Drugs: Interdicting the Flow . . .

CONGRESS PUT THE United States into the business of grading other nations on
their performance in the war against drugs, and punishing those found to fall
short, back in 1986. "Certification" then seemed an idea worth testing. It
now has been tested. It's a flop. By provoking local nationalism, this sort
of unilateral American intervention has, in Mexico, Colombia and elsewhere,
strained the antidrug cooperation it was meant to strengthen. It has
centered the American fight against drugs more on foreign supply than on
consumption at home an emphasis that, for all the successful drug
seizures, has seen the international drug flow pick up over the years and
force prices on the American street steadily down.

Now comes a move in Congress to look at certification with a beady eye. Sens.
Christopher Dodd and John McCain are leading a bipartisan, ideologically
neutral effort that draws reasonable and necessary conclusions from the
experience of the past decade. They would suspend for two years the process
of unilateral American certification and enlist the drugproducing and
transit countries to join the United States in an international program to
contend with both trafficking and consumption. In a word that Americans will
have to get used to in dealing with these "global" issues, the United States
would "multilateralize" the war against drugs. Cooperation would become the
key.

International problems exist for which onesided applications of American
power in this instance control of international credit are a remedy.
Drugs is not one of them. While other countries are the principal source of
the supply, the United States is the dominant source of the demand. It is
laughable to pretend that just one side of this equation can and need be
dealt with. Then, a concentration on foreign supply ignores that Americans
have done no better cleaning up trafficking networks in this country than
others, including Latins, have done with the networks abroad. The
certification policy, imperiously penalizing foreigners not just for their
lapses but for the United States's own, ignores this evident fact.

Mexico provides a particular reason to review American drug policy. Its
corruption is unquestionably responsible for some part of the flow of illegal
drugs. But Mexico is also a country now making an immense effort to undo the
political distortions that lie behind much of the corruption. By looking for
cooperative ways on drugs, the United States tackles a hemispheric menace and
encourages Mexican democracy at the same time.

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