administrations have been
building closer links. For the
first time, a big Mexican
drugs boss was recently
extradited to America to
stand trial. And the
American administration is
at last willing to admit
that—as President Bush said
on a visit to Mexico earlier
this year—the real problem
is demand. But tackling
demand is just as tricky as
cutting off supply.
Superintendent Dean
Ingledew of London's
Metropolitan Police is in
charge of policing Soho, the
city's main nightclub
district. His territory is full
of Victorian alleyways,
hostess bars and illegal
drinking clubs. The
customers who support
Soho's thriving crack trade
are mainly “rough sleepers”,
homeless folk who can make
up to £100 ($140) a day
begging in the street. But
the market is changing:
many more young
professionals are coming in
to sample a drug that has
never before been popular
in Britain, but now seems to
be becoming more
affordable.
Mr Ingledew and his
colleagues use a mixture of community co-operation and street
design, trying to improve lighting in Soho's darkest nooks. They are
developing ingenious ways to trap those dealers who keep their
stock of “rocks” in their mouths and swallow them when arrested.
But ultimately their main goal is protecting public safety and the
quality of life in Soho. Drug-dealing causes less disruption than
belligerent drunks, but he is frank about the difficulty of tackling it.
“Our aim is to arrest the dealers,” he says, “but there are a huge
number of people who want to buy from them. So whenever we
take a dealer out, the gap is filled. Enforcement is at best able to
displace the market a few hundred yards, and to keep a lid on it.”
In New York, where the drug problem once bred horrific gang
violence, the emphasis has been different. Michael Tiffany, deputy
chief of the Bronx Narcotics Division at the New York Police
Department, explains how putting a lot of officers into drug
enforcement over the past eight years has brought successes. Up
until 1994-95, he says, New York was the main distribution point
for cocaine in the north-eastern United States. A decade ago,
50% of the people arrested for drug offences in the Bronx might
have been from out of town. Now 95% of them are local. The
wholesale distribution network has moved on.
Gone, too, has much of the violence. Bridget Brennan, special
narcotics prosecutor for the City of New York, argues that
increased enforcement has “taken out the most disorganised—and
most violent—organisations, that were shooting each other over
spots. The ones left are more careful. They have a business
interest in keeping violence down and not attracting attention to
themselves.”
Her fear is that, with the violence gone, public support for tough
policing may fade: “The greater our success, the harder it may be
to go on.” Mr Tiffany has a different worry. “We can control the
distribution of narcotics to a reasonable degree. We can control
the violence.” But, with so many drugs pouring into the country
and a popular culture that accepts them, “we will reach the point
where all we can do is to hold the line.”
Both in London and New York, the police rightly give priority to
stopping the threats to public order and safety that drug-dealing
can bring. Enforcement everywhere ought to have effects on the
supply of drugs: it should drive up the price, reduce the
competition and restrict the supply. But the increased efforts that
governments have made to stem the flow do not appear to have
raised the price, lowered the purity or discouraged the purchase or
the use of drugs. That is true even in America, where policy has
been concentrated on trying to reduce the availability of illegal
drugs. This has been vastly expensive; it has sometimes corrupted
the law-enforcement process; and it has damaged civil liberties
and led to the imprisonment of hugely disproportionate numbers of
non-whites.