Drug war options
Critics push for change of drug war's focus
By JOHN OTIS
Special to the Chronicle

BOGOTA, Colombia -- Colombia may be ground zero for the war on drugs in
Latin America, but the nation's libertarian rules on the use of narcotics
suggest another appellation: the Amsterdam of the Andes.

Under a 1994 court ruling, adults may possess up to 20 grams of marijuana
and one gram of cocaine and heroin for consumption in the privacy of their
homes.

Although the ruling gave Colombia the most tolerant drug-use policy in South
America, experts say it has had little practical impact, because selling
narcotics remains illegal. And unlike the Dutch city of Amsterdam, where
marijuana is legal and widely accepted, in Colombia, society generally
frowns on drug use.

Still, the ruling represented a startling deviation from the hard-line
orthodoxy on drugs promoted by the United States.

As the battle against narcotics trafficking rages on six years after the
ruling, a growing number of academics and politicians in North and South
America is challenging conventional drug-war wisdom and calling for
policy-makers to at least consider a change in focus.

Some analysts, for instance, view the recently approved $862 million U.S.
aid package for Colombia as a well-meaning but misguided plan.

The bulk of the aid will help the Colombian army push into the country's
rebel-controlled south and fumigate opium and coca fields, which provide the
raw materials for heroin and cocaine. Critics contend that a better plan
would focus on the disruption of powerful smuggling syndicates and provide
more aid to help drug farmers switch to legal crops.

Others question the logic behind supply-side crackdowns, since the market
has consistently shown that as long as there is demand for drugs, someone
will supply them.

"Asking South American peasants to stop growing coca is like asking the
Scots to stop growing barley because people on the other side of the world
could not hold their drink," Britain's Princess Anne said during a tour of
Andean countries.

But Barry McCaffrey, director of the White House Office of National Drug
Control Policy, insists that the U.S. aid program for Colombia will
strengthen the Bogota government and deal a devastating blow to the drug
cartels as well as the guerrillas and right-wing paramilitaries who earn
millions of dollars annually from the narcotics trade.

"The people involved in coca and opium cultivation are in the middle of one
of the most disgusting, destructive businesses on the face of this Earth,"
McCaffrey says. "So it's hard to see this aid package as being anything but
a blessing for the people of Colombia." But even if the South American drug
supply were somehow cut off, some studies suggest that U.S. consumers still
could choose from a Whitman's Sampler of domestically produced narcotics.

As a result, many observers say, the United States should drop its
"zero-tolerance" approach and focus on forging more realistic domestic drug
policies. Several prominent U.S. and Latin American thinkers have proposed
that nations allow their citizens to make their own decisions about drug
use, then control and regulate the sale of cocaine and heroin much as they
do for alcohol and prescription drugs.

That was the philosophy behind the ruling of Colombia's Constitutional Court
to legalize drug use.

The ruling doesn't mean that the court believes it's good or healthy to do
drugs. Rather, it's an individual decision. It's one's own moral choice,.
says Carlos Gaviria, the magistrate who wrote the majority opinion in the
case.

U.S. officials point out that most Americans disapprove of drug
legalization. But many polls also show that most people have little faith in
current policies, which have resulted in overcrowded prisons, courts clogged
with narcotics cases and annual costs at the federal, state and local level
of $45 billion, according to Kevin Zeese, president of Common Sense for Drug
Policy, a nonprofit organization in Washington.

Analysts point out that there are many drug-policy options, including the
European-style "harm reduction" approach, which holds that eliminating all
drug use is impossible and treats narcotics abuse more as a public health
problem than a law enforcement issue.

Still, many analysts say that reasoned discussion on reforming U.S. policy
is often avoided, in part, because politicians seeking re-election want to
appear tough on drugs.

South of the border, meanwhile, drug policies are largely dictated by the
U.S. government, according to George Vickers, executive director of the
Washington Office on Latin America. He points out that countries are wary of
forging independent policies for fear Washington will blacklist them as
untrustworthy partners in the war against narcotics and cut off millions of
dollars in aid. "There have been a number of alternatives put forth," says
Fernando Cepeda, who was Colombia's interior minister in the late 1980s. "No
one is asking that you blindly follow what is proposed, but at least
listen."

Attacking supply.

During a town-hall meeting in southern Colombia, a nervous coca farmer
shuffles to the podium to ask the assembled officials about the U.S. aid
package for Colombia."Why is most of the money for guns?" he asks. "Do you
think that with military aid, you will solve the social problems of the
Colombian people?"

Many analysts are posing the same question. While they agree that some
military aid is required, they say the problem is one of proportion. They
believe that the bulk of U.S. counterdrug assistance should go toward
humanitarian aid to help drug farmers switch to legal crops and to efforts
targeting high-level drug capos.

Instead, nearly two-thirds of the package consists of attack helicopters,
troop training and other military and police aid for the push into
guerrilla-held regions and the eradication of drug crops.

The U.S.-backed plan "is not a strategy against narco-traffickers" It's a
strategy against farmers and guerrillas," says Ricardo Vargas of Andean
Action, a private group with offices in Peru, Bolivia and Colombia that
investigates drug issues in South America.

Vargas points out that fumigation programs have failed to reduce the amount
of land under drug cultivation in Colombia. Yet, he says, the country's
air-interdiction program has paid off.

In the past two years, the Colombian air force has forced down 42
drug-smuggling planes. But just 12 percent of the U.S. aid package is for
aircraft, intelligence, radar systems and other tools for interdiction in
Colombia."What's more, just 9 percent of the funding is destined for
alternative development programs for drug farmers," says Adam Isacson of the
Center for International Policy in Washington."You need to start attacking
the reasons that people grow coca in the first place. What you need is the
Alliance for Progress," Isacson says, referring to the Kennedy
administration's massive program to promote social development in Latin
America in the 1960s.

Rand Beers, who heads the U.S. State Department's Bureau for International
Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, defends Washington's emphasis on
military aid and suggests that other nations will come through with
humanitarian assistance for Colombia.

"This focus on the so-called 'stick' will allow other sponsors to provide
support for the 'carrot,'" Beers told the Senate Armed Services Committee in
April.

"No matter how the aid is parceled out, anti-drug policies must safeguard
against the balloon effect, the phenomenon in which drug production is
suppressed in one country but shifts to another," says Cepeda, the former
Colombian interior minister.

"The strategy has to be designed so that if there is success in Colombia, it
doesn't push drugs into Brazil or Ecuador," Cepeda says.

Even so, many studies show that counterdrug efforts in South America may
have little long-term impact on the flow of drugs into the United States.

According to the U.N. Drug Control Program, profits in illegal drugs are so
inflated that three-quarters of all narcotics shipments would have to be
intercepted to seriously reduce the profitability of the business and
discourage people from getting involved in the trade.

In 1998, however, the U.N. agency estimated that just 30 percent of cocaine
shipments and 10 percent to 15 percent of heroin shipments were intercepted.

And even if the Andean drug pipeline could be cut off, experts disagree on
how it would affect Colombia and the United States.

"If you could separate drug money from Colombia's other problems, their
chances of achieving peace, putting the economy back on its feet and
building democratic institutions goes way up," says McCaffrey, the U.S. drug
czar.

But others caution that entrenched guerrillas and drug mafias might find
other ways to survive and prosper.

Colombia's rebel groups have been around since the 1960s, long before the
country's drug trade took off. According to Bruce Bagely, an international
studies professor at the University of Miami, the guerrillas could make up
for a decrease in drug profits by increasing their earnings from kidnappings
and extortion.

It's also seen as unlikely that the United States would evolve into some
sort of drug-free Mayberry.

According to a 1992 report by Rand Corp., a public policy research center in
Santa Monica, Calif., overall drug consumption in the United States would
probably decline if the flow of imported narcotics were cut off. But, the
report said, many Americans likely would switch to domestically produced
drugs, such as high-potent marijuana or the synthetic methamphetamine known
as ecstasy. Many U.S. officials fear that ecstasy may be the next drug of
choice among American youth.

"Unfortunately, I think the future that we face is chemically manufactured
drugs," McCaffrey says. "Why would you use cocaine when you have ecstasy?
It's much cheaper and can be made in a high school lab."

Moreover, according to the Rand report, the dangers of drug use might
increase, because the synthetics are often more powerful than plant-based
drugs.

Migration from one drug to another "shines the harsh light of reality on the
futility of interdiction," writes Dirk Chase Eldredge in his book Ending the
War on Drugs.

If the supply of this or that drug were cut off, demand, ingenuity and greed
would quickly supply a substitute."

Legalization

As he watches a police crop-duster swoop over a coca field in northern
Colombia, Defense Minister Luis Fernando Ramirez says that the true drug
crisis lies far beyond his country's borders.

"The police and the army will continue to fight drugs here. But as long as
there is consumption in the industrialized countries, people here will
produce drugs," he says.

Although drug use is rising in Latin America, the region's politicians and
intellectuals have long insisted that narcotics are mainly the problem of
consumer nations.

But three decades after President Nixon declared the United States' first
war on drugs, millions of Americans continue to use cocaine and heroin. If
the war against narcotics has failed, some observers say, perhaps it would
be more productive to make some sort of peace with drugs.

A number of prominent intellectuals, including economist Milton Friedman,
conservative icon William F. Buckley Jr. and Colombian novelist Gabriel
Garcia Marquez, have come out in favor of controlled drug legalization. Soon
after former Secretary of State George P. Shultz retired from government
service, he spoke out on the issue.

"It seems to me we're not really going to get anywhere until we can take the
criminality out of the drug business," Shultz said in a 1989 speech at
Stanford Business School.

" We need to at least consider and examine forms of controlled legalization
of drugs."

"Just as the end of alcohol Prohibition in the United States reduced
gangland violence, ending drug prohibition would kill off the narcotics
cartels," says New Mexico Gov. Gary E. Johnson, the highest ranking elected
U.S. official to promote the legalization of narcotics.

"People think that somehow I'm giving in to the drug dealers," the
Republican governor says in a telephone interview.

"Well, baloney. I'm putting the drug dealers out of business."

"As things stand now, Americans support both sides of Colombia's civil war,"
says Robert J. Barro, a professor of economics at Harvard University who
favors legalization. "While U.S. taxpayers provide funds to the Colombian
army, drug consumers underwrite the nation's drug cartels and guerrillas by
paying inflated prices for cocaine and heroin."

McCaffrey, the drug czar, has described those who favor the legalization of
narcotics as irresponsible free-thinkers who would sell crack to kids at
7-Elevens. But in most cases, legalizers suggest a control regime similar to
that used for alcohol and prescription drugs.

"I would like to see drugs sold in licensed, regulated stores, not on street
corners and not on playgrounds," David Boaz of the Cato Institute -- a
libertarian think tank in Washington -- said at a congressional hearing last
year.

"You don't see very many liquor dealers offering liquor on schoolyards and
playgrounds. You do see people selling drugs there, because it's a
completely unregulated, unlicensed, illegal business."

Gov. Johnson argues that if heroin were legal and inexpensive, users of the
drug would be less likely to commit crimes to support their habits. In turn,
he says, the billions of dollars saved from decreased law enforcement could
be used for drug-use prevention programs and for treatment of addicts.

"Under a legalization scenario, there will be a new set of problems. But I
suggest that the new problems are going to be about half the negative
consequence of what we've got today," Johnson says.

Many experts point out, however, that no one really knows what the new set
of problems would entail, because only a handful of studies have focused on
the issue.

Some say drug legalization would have to be carried out at a worldwide
level. If not, a checkerboard of conflicting drug laws could lead to a kind
of balkanization under which nations opting for legalization would attract
drug users from countries with stricter rules.

For example, when Swiss authorities allowed drugs to be sold and used
publicly at Zurich's Platzpitz Park in the early 1990s in an effort to
identify and treat local addicts, narcotics users from all over Europe
invaded the park. The experiment was canceled.

It's also unclear how legalization would affect drug consumption. After
Prohibition ended in 1933, alcohol use gradually increased by about 25
percent. But some experts say that the response might be different for
cocaine and heroin.

U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration officials suggest that legalization
would turn the United States into a nation of zombies with millions of new
users. "The practical outcome of legalizing even one drug, like marijuana,
is to increase the amount of usage among all drugs," said DEA administrator
Donnie Marshall in congressional testimony last year.

Even the impact of legalization on Colombian cartels is a topic of hot
debate.

In their book The Andean Cocaine Industry, authors Patrick Clawson and
Rensselaer Lee argue that multinational drug cartels might start smuggling
nerve gas or atomic bomb parts.

"Look at U.S. history," they write. "Prohibition spawned the growth of major
criminal enterprises, but when Prohibition was repealed and alcohol again
became legal, these criminal enterprises just expanded into new areas --
drugs, loan sharking, gambling and the like."

Still, drug-policy reformers say that something seems amiss when the drug
czar's views on legalization agree with those of many smugglers, including a
convicted trafficker who wrote a 1992 book.

"I do not want to see anything done that would change the status of illegal
drugs," Hawkeye Gross says in his book Drug Smuggling. "It is a comforting
thought to know that the opportunity exists for me to saddle up the ol'
airplane and roll the dice for a million-dollar-plus payday if I so choose.
That's the real American dream."

Harm reduction

In 1998, during a U.N. summit on illegal drugs, member states approved a
resolution calling for a push to eradicate the world's coca, opium poppy and
marijuana crops by 2008.

But days before the conference opened, hundreds of influential figures,
including newsman Walter Cronkite and former U.N. Secretary-General Javier
Perez de Cuellar, signed an open letter to the United Nations saying that
"the global war on drugs is now causing more harm than drug abuse itself."

The signers of the letter endorsed what is known as "harm reduction," which
holds that drug polices ought to do more good than harm. Many analysts view
harm reduction as the fertile middle ground between an all-out war on drugs
and legalization.

Proponents of the philosophy, for example, would change marijuana laws, if
stiff penalties for smoking the drug were deemed to cause more harm than the
drug itself. They would adopt needle-exchange programs for addicts to help
stop the spread of AIDS.

Harm reduction also means focusing counterdrug efforts on the most effective
programs.

During the congressional debate on the U.S. aid package for Colombia,
several lawmakers argued that some of the money for military hardware should
be shifted to domestic treatment programs. They cited a 1994 Rand study that
showed treatment is 23 times more cost-effective than drug fumigation and
interdiction efforts abroad.

"Our priorities are all out of line," said Rep. Jim Ramstad, R-Minn. "For
the $400 million proposed to build new helicopters for Colombia, we could
treat 200,000 addicts in the United States."

McCaffrey, the drug czar, has supported some harm-reduction measures, such
as establishing methadone clinics to treat heroin addicts, but has opposed
other initiatives. He has criticized the decision of several states to
permit the use of marijuana for medical purposes, because he views such laws
as back-door efforts to legalize drugs.

Given the gravity of the issue, some analysts say that there ought to be far
more public debate on alternative policies.

Still, says Zeese, of Common Sense for Drug Policy, "I think things are
shifting. Politicians are starting to feel comfortable coming out and
discussing" different approaches to the war against narcotics.

In Colombia and Peru, criticism of current drug policies is growing. But
due, in part, to a lack of funding and the danger of being targeted by drug
traffickers, few think tanks and universities have focused on the issue.

Isacson, of the Center for International Policy, says that the pace of
drug-policy reforms in both North and South America could depend on whether
the U.S. aid package has much impact in Colombia.

"If things go badly after spending all this money and they still have an
increase in flow of cocaine," he says, "then maybe there will be a day of
reckoning."

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Fast facts
· Drug trafficking is a $400 billion per-year industry that represents 8
percent of the world's trade, according to the United Nations.

· Three-quarters of all illicit drug shipments would have to be intercepted
to seriously reduce the profitability of the narcotics trade, the United
Nations says. Current efforts intercept 30 percent of cocaine shipments and
10 percent to 15 percent of heroin shipments.

· Americans spend between $46 billion and $79 billion yearly on cocaine and
heroin, according to the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.

· In 1969, the Nixon administration spent $65 million on the drug war. In
1982, the Reagan administration spent $1.65 billion. In 2000, the Clinton
administration is expected to spend $18.5 billion.

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