Bad Neighbour Policy:

WASHINGTON'S FUTILE WAR ON DRUGS IN LATIN AMERICA

MORE than 30 years ago, President Richard Nixon declared war on the
use of illegal drugs in the United States, and their supply from
abroad, especially from Latin America. Over the intervening decades
that war has become an increasingly serious and costly one, as Ted
Galen Carpenter succinctly shows in a timely book. At home, Americans
have seen their civil liberties eroded in its name, while the federal
government now spends some $11.7 billion a year fighting drugs.
Abroad, the drug warriors have bullied and bribed Latin American
governments into sullen co-operation. Under Plan Colombia, the
Americans are now deeply involved in that country's internal
conflicts, spraying coca fields and training army battalions. And yet
the flow of drugs reaching the United States is undiminished. While
casual cocaine use has declined, heroin consumption has increased.

This adds up to a "colossal failure", argues Mr Carpenter, who works
at the Cato Institute, a libertarian group in Washington, DC. That
failure is inevitable, in his view. As long as drugs are demanded, the
only effect of making them illegal is to drive up their price,
providing an unbeatable economic incentive for their production. It is
time for the United States to abandon its "experiment with drug
prohibition" which began with the Harrison Act of 1914.

Mr Carpenter's conclusion is one that many students of the drug war,
including this newspaper, have long endorsed. The problem is that most
Americans do not. Several European countries, and Canada, have
recently shifted away from a penal approach to drugs, and towards one
of decriminalisation and "harm reduction". But none has contemplated
legalising cocaine, the use of which is soaring in Europe. Beyond a
timid movement to allow the medical use of marijuana, America remains
tightly wedded to prohibition.

Mr Carpenter is right, too, that the Latin American countries which
are the source of drugs, or through which they are trafficked, pay a
disproportionate share of the costs of failed prohibition. More's the
pity, then, that he shows no sign of having visited any of them in
researching his book--or even of setting foot outside his office in
Washington.

This gives his book some disfiguring weaknesses. The central one is
that his review of three decades of American policy fails to
distinguish sufficiently between the cost to Latin America of the drug
war, on the one hand, and of the illegal drug industry itself on the
other. The drug war has indeed inflicted obvious damage; America's
support for Peru's disgraced spy chief, Vladimiro Montesinos, is one
unedifying example.

But the drug industry has itself wreaked havoc in the Andean
countries. That is because prohibition makes drug production highly
lucrative. This gives the drug industry enormous economic and military
power, which it exercises through corruption and violence to undermine
already weak democratic states. Colombia's guerrillas, for example,
would almost certainly have made peace at least a decade ago had drug
money not given them and their paramilitary opponents a new, extended,
lease of life. As a result, Colombia's governments have had little
choice but to seek American military aid--and have every right to it
as long as American (and European) drug consumers are financing the
assault on democracy, however unwittingly.

In other words, unless and until drugs are legalised, Latin American
governments have no choice but to try and tackle the monster
engendered by prohibition. But such policy dilemmas are too subtle for
Mr Carpenter's polemic. He leaves ungrasped, too, the many nettles
that spring from legalisation, ranging from who might produce the
drugs to whether consumption could be restrained. In a different way,
he is as out of touch with reality as are the drug warriors. That is a
shame, for his main argument is an intelligent one.