Prohibition, mark two

Matthew Engel Tuesday April 29, 2003 The Guardian

Americans are now telling pollsters they feel safer after the sack of
Baghdad, and are evidently starting to believe the war on terror is being
won. Hold that thought a moment while we consider the state of play in the
other concept-war: the one on drugs.

It is 42 years since the UN set out to eradicate the use of illegal drugs,
with results that we see all around us: the last marijuana smoker races the
last speaker of Scots-Gaelic towards extinction; redundant cocaine dealers
beg pathetically on the streets; the scourge of heroin has been banished
forever from the planet.

That, as Polly Toynbee showed in these pages last week, was the impression
a Martian might have got from attending the UN's half-time review of its
current 10-year drugs plan in Vienna earlier this month. The head of the UN
office on drugs and crime, Antonio Maria Costa, cheerily announced that his
organisation was on target to deal with the problem by 2008: "Drugs control
policy works," he said. Presumably, his job has given him access to some
great reality-excluding dope.

This insanity keeps a lot of bureaucrats in work and holds off any
unpleasantness with the policy's chief promoters, the US. The American
approach that failed in the security council over Iraq - bribe, blackmail
or batter your opponents into submission - has successfully prevented any
fresh international thinking about drug control for decades. Allegedly
liberal-minded governments such as Britain's tinker with cannabis laws to
save a little police time, while the piles of used needles grow higher.

Meanwhile, a war that began when heroin, cannabis and cocaine were confined
to a small, louche minority has successfully spread them worldwide. It is a
re-run of the American booze prohibition experiment, played out globally
and indefinitely. But the extraordinary reach of the ongoing catastrophe is
largely hidden.

Just consider a few aspects of it from this hemisphere: inside the US, the
prison population has now gone above 2 million. That means that about 1% of
all American adults are currently in jail, a proportion rising to 12% among
black males in their late 20s. The justice department estimates that the
chances of a black male baby born today being imprisoned for more than a
year are close to one in three. Marc Mauer, of an independent organisation,
The Sentencing Project, reckons that if you add together direct drug
offences (sale, trafficking, possession etc), crimes committed to fund drug
use and crimes committed by people on drugs, then half the people in jail
are there for drug-related crimes.

The US has no policy for curbing drug use internally, except for locking up
this million people and putting up "drug-free zone" signs outside schools.
It concentrates on supply-side efforts: trying to stop traffickers,
spraying South American coca fields and encouraging farmers to grow other
crops. As Ted Galen Carpenter points out in a new expose of the futility of
all this, Bad Neighbour Policy, the US has a splendid technique for
announcing success as far as seizures are concerned: ifit intercepts a lot
of drugs, that proves how well its approach is working; if the interception
rate goes down, that proves it too.

Officials regularly gloat to the newspapers about how many fields have been
sprayed, and how many Colombian farmers have been encouraged to switch to
legal crops. They don't tell us they are spraying with a form of glyphosate
unapproved in the US that is, according to reports from other sources,
having disastrous effects on wildlife, legal crops and, sometimes, humans.

They don't say that the more they spray in one area of Colombia, the more
production moves deeper into more impenetrable rain forest, where the
locals add to global warming by chopping down more trees and planting
there. They don't say that the more they spray in Colombia generally, the
more cocaine production rises again in Bolivia and Peru.

They don't say that shrewd farmers have now found they can beat aerial
surveillance by sticking coca bushes in the shade of dense coffee
plantations. They don't admit the crop-substitution projects are useless
because other crops bring in about one-ninth the income of cocaine, which,
thanks to US policies, is untaxed, unregulated and rampant.

Instead, the Americans jail a million of their own people and force the UN
to hold idiotic conferences where officials spout drivel. They should hire
this Costa bloke to run the war on terrorism. After all, most terrorism is
financed by drug money anyway. He could keep proclaiming victory for them.