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The Village Voice
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The following article
appeared in the Village Voice,
a Manhattan newspaper, in the issue of the week January 23,
1990.
Though the author primarily explores "legalization," rather
than the separation of the retail markets of cannabis
and other substances,
the article very simply describes the essence of Cures not
Wars' criticism of the current model of "crime prevention."
Prohibition of marijuana not only fails to prevent crime,
but it promotes addiction, crime, and psychic distress in
myriad ways. It is also worth noting that Drug Prohibition
actually dates from 1914. Prohibition of specifically Marijuana
dates from 1937. The "twenty-year" drug war referred to here
is the official "War on Drugs" declared by Richard Nixon in
1969.
This policy constituted a major expansion of Prohibitionist
activity on the part of the Executive Office, but it was not
the start of zero tolerance. For more information on the Democrats'
reversal of drug policy following the Carter administration
please see "A Bit of History" elsewhere on this site. This
article will be transcribed in installments. Reprinted by
permission of the author The Drug War is Killing Us by Daniel
Lazare Interdiction Has Made Hard Drugs Cheap and Violence
Plentiful. There's a Better Way. After 20 years of troop sweeps,
police actions, and military rhetoric, the evidence is all
around us. The war on drugs has flopped. It's been more than
ineffective--it's actually made things worse. It has caused
street crime to mushroom and the murder rate to soar. It has
intoxicated ghetto kids wiht visions of gold chains, black
Mercedes, and other fruits of an underground economy. Rather
than stopping drugs, it has ensured a flow of harder and harder
substances onto the street. In the 1960s, an estimaed 69,000
Americans were addicted to heroin. Today, there may be 250,000
junkies in New York City alone. Meanwhile, the cities are
struggling to dig out from under a blizzard of low-priced
cocaine. New and far more potent drugs are flooding the ghettos--due
largely to interdiction policies that penalize traffickers
in soft bulky drugs like marijuana while actually increasing
the supply of coke. In the late 1970s, federal drug prosecutors
were congratulating each other the arrest and conviction of
Nicky Barnes, sentenced to life in for selling 43 pounds of
heroin and coke a month out of a West Harlem garage. Barnes
is small potatoes compared to Rayful Edmond, recently convicted
of distributing 440 pounds of coke a week in Washington, D.C.
This explosion did not occur despite the drug war, but because
of it. Putting away druglords like Barnes backfired by disrupting
a stable system, replacing it with something worse, and persuading
Barnes' many imitators that they would have to be more aggressive,
more ruthless, more sophisticated if they were to take his
place. No matter how hard the cops crack down, drug producers,
importers, and street dealers manage to keep one step ahead.
"When I first started in the early '80s, a big coke seizure
was 70 pounds," muses a former federal prosecutor in Miami.
Nowadays, he says, busts that size are so commonplace as to
be hardly worth mentioning. In 1981, federal drug agents confiscated
4,263 pounds of cocaine. By late 1989, the haul was approaching
171,000 kilos--not because the Drug Enforcement Administration
was getting better at its job, but because smugglers have
gotten better at theirs and are pushing so much more stuff
through. This is the sort of private sector initiative any
free market economist can appreciate. Although the feds have
succeeded in pushing marijuana prices up--from $20 an ounce
in the 1960s to $200 and up today--coke has plummeted from
$50,000 per kilo in the late 1970s to under $10,000 early
last year. As a result of this interdiction-driven price structure,
marijuana-once a "poor man's drug"--is now a gourmet item;
cocaine, once reserved for the media elite, is now the lumpen
proletariat's drug of choice. The cheap, smokeable form of
cocaine known as crack--said to have been invented in a Los
Angeles kitchen in 1983--is simply the latest product of a
process of research and development, along with ever-more
sophisticated marketing that governemnt policies foster. Interdiction
places a premium on portability and potency, encouraging dealers
to switch to products that give more bang for the buck, while
being easier to conceal from the police. The result: hard
drugs push out soft drugs, pushers get smarter, and as cops
up their firepower, dealers up theirs. Once the crack fad
blows over, as undoubtedly it will, other drugs--even cheaper,
more mind-blowing and more toxic--will arise to take its place.
Who knows what strange fruit the drug war may bear? This is
a record of failure that's hard to beat--not that the government
doesn't try. In the late '60s, New York's governor, Nelson
Rockefeller, unveiling what he called the toughest drug law
in the world, vowed to go after not just drug lords, but users
and low-level as well. As a result, the courts ground to a
halt as a long line of petty offenders, facing stiff prison
sentences, ceased plea bargaining and demanded full-blown
trials instead. Last September, drug czar William J. Bennett,
unveiling the Bush's administration's latest master plan,
also vowed to go after...petty users and dealers.
The consequence, predictably, is that plea bargaining has
declined, court dockets are overcrowded, and juries are increasingly
reluctant to send people to prison for minuscule amounts of
dope. With drug busts running at 750,000 a year nationwide--mostly
for pot--prisons ar bulging. In New York, where city officials
are so desperate for lockup space they've displaced first-degree
robbery as the number of all felony indictments. So the drug
war has led to more drugs, which in turn have led to more
arrests and ever more feverish rhetoric out of Washington.
"The more it's demonstrated that authoritarian responses don't
work," observes ACLU Director Ira Glasser,"the more authoritarian
they become. It feeds on itself in a way that is almost classically
a form of hysteria." The self-defeating nature of the drug
war is clear from something called Operation Intercept, a
massive effort launched by the Nixon administration to stop
the flow of marijuana across the Mexican border. Billed as
the largest peacetime search-and-seizure operation in history,
Operation Intercept sent customs agents rifling through hundreds
of thousands of cars and trucks for nearly three weeks in
the fall of 1969. Yet while the campaign snarled traffic and
tied up cross-border tourism and commerce, the drug haul turned
out to be small. It did succeed, though, in triggering far-reaching
changes in the marijuana business. Stepped-up border controls
forced distributors to upgrade their methods. While previously
they had relied on peasants riding public buses, in the aftermath
of Operation Intercept they began switching to backcountry
routes and eventually to DC-3's. As a U.S. customs agent pu
it in Elaine Shannon's 1988 best-seller, Desperados, Operation
Intercept "caused the smugglers to learn to use airplanes.
They started hiring pilots. And the loads got bigger." The
trade also grew more professional and better capitalized.
Paraquat, the herbicide that Mexican officials sprayed on
marijuana fields in large quantities at American behest in
the late '70s triggered another commerical revolution. The
poison knocked Mexican pot off the market. But instead of
stopping the marijuana trade, it caused it to shift south
to Guajira Peninsula in northern Colombia, source of the the
Colombi Gold that would soon become famous among American
tokers. Large-scale sweeps by the Colombian military followed,
whereupon marijuana cultivation, like the jet stream encountering
a local storm center, shifted once again. This time it retreated
deeper into the Colombian interior where it came to the attention
of drug dealers in the city of Medellin. Medellin had functioned
as a heroin smuggling center in the 1950s. It was also close
by the coca fields of Bolivia and Peru. As the U.S. Coast
Guard and Customs Service clamped down and smuggling costs
rose, it wasn't long before the major marijuana families realized
there was more money in the local white powder. Cocaine began
finding its way to the U.S, market in increasing quantities.
The changing nature of the drug trade is illustrated by a
story about Carlos Lehder. In the late '70s, this ambitious
young Medellin drug entrepeneur arrived at Norman's Cay in
the Bahamas to set up a trans-shipment station for drugs bound
for Florida. He was irritated to find, however, a small mom-and-pop
operation flying planeloads of pot. Lehder and his heavily
armed associates permitted the ring to continue, but only
if space was cleared on each flight for a shipment of coke.
Each planeload of marijuana was worth perhaps $300,000 wholesale;
the same worth in cocaine was worth $26 million. Pot was by
now small-time. Coke was where the smart money was heading.
In 1982, Ronald Reagan appointed vice-president Bush director
of the South Florida Task Force, a super-agency aimed at controlling
the flood of hot money and drugs in and around Miami. The
task force was highly effective in intercepting rusty freighters
loaded with pot, but less effective against smugglers bearing
valises full of cocaine.
The result was to tip the market decisively in favor of
coke. In 1985, the Reaganites did coke smugglers by launching
a massive eradication program, Operation Delta-9, complete
with troops and military helicopters, against domestic marijuana
growers in all 50 states. Although pot growers tried to recoup
by moving their crops indoors to greenhouses and basements,
market share was lost. With a major competitor out of the
way, the boys from Medellin now had the field to themselves.
At some point in the mid-'80s, amid mounting horror stories
of broken marriages and ruined careers, cocaine began showing
signs of losing favor with the middle class. The results might
have been a market glut of disastrous proportions for the
cocaine cartels were it not for crack. For a few dollars a
vial, it created an intense, short-lived high that proved
immensely popular with the ghetto masses. For cocaine businessmen,
the day was saved. For urban blacks and Latinos, the nightmare
was just beginning. By embarking on a crusade against pot,
federal narcs triggered a series of events that eventually
laid the basis for a cocaine catastrophe.
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