DOLLAR VS. DOLLAR: US CONSUMERS BATTLE US TAXPAYERS IN GLOBAL DRUG WAR

Although the reporting has improved in recent years, US media coverage
of the "war on drugs" continues to ignore the economic realities of
just who is fighting who in the conflict. The drug war is best
understood as a battle of dollar versus dollar -- a bloody war between
the dollars of US taxpayers and the dollars of US consumers.

On one side, Americans pay large sums of money to vast networks of
people who grow, process, ship, smuggle, defend, and deliver drugs to
the US. On the other side, Americans also pay another network of
people vast amounts to find, fight, arrest, and kill those whom we
hire to provide the drugs to begin with.

Few tend to think of US buyers of illicit drugs as "consumers." To use
that word is to seemingly legitimize illicit drug consumption as a
form of economic activity. But all activities that involve trading
currency for a product -- and plenty of activities that don't -- are
inherently economic in nature. A 2006 Congressional Research Service
report estimated that Americans spend "over $60 billion" annually on
illicit drugs. Andres Martinez of the New America Foundation told
Newsweek late last year that the number was some $65 billion.

These billions are the commerce of a wealthy First World nation. Sure,
America is in the midst of an economic downturn. And yes, the outlook
is glum. But even as many Americans face unemployment and foreclosure,
it remains true that life for average Mexicans and others in
developing nations is far less prosperous. As a result, the money used
by Americans to buy illicit drugs has massive buying power once
converted into pesos and other currencies of poorer economies.

These US pesos pay the salaries of drug traffickers, peasant growers,
and corrupted government officials. The US pesos even come back into
the American economy, as drug traffickers spend a portion of their
profits buying American weapons that they smuggle back into Mexico.

Meanwhile, there is the other side of the equation: a massive flow of
American tax dollars that is spent fighting the very people who are
paid by Americans to provide illicit drugs. Some of those tax dollars
go directly into US military efforts at interdiction. Other dollars
fund anti-corruption and anti-drug units in Mexico and elsewhere.
Additional sums of money make their way south in the forms of military
training and hardware.

In 2009, almost $6 billion had been authorized by Congress for the
Pentagon, State Department, and Department of Homeland Security to
spend on programs "to disrupt the flow of illicit drugs into the
United States, and provide support to partner nations." This includes
the hundreds of millions in aid to countries ranging from Mexico to
Colombia. Mexico alone was promised some $1 billion in multi-year aid
for its battles.

Thus, all of Latin America is essentially a proxy battleground between
US taxpayers and US drug consumers. While there are certainly many
Latin American drug consumers, US drug consumers dwarf their Latin
American peers in size and scope. According to the U.N.'s 2009 World
Drug Report, for every one cocaine user in South America, there are
three in North America. The US "is still the world's largest cocaine
market."

Today, some governments in Latin America are tired of the scars they
bear as a result of this battle. Many have considered narrowing their
involvement in the drug war, notably without protest from the Obama
Administration. At the start of this year, Reuters reported that
Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Ecuador were "relaxing penalties for
possession and personal use of small amounts of narcotics." As
reporter Luis Andres Henao put it, they were "convinced that the
four-decade-old, US-led war on drugs has failed."

This trend reveals that many Latin American nations are becoming less
willing to play host to the outsourced drug war between American
taxpayers and American consumers. So long as US dollars finance both
sides of this bloody international battle, it makes little difference
what is done anywhere else.

Sanjeev Bery is the Executive Director of Freedom Forward
(http://freedomforward.org) and a midcareer MPA at HKS.