THE HYDRA-HEADED DRUG BUSINESS

There's No Killing It

At last we've turned the corner in the war on drugs.

A Coast Guard crew has seized more than 13 tons of cocaine in what
authorities are calling "the largest cocaine seizure in U.S. maritime
history."

But careful news watchers have heard those words before. Back in 1998
Attorney General Janet Reno and Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin
announced more than 100 indictments and the seizure of some $150
million from Mexican banks, representing a successful conclusion to
"the largest, most comprehensive drug money laundering case in
history."

Indeed, it seems not a week goes by without a report of "New
Hampshire's biggest drug bust," "the biggest drug bust in middle
Georgia history," "the largest drug bust ever in the United States
outside of Florida," or - drum roll, please - "the largest drug bust
in history." According to Nexis, in the past year newspapers have
reported 66 "biggest drug busts."

Law-enforcement agents and journalists both love those stories - they
publicize the "success" of the war on drugs, and they offer the
journalists great visuals and great numbers. Helpful police flacks
always provide some sexy dollar figures - cocaine with a street value
of $3.3 million, $20 million, $73 million, $2 billion.

In a 1991 San Francisco case, billed as the biggest heroin bust ever,
television cameras panned over 59 boxes containing 1,080 pounds of
heroin - enough to supply each of the country's estimated 500,000
heroin addicts for a month. Drug-war officials said the street value
of the heroin was $2.7 billion to $4 billion.

It's true that the drug warriors are interdicting more drugs at our
borders all the time. Seizures of cocaine rose from 9,000 kilograms
in 1983 to 80,000 kilograms in 1989 to 108,000 kilos in 1997. But
does that indicate success? More likely, it means that more drugs are
crossing our borders, and officials are interdicting about the same
percentage as before. The street prices of cocaine and heroin have
been falling for years, a pretty good indication that plenty of both
are still crossing our borders.

As Mark A. R. Kleiman, a specialist on drug policy at Harvard
University, said about the California raid, "For any shipment like
this that you catch, you can assume that many more get through."

When Americans read about ever-larger drug busts, or when we watch
television shows about drug enforcement, we get the impression that
drug-enforcement agents are clever and innovative, always staying one
step ahead of the sinister pushers. But in reality the drug
distributors are the innovative ones - because they have a financial
incentive to be. The DEA and other law-enforcement agencies are
bureaucracies, and like all bureaucracies they tend to be
inefficient. Police officers and drug agents get paid whether they
slow drug traffic or not. In fact, they may receive more funding if
the drug problem gets worse. Drug dealers, on the other hand, are
entrepreneurs. If they outwit the officers, they make big money. That
economic incentive spurs creativity, innovation and efficiency.

Every week brings reports of innovations in drug smuggling: people
who swallow heroin and carry it into the United States in their
stomachs; drugs placed in the luggage of unaccompanied children on
international flights; cocaine implanted in a passenger's thighs -
and those are just the methods police have discovered.

When the Supreme Court approved surveillance flights over private
property to search for marijuana fields, marijuana growers began
moving indoors and underground. In November 1990 five subterranean
marijuana farms were found by law enforcement officials in Southern
California and Arizona; imagine how many were not found. One near
Lancaster, Calif., cost about $1 million to build, police said, and
had the potential to produce an annual profit of $75 million from
8,500 plants harvested four times a year.

Around the world, drug enforcers face what Ethan Nadelmann of the
Lindesmith Center calls the "push-down/pop-up factor": push down drug
production in one country, and it will pop up in another. Marijuana
and opium can be grown almost anywhere, and coca is being grown in
places previously considered unsuitable. As long as Americans want to
use drugs and are willing to defy the law and pay high prices to do
so, drug busts are futile. Other profit-seeking smugglers and dealers
will always be ready to step in and take the place of those arrested.

"We've cut off the head of the dragon," said Robert Bender, head of
the Drug Enforcement Administration's San Francisco office, in
announcing that 1991 heroin bust.

But in decade since, the DEA has discovered that it had cut off the
head, not of a dragon, but of a Hydra - the nine-headed monster in
Greek mythology that couldn't be killed because whenever one of its
heads was cut off, two more grew to replace it. Is there any reason
to hope that today's "largest cocaine seizure in U.S. maritime
history" will be any different?
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