DRUGS - NOW WHAT?

Will The Tragic Downing Of A Missionary Plane Over Peru Cause The Bush
Administration To Rethink Its Anti-Drug Strategy In The Region?

Probably not, says Ethan A. Nadelmann, executive director of the Lindesmith
Center-Drug Policy Foundation.

Nadelmann, whose group has long fought for reform of the nation's drug
policies, believes Washington's policy of military interdiction in
countries like Peru and Colombia is doing more harm than good. He spoke
with NEWSWEEK'S Arlene Getz about the possible fallout from the April 20
killing of Roni Bowers and her 7-month-old daughter Charity by Peruvian
soldiers who thought they were drug traffickers. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: What did you think when you heard about the shooting down of the
missionary plane? Ethan Nadelmann: This is something that was inevitable.
Already thousands of innocent people have been killed one way or another in
this war on drugs-in the United States, Latin America and elsewhere.

What distinguishes this case is that American citizens were involved, but
I'd be surprised if these were the first United States citizens who died.
It seems to me that all of those people have died in vain, that the efforts
have done absolutely nothing to address the real problem of drug abuse in
the United States. It's a tragedy that innocent people are killed in a war
on drugs.

The fundamental difference between a criminal-justice policy and a war is
that in the former it's not acceptable to have collateral casualties. The
thing that we saw in Peru-and what we'll probably be seeing in Colombia and
elsewhere-is evidence that this really is a war, even though it's really a
war without any sensible strategy or reasonable objectives or prospects for
success.

President Bush has suspended American flights in support of Peru's drug
interdiction efforts while the investigation continues.

Is this incident likely to make the administration reconsider current U.S.
strategy? Not by itself.

A case like this shocks people.

It may sensitize people in the religious community, but there will need to
be other incidents that will lead to people coming together to challenge
the current policy.

Doesn't the public care? Most Americans don't pay that much attention to
it, and I don't think they care that much. They know they don't want
innocent civilians getting killed, but they've become numbed-detached when
they hear of innocent people being killed in the war on drugs.

There's no sense of outrage to this.

How effective is the policy of trying to stop the drugs at their source?
What makes the death of the missionary and her daughter so tragic is that
the policy of interdiction itself, of source control, is a proven failure.

This is not just something we started doing a few years ago. We've been
engaged in source control efforts, supply reduction efforts, for something
like 50 years.

What's new is the magnitude of the effort. What's also not new is the
failure of the policy.

We live in a global society, we're interdependent. If you look at the tens
of millions of people coming into the country this year, if you look at the
hundreds of billions of tons of goods coming into the country each year
[then] trying to find those drugs makes looking for a needle in a haystack
seem like child's play in comparison. Ultimately it's not about the drugs,
it's about drug abuse.

There are synthetic opiates that are now being used by drug addicts.

In parts of the world where people are too poor to buy a marijuana joint,
they sniff gasoline, or glue. Even if these two particular chemicals
[heroin and cocaine] were to suddenly disappear, drug abuse would not
disappear.

So are you suggesting that nothing should be done because it's impossible
to stop the drug trade. I have a much more developed strategy than that.
I'm not here advocating the legalization of heroin and cocaine.

A few weeks ago Vicente Fox, the president of Mexico, was asked what he
thought of drug legalization. He said "Well yes, it makes the most sense
for Mexico, and it would be the best solution, but-and then said the
politically correct thing-which is we can't do it, it would have to be done
multilaterally, etc., etc." A few months before that the president of
Uruguay, [Jorge Batlle Ibanez] said the same thing and he didn't even
retract it. Based upon my conversations with other top-level Latin American
people, when you sit down quietly and speak off the record, many many more
say the same thing.

They think the war on drugs is crazy, but that politically they have no
choice but to go along with [it] because the alternative would be horrible
political sanctions by our government and others.

That debate needs to be out there, but politically it's impossible to go there.

Supporters of the interdiction flights argue that when Peru first started
shooting down planes suspected of drug trafficking in 1995, they succeeded
in that the demand for coca leaf plummeted and the price dropped by more
than 60 percent. But less than three years later, Peru coca prices started
rising again.

Your interpretation? It's the push-down pop-up effect.

The production of coca in Colombia more than compensated for the production
in Peru and Bolivia. But for the availability of Colombia as an alternative
source it would have been a lot more difficult and probably impossible to
suppress that production in Bolivia and Peru. There are people who want to
pretend that trying to deal with drugs is trying to deal with smallpox,
that drugs are like a disease and we should aim to eradicate them from the
face of the earth.

But there's one fundamental difference between smallpox and cocaine, which
is that there's no demand for smallpox, but there's a global demand for
cocaine.

What does that mean for Plan Colombia, where the U.S. in involved in a $1.3
billion, two-year military effort to eradicate cocaine production? Plan
Colombia may have the effect of reducing the opium and coca production in
Colombia. The almost-certain consequence of that will be to have increased
opium and coca production in other places.

These are global commodities, there's a persistent demand for these things.

President Bush's choice for his new drug czar is reported to be John P.
Walters, known as a conservative who advocates a tough approach to the war
on drugs. What policy changes do you expect from the new administration?
President Bush, shortly before he entered office, gave an interview with
Larry King where he said some surprisingly moderate things. [Bush] talked
about addressing the issue of mandatory sentencing minimums [for drug
offenders], the difference in the sentencing of crack cocaine and powder
cocaine violators and he talked about addiction as a disease.

That was quite promising. On the other hand, the appointment first of John
Ashcroft [as Attorney General] and now of John Walters is a disaster.

These are ideological drug warriors, they stand for the position that drug
policy should not be based upon common sense or science, that what it's
really about is punishing people.

They don't even like looking at drug addicts or drug users as victims of
the drug war. I think that's the dominant strain of what we're going to see
coming from the Bush administration. The one silver lining is that I think
there's some chance that President Bush may make good on his suggestion to
address the issue of mandatory minimums.

I think if he does so it will be because a growing number of Republican
governors are telling him this needs to be done-especially if the
Republican party wants to attract African-Americans into the party

Can the drug war ever be won? Not under the current strategy.

Rather than aspiring to be a drug-free society, we should accept that drugs
are here to stay. Our only choice is to learn to live with them so that
they cause the least possible harm to individuals and to society at large.