President Bush probably wanted to burnish his self-styled reputation as a fierce opponent of terrorism who has conflated other conflicts with the all-encompassing and likely generations-long War on Terror and can celebrate success wherever his writ runs. But in declaring, for the umpteenth time in recent years, imminent victory in the war on cocaine in Colombia, he flatly contradicted a recent comment from his own "drug czar" – and for anybody who has followed the decades-long struggle to stifle the flow of drugs from Latin America made himself look ridiculous.
Perhaps declaring victory in the face of disaster, even (or especially) if it flies in the face of more realistic assessments, becomes a habit that is hard to break. The president knows something about habits that are hard to break, although he does seem to have broken a few earlier in his life. Perhaps we can hope for a deeper conversion experience.
At any rate, the president made a point, on his way back from the APEC conference in Chile, of stopping off in Colombia to praise Colombian President Alvaro Uribe’s sterling effort in fighting the drug war. Unfortunately, the statistics he cited are fairly irrelevant. The best evidence is that the government continues to lose the drug war, at great cost to the taxpayers.
In claiming that victory is just around the corner, the president noted a sharp increase in arrests, more spraying of poison on coca fields (Colombia supplies about 90 percent of the cocaine in the U.S. black market), and seizures that have kept 475 tons of cocaine from reaching the United States.
The cost to the U.S. – leaving aside the costs to Colombia – is about $3 billion in military and economic aid over the last four years. There are also some 325 U.S. troops – authorization was recently received to more than double the number to 800 – and 600 civilians doing contract work in Colombia.
Irrelevant Data
With all due respect, however, as Cato Institute scholar Ted Carpenter‘s recent book Bad Neighbor Policy is only one of the works on the area to demonstrate, statistics about spraying and seizures are not especially relevant. What matters is whether all this effort and expense has any impact on the price and availability of cocaine on the streets of America. That story is hardly encouraging, at least from the perspective of the drug warriors.
Just last August, "drug czar" John Walters (a little closer to the ground than the president on this issue) took an AP reporter on a flyover of blackened Colombian coca fields and let slip a few candid comments. "Thus far we have not seen a change of availability in the United States," Mr. Walters admitted. He quickly added that the drug warriors expected to see those kinds of results sometime soon – maybe in the next year or so.
But they’ve been promising that since the 1970s.
The More Things Stay the Same
I talked to Sanho Tree, who follows Colombian developments at the Institute for Policy Studies and visits the country often. He told me the price for a kilo of coca paste in Colombia has remained steady at about $800 since the inception of Plan Colombia, way back under the Clinton administration.
Sanho also worked with Juan Forero of the New York Times on several stories on Colombia. Forero called the New York Police Department a couple of months ago to get an idea of how things are on the street. The NYPD says the price, availability, and quality of cocaine are virtually unchanged over the last several years.
The drug war does drive some of those who are less efficient at violence and concealment out of business, thus buttressing the most vicious of the drug lords. If that’s good news, maybe the drug war is a success. By any commonsense evaluation, however, it’s a failure.
There’s another relevant aspect. President Bush and other drug warriors would like to conflate the War on Drugs with the War on Terrorism, implying that pouring poison on coca fields (and other crops, though they seldom admit it) and arresting traffickers somehow contributes to reducing the amount of terrorism in the world. There’s a good case to be made, however, and one that I have made myself at some length elsewhere, that aggressive enforcement in the drug war actually helps terrorists.
The reasoning is fairly simple. People involved in illicit activities, as defined by nation-states, have common interests in secure routes, hiding places, caches for weapons and other goods, and methods of travel and concealment. They are bound to get together and they do. Narco-traffickers cooperate with terrorists and vice versa. Sometimes they are the same people. A good deal of terrorism is financed by drug trafficking.
All of this is possible precisely because certain drugs have been made illicit, thus creating a risk premium in drug prices, which makes ridiculous profits possible to those most adept at violence, concealment, and corruption. So the connection between narco-trafficking and terrorism is that laws against (certain) drugs and those who use them create the conditions that make it possible for traffickers in politically-oriented violence to acquire money, weapons, and methods of operation more easily than if those drugs were not outlawed.
President Bush wants to nick taxpayers for $566 million for Plan Colombia next year. He might as well pour the money into a toilet. It’s probably too much to hope that he will do the logical thing – if he is serious about defunding terrorists – and de-emphasize or begin to end the War on Drugs.
