SMARTEST DRUG STORY OF THE YEAR

Rolling Stone on the War on Drugs.

If I were maximum dictator, I would force every newspaper editor,
every magazine editor, and every television producer in the land to
read Ben Wallace-Wells' 15,000-word article in the new (Dec. 13)
issue of Rolling Stone, titled "How America Lost the War on Drugs."

Wallace-Wells captures the complete costs of the drug war better than
any journalist I've read in a long time. He documents how the federal
government has dropped about $500 billion combating illicit drugs
over the past 35 years. Nearly 500,000 people sit in jail or prison
for drug crimes, "a twelvefold increase since 1980," Wallace-Wells
writes. For all the money the government has spent and all the people
it's jailed, it's still failed to make a long-term impact on the
availability of drugs. The militarized drug-control techniques
favored by the Bush administration, he reports, have increased
violence and political corruption abroad, violated human rights, and
destabilized several Latin American nations.

Wallace-Wells' accomplishment, while formidable, didn't require the
back-channel confidential sources that Bob Woodward relies on or the
mildewed library stacks of obscure documents that made up I.F.
Stone's arsenal. Wallace-Wells gets the story and gets it well by
approaching the much pawed-over topic with an open mind and a smart
set of questions. Like an auditor called in to assess the wreck of a
Fortune 500 company, he asks what the government has gotten for the
half-trillion dollars it has spent on the drug war and takes the
question to the limits.

There is no reason that this project couldn't have been conceived and
executed by any newspaper in America. No reason except that too many
editors, most of whom have indulged in illicit substances, fear the
consequences of telling their readers the truth about drugs (canceled
subscriptions, invective from Limbaugh and O'Reilly, loss of respect
at the country club or university club).

Wallace-Wells believes that a heavily subsidized drug-treatment
program, think-tanked to the top of the Clinton administration's
policy pile, could have reduced crime and drug use if Newt Gingrich
and the Republicans hadn't taken complete control of Congress. We'll
never know. He writes that Clinton acquiesced to the Republicans
because he didn't want to appear soft on crime or drugs, letting
Clinton off too easy in the process unless, of course, Newt put a gun
to Clinton's head and forced him to appoint the tyrannical Barry
McCaffrey to the drug czar throne in 1996.

Wallace-Wells' skillful illustration of the international
repercussions of the repressive Nixon-Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush war on
drugs, which threatens to turn Peru and Mexico into narco-states,
inspired me to revisit economist David R. Henderson's findings on the
effects of stringent drug control. In a working paper circulated in
the late 1970s and finally in a 1991 paper published in the
University of California-Davis Law Review (1991. 24: 655-676) titled
"A Humane Economist's Case for Drug Legalization," Henderson shows
how increased penalties never have the effects on drug markets
predicted by governments.

Henderson looks at drug markets as rational, which they are, and
writes that increased drug penalties tend to drive "more civilized
dealers" out of the market and reduce supply. "Competition by buyers
for a lessened supply must cause the price to rise," he writes, and
as "the price rises, profits will increase and in the long run
eventually will return to their precriminalization levels." As the
civilized dealers exit, the most vicious dealers rise. He continues:

Profits of dealers will look higher than normal because the cost of
imprisonment, fines, and bribes is not subtracted. Also, profits of
successful dealers who are never caught will be higher than normal,
just as profits of lottery winners are higher than normal. Looking
only at the profits of dealers who successfully avoid capture,
however, and concluding on that basis that the illegal drug business
is abnormally profitable is like looking at the fortunes of only
lottery winners and concluding that buying a lottery ticket is
abnormally profitable.

Henderson's insights help explain the phenomenal violence of the
cocaine trade described by the Rolling Stone piece. A DEA veteran
explains that in the 1970s, "swashbuckling entrepreneurs" with small
planes smuggled drugs into the United States through the
Caribbean--"guys who wouldn't have looked out of place at a Jimmy
Buffett concert." Increased militarization of drug interdiction by
the United States failed to eliminate drugs--it only moved their
staging grounds to other Latin countries and enlisted more ruthless
drug entrepreneurs, such as Pablo Escobar.

After the drug warriors killed Escobar in 1993, Wallace-Wells writes,
the Medellin cartel didn't dissolve. Instead, it cleaved into smaller
operations that obtained protection for their coca crops from the
Colombian and U.S. armies from FARC, the ultraviolent and well-armed
rebel army in Colombia's jungles. Smuggling to the United States
through Mexico, the microcartels partnered with local drug gangsters
who compromised police, the army, and politicians as they cut them in
on the action.

The end result is a more violent and better-established drug trade
than before, and much more than ever before. The old-school
Colombians were "civilized" compared with the Mexicans, as this
recent Reuters report shows. One Mexico anecdote in Wallace-Wells'
piece reads like a lost paragraph from Blood Meridian. He writes:

Last year, gunslingers wearing military uniforms walked into a
popular nightclub in Uruapan and dumped the severed heads of five
rivals on the dance floor, like soccer balls.

A piece doesn't have to be perfect to win my admiration, and
Wallace-Wells' isn't. Although Mexican drug operations came to
dominate the U.S. illicit methamphetamine market, I think he gives
them a tad too much credit for popularizing and spreading the drug.
The drug was very well-established in the U.S. West before the
Mexicans pushed their way into the market in the early 1990s.

For example, Nexis tells of a 1,000-pound methamphetamine bust in San
Francisco in 1989; a 125-pound methamphetamine bust in Fullerton,
Calif., in 1987; a 1978 lab bust in Toronto with chemicals on hand to
make 200 pounds of the drug; and much more. An Aug. 20, 1988, Los
Angeles Times article reports the seizure of three chemical-supply
plants in Los Angeles and San Diego counties that supplied upward of
2,000 other meth labs with chemicals.

"Federal agents said there were enough chemicals in the plant to make
more than 50 tons of methamphetamine, which over the years could
wholesale for millions of dollars," the Los Angeles Times reported.

But I'm quibbling. Read Wallace-Wells' fine feature, and if you know
any journalists, buy them a copy.

But when Rolling Stone botches a drug story, it's just as bad as the
rest of the pack. See this feature about methamphetamine from 2003,
which Reason's Nick Gillespie rightly condemned.