Illegal Drugs

STOPPING IT

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.

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