MONEY DOWN THE HOLE

How Committing More Resources to Mexico's Drug War Will Only Make the
Problem Worse

President Bush confirmed last week, at the U.S.-Canada-Mexico "summit"
meeting, that the U.S. is planning a "robust" aid package to help
Mexico combat the illegal drug trade. There is little question that
Mexico is experiencing a tragic wave of violence as various drug
cartels battle among themselves and with the federales. But throwing
more resources into enforcement will make matters worse.

The administration was at pains to say that the proposed aid to Mexico
was not at all like the "Plan Colombia" program that has seen $800
million to $1.3 billion sent to Colombia every year since 1998, when
the Clinton administration started it. No wonder. After all that money
was spent, the number of acres under coca cultivation in Colombia
actually has risen in recent years, and the street price of cocaine in
the United States has declined, which is exactly the opposite of what
the plan was supposed to accomplish.

The continued availability of illicit drugs in the U.S. should be
testimony enough that the "war on drugs" is one of the most massive
and socially disruptive policy failures of modern times. Drug warriors
may like to think that if they just spent more money and ratcheted up
the pressure on traffickers, they would finally end illicit drug use
and trafficking. This approach has always failed in the past and will
fail in the future, for some obvious reasons.

Prohibition raises the price to consumers to many times the cost of
producing the drugs, so as long as the demand is there the potential
profits will lure unscrupulous operators into the trade. Conspicuous
flurries of enforcement tend to winnow out the least-competent of the
dealers, reducing competition for those most skilled at the dark arts
of concealment and violence. Even if a major operator is taken down, a
dozen more will scramble to take his place.

Then there's what former American University law professor Arnold
Trebach called the "iron law of prohibition." Concentrated
enforcement, he observed, leads to traffickers moving toward more
compact, more easily concealed and higher-margin illicit drugs. In
practice this means moving from less harmful drugs like marijuana
toward more harmful drugs like heroin, cocaine or methamphetamine. So
dealers in the U.S. could find themselves with smaller supplies of
"softer" drugs and better supplies of "hard" drugs, and will push
customers in that direction.

Thus the U.S. "anti-drug" aid package to Mexico not only won't be
helpful, it will almost certainly make things worse.