PANELISTS DECRY 'WAR' ON DRUGS

Panelists Decry 'War' On Drugs

At Tuesday night's panel, "The International War on Drugs: Plan Colombia
and Beyond," Peter Andreas, assistant professor of political science and
international studies, admitted that he once inadvertently contributed to
Bolivia's cocaine economy by agreeing to sit on top of a large stack of
toilet paper on a public bus.

Unbeknownst to Andreas at the time, toilet paper is used to dry coca paste,
and Bolivia's cocaine production depends on the surreptitious import of
this seemingly innocuous product.

Andreas used the anecdote, though ironic, as a reflection of the inanity of
the current state of the international drug war, which panelists said was
riddled with contradictions.

Sanho Tree, director of the Drug Policy Project at the Institute for Policy
Studies in Washington, said that the logic of the international war on
drugs is fundamentally backward and misguided and that this has created
troublesome and undesirable results.

Tree said policy makers respond to the trade of illegal drugs by merely
escalating law enforcement as opposed to considering the root of the
problem - the staggering demand for drugs on an international level. This
creates a Darwinian "survival of the fittest" dynamic that leads to
authorities catching "only those stupid enough to get caught," he said.

"We have forced this economy to evolve at a lightning pace," Tree said.

However, Aung Din, policy director and co-founder of the U.S. Campaign for
Burma, said that in Burma (also known as Myanmar) the problem is
principally one of supply and not demand, asserting that eradication of the
sources of opium was the only solution.

Andreas cited another absurd and unintended fruit of the drug war. Because
marijuana is bulkier and easier to detect by dogs than cocaine or heroine,
domestic production of cannabis has skyrocketed, and on an international
level, there has been a diversification to other less detectable, more
dangerous drugs.

Andreas and Tree agreed that calling the attempt to eradicate drugs a "war"
was problematic, because unlike most wars, this one has no foreseeable end,
they said.

"For decades we've been waging a war against an enemy that is literally
incapable of surrender," Tree said. The "enemy" is incapable of surrender
both because drug growers and dealers often have no viable alternate
livelihood and because they are not a united group that is able to make a
collective decision, he said.

Equally troublesome as the use of the term "war" is the common assertion
that Colombia is the home of narcoterrorism, Tree said.

Though Andreas said that "the politics of the war on drugs and the war on
terror overlap tremendously," Tree said that narcoterrorism "is a
terminology that doesn't help us understand either phenomenon."

Ricardo Luna, a visiting professor in Latin American studies, moderated the
discussion. Luna formerly served as Peru's ambassador, first to the United
Nations and then to the United States.

Audience members generally seemed pleased with the quality of the
discussion, although Tania Albin '08 said that "the way that they explained
the problem but didn't say any solutions to it" bothered her.

When another audience member asked the panelists what type of crops could
replace illegal substances to ensure that farmers continue to make a
living, Andreas held up a case of Colombian coca tea, which is a mild,
legal stimulant that could be produced in place of cocaine.

"I really liked the question about alternative crops. There's never going
to be a change unless there is a change in livelihood," said Dan MacCombie
'08, treasurer of Students for Sensible Drug Policy, which co-sponsored the
event with Amnesty International, Latin American Students Organiza-tion,
Oxfam at Brown and Unicef at Brown.

Though participants debated the root of the problem, all agreed the current
state of the war on drugs is unsatisfactory. "What was really interesting
was the hypocrisy of the drug war, which is an unwinnable war," said Alex
Schrobenhauser '08.