DARWIN CAN TEACH US ABOUT DRUG WAR

With every passing year the drug problem seems to get worse. The U.S.
government responds by pumping billions more dollars into the war on
drugs. Federal spending for this "war without end" is more than
twenty times what it was in 1980 and still the drug traffickers
appear to be winning. Despite more than six billion dollars spent on
"Plan Colombia" alone, cocaine production has actually increased in
that country. Now the Bush Administration is asking for $1.4 billion
more to aid the Mexican government's drug crackdown through the
"Merida Initiative."

Although it may seem counterintuitive, the "law and order" response
by our politicians only intensifies the problem. Instead, they might
turn to Charles Darwin's theory of evolution to glean insight as to
why these "common sense" reactionary solutions often are counterproductive.

As illegal drugs become easier to obtain and more potent, politicians
respond in a knee-jerk manner by ramping up law enforcement. After
all, drugs are bad so why not escalate the war against drugs?
Politicians get to look tough in front of voters, the drug war
bureaucracy is delighted with ever expanding budgets, and lots of
low-level bad guys get locked up. Everyone wins - including,
unfortunately, the major drug traffickers.

As politicians intensified the drug war decade after decade, an
unintended consequence began to appear. These "get tough" policies
have caused the drug economy to evolve under Darwinian principles
(i.e., survival of the fittest). Indeed, the drug war has stimulated
this economy to grow and innovate at a frightening pace.

By escalating the drug war, the kinds of people the police typically
capture are the ones who are dumb enough to get caught. These
criminal networks are occasionally taken down when people within the
organization get careless. Thus, law enforcement tends to apprehend
the most inept and least efficient traffickers. The common street
expression puts it best: "the dealer who uses, loses." Conversely,
the kinds of people law enforcement tends to miss are the most
cunning, innovative and efficient traffickers.

It's as though we have had a decades-long unintended policy of
artificial selection. Just as public health professionals warn
against the overuse of antibiotics because it can lead to drug
resistant strains of bacteria, our overuse of law enforcement has
thinned out the trafficking herd so that the weak and inefficient
traffickers get captured or killed and only the most proficient
dealers survive and prosper. Indeed, U.S. drug war policies have
selectively bred "super-traffickers."

Politicians cannot hope to win a war on drugs when their policies
ensure that only the most efficient trafficking networks survive. Not
only do they survive, but they thrive because law enforcement has
destroyed the competition for them by picking off the unfit
traffickers and letting the most evolved ones take over the lucrative
trafficking space. The destruction of the Medellin and Cali cartels,
for instance, only created a vacuum for hundreds of smaller (and more
efficient) operations. Now the police cannot even count the number of
smaller cartels that have taken over - much less try to infiltrate
and disrupt them.

Moreover, the police have constricted the supply of drugs on the
street while the demand remains constant thus driving up prices and
profits for the remaining dealers. Increasing drug interdiction
creates an unintended price support for drug dealers which, in turn,
lures more participants into the drug economy. Of all the laws that
Congress can pass or repeal, the law of supply and demand is
apparently not one of them.

A public health approach to dealing with illicit drugs should take
precedence over "law and order" approaches. Treatment and prevention
must take priority over interdiction and eradication because drugs
are a demand-driven problem. Politicians, however, continue to devote
most drug funding toward cutting the supply. The proposed aid
package for the notoriously corrupt Mexican drug war establishment
would be better spent on providing treatment for addicts in the
United States. Over reliance on politically expedient "get tough"
policies will only continue an endless spiral of drug trafficking evolution.