ADDICTED TO THE DRUG WAR FRONTLINE'S two-part documentary Drug Wars, which airs on PBS on Monday and Tuesday, October 9 and 10, concludes with the U. S. government poised for its biggest campaign yet to control the flow of narcotics. The Clinton administration recently gave Colombia a1.3-billion to send police and soldiers into guerrilla-controlled territory to eradicate coca plants cultivated by peasant farmers. The history of U. S. drug-war efforts-the subject of this instructive and often compelling four-hour report-foretells the tragedy that will soon unfold. The documentary's central theme is the intensification of the drug war during the past three decades and its continued failure to reduce the flow of drugs-especially cocaine-from Latin America to the United States. Starting with President Nixon's escalation of the war in the early 1970's,the report uses film footage and interviews with key participants to mark some of the milestones of drug trafficking and drug-war policy. In addition to talks with law-enforcement agents, political officials, and drug traffickers, there are exclusive interviews with the men who led the infamous Medellin cartel. The filmmakers examine Nixon as the first president to launch a major federal drug-treatment program-methadone for heroin addicts-and the first to give the enforcement of drug laws a high priority. They look at President Carter's failed attempt to decriminalize marijuana, at the crack epidemic of the mid-1980's and the accompanying publicity, at the sharp increase in law-enforcement financing that followed, and at the stiffening of penalties for drug offenses during President Reagan's second term. But the documentary's main focus is on the drug war abroad in the 1980's and 1990's, particularly in Colombia and Mexico. The historic failure of those efforts is driven home as the report documents instance after instance-drawing in part on testimony from Drug Enforcement Administration and other law-enforcement officials-to explain the goals, tactics, and outcomes of the operations. As the narrative unfolds, each success at seizing drugs, breaking up Colombian cartels, and arresting Mexican drug lords fails to raise the price or lower the supply of drugs in the United States. In fact, although unstated in the program,the price of heroin and cocaine has fallen substantially since 1970, even as law-enforcement efforts have escalated. One D.E.A. agent, Bill Alden, remembers the glee at the agency's headquarters after the great drug bust of March 10, 1984, when a major cocaine-processing complex, Tranquilandia, was destroyed in the Colombian jungle. "We thought . . . we would see probably a drop in purity an increase in price, because we affected availability ... Wrong-there was no impact. There was absolutely no-- 22,000 pounds, 12, almost 12 tons of cocaine seized-no impact on the market at all." By the end of the documentary, some of the strongest arguments for shifting priorities to treatment, education, and prevention come from the very same law enforcers who designed and directed the drug war. Would putting 90 percent of the drug-war budget (currently $18.5-billion) into treatment work? asks Jack Lawn, a former D.E.A. chief. "We won't know unless we try it," he says. "But 20 years of doing it the other way certainly has not worked." If the drug war has failed, is it because the government has not tried hard enough? Or is the strategy inherently unworkable? Drug Wars does not systematically explore that critical question. Some officials interviewed suggest that the failure is due to a lack of political will, or to interagency rivalries, or to the willingness of the U. S. government to subordinate America's drug control to other national interests. The United States has, for instance, turned a blind eye to corruption in Mexico in order to promote rrNA and free trade, and ignored drug smuggling by the American-supported contras in Nicaragua in the interest of overthrowing the Sandinista government. Other evidence in the documentary suggests that even if U. S. agencies worked hand in hand, and no national priorities ever trumped control of narcotics, the drug war would still fail miserably Robert Stutman, former head of the D.E.A.'S New York office, tells of a study done by the agency's Intelligence Division 20 years ago. Profits on illegal drugs were so high, he says, that the "average drug-- trafficking organization, meaning from Medellin to the streets of New York, .. . could afford to lose 90 percent of its product and still be profitable. ... That is a hell of a business. . .. Even if you are wildly successful (interdicting drug traffic, you are not going to stop drug trafficking in the United States." In one of the best segments of Drag Wars, Guillermo Gonzalez Calderoni, former commander of the Mexican federal police, details the systemic corruption of Mexico's law-enforcement agencies, with low-paid officers in all ranks bribing their superiors for jobs in which illicit drug money is available. Such a detailed public admission by an insider is rare. Later, dramatic footage from U. S. Customs shows a Mexican military unit, paid by the traffickers to protect a planeload of cocaine, ambushing and killing Mexican federal police officers chasing the plane. The implicit conclusion: With corruption so widespread, a law-enforcement solution is impossible. ONE OF THE SHOW'S most convincing illustrations of law enforcement's limited effectiveness is the well-edited sequence narrated by a former drug trafficker, Steve. He guides the viewer step by step through his own operation: purchasing cocaine in Colombia, arranging shipment by plane or boat to Tijuana, and bringing the drugs across the border hidden among the thousands of vehicles that cross into the United States each day. "I used to send 12 cars at a time. . . . I figured, as long as six cars-50 percent-got through, I was making a good profit " Steve distributes the cocaine in Los Angeles, ships it by truck, courier, or FedEx to retail markets around the country, and finally smuggles the dollars back into Mexico, where he easily launders them in Mexican banks. Given such overwhelming evidence that America's drug-war strategies are failing, why do we persist? The documentary hints at some answers. During the rapid expansion of the drug war in the mid-1980's, the news media hyped the growing crack problem as a national crisis. Politicians, anxious to prove how tough they were, approved large budget increases and "mandatory sentences . . . unprecedented in their severity." Members of Congress, says Eric Sterling, then a Congressional aide, "were jockeying for position in front of the Tv camera about what they were doing about the drug crisis." Political ambition helps explain the persistence of failing drug policies, but the documentary doesn't explicitly mention the role of partisan politic. In the late 1970's, conservative Republicans seized the drug war as part of a larger moral agenda in an effort to create a populist base against the Democrats The Democrats, in turn, tried to grab the drug issue back as a way to prove their tough-- on-crime bona fides. Evidence and rational argument were irrelevant, as both sides competed to turn evidence of failure into arguments for escalation. One of the most subtle and important explanations for our failure to change course is the politics of stigmatization, which the filmmakers mention briefly. Film clips show President Bush's first drug czar, William Bennett, arguing that people who use drugs are culpable, responsible for their behavior, and should be punished. In the next clip, Dr. Jerome Jaffe, Nixon's drug czar, explains that branding drug users as immoral may persuade people to behave differently, but also makes them seem "perhaps a little unworthy of an investment in treatment." IN FACT, Jaffe's first attempts to persuade Nixon to back methadone treatment failed until the president was told by advisers that thousands of soldiers returning from Vietnam had become addicted to heroin. "I think it's .. . been easy to stigmatize and marginalize the heroin users in the inner cities . . . to make it possible to treat them primarily as law-enforcement problems," Jaffe explains. "It's a lot harder to do that with people that you've sent as part of the military to fight your battles on foreign soil, and to say that they're not worthy of special attention." But even Nixon's short-lived emphasis on methadone treatment was packaged as a crime-fighting tool, not a health measure, implying that the only justification for treating the addict-criminal was to keep him or her off the street. The fact that treatment programs since then have always been stepsisters to the punitive drug war, and always packaged as crimefighting tools, has ensured the continued stigmatization of people with drug problems-and fueled public support for escalating punishment, not treatment efforts. The consequences of such failed yet unchanging punitive policies are tragic not only for those left without care, but also for hundreds of thousands of people with drug problems who go to prison for crimes often committed to support their habits. "Today there are nearly two million people in U.S. jails, . . . a doubling since 1994," the documentary says. "The U. S. now matches Russia in having the highest incarceration rate in the world. Well over half the prisoners are in on drug charges, and two-thirds are minorities-50 percent black, 17 percent Hispanic. . . . Mandatory minimums. . . have resulted in sentences for drug convictions that are often longer than for murder and rape." The damage left in the wake of the escalating drug war goes beyond our borders to the Latin American countries that we enlist to fight the war on their own turf The current spectacular expansion of U.S. aid to Colombia will soon provide another chapter in the story told by Drug Wars In Colombia, antigovernment guerrillas have moved into the drug business, taxing the peasant growers of coca and the drug traffickers who operate in the guerrillas' zones of control. The U.S. aid program (backed by several hundred advisers) will soon involve us in a major counterinsurgency war, as we encourage the Colombian military and police to push into guerrilla-controlled coca-growing regions. THE DOCUMENTARY quotes without comment the highly misleading label that Gen. Barry McCaffrey the current drug czar, uses to describe the guerrillas: "narco insurgents." He wrongly pictures them as fighting only for drug dollars, not for ideology He overlooks the fact that the guerrillas have been fighting for more than four decades, in a civil war over political power and reform, not economic gain. The documentary also fails to mention that the military we are aiding has itself long been involved in protecting drug traffickers, and that the so-called paramilitary forces-right-wing militias often armed, trained, and protected by the military-are as deeply involved in taxing drug growers as the guerrillas are. Mathea Falco, assistant secretary of state for international narcotics matters in the Carter administration, argues that "we're deluding ourselves that we're going to have any impact on our own drug problem" by making war in Colombia. She's right. Even if the U. S.-backed war defoliates every acre of coca leaf, burns every laboratory, and destroys every last gram of Colombian cocaine, it will have won a hollow victory. As long as demand persists in the United States, the drug business will simply move elsewhere, as it always does. But the people of Colombia will live with deepening violence and escalating civil war as a result. It is they who will pay the price for the foolhardiness of our public officials. Unwilling to face the lessons of our own history, and lacking courage to "just say no" to a failed policy U.S. politicians are too paralyzed to face the truth: Drug abuse and addiction are primarily a health problem, instead of a crime problem, and they must be tackled here at home.
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