War on Drug Cartels: We’re Losing.

“Cocaine is God’s way of saying you’re making too much money” – Robin Williams

…a typical scam[:] A cartel member… volunteered to become a DEA informant for pay. A few weeks later the “informant” reached out to his DEA handlers and told them that a major drug shipment, a million dollars of marijuana, hidden inside a battered blue truck, would be coming across the border at a specific time and place. When H-hour arrived, the blue truck showed up at the border just as the informant said it would, and dozens of agents converged on it. They began to dismantle the truck, and to their glee, they quickly found the stash, hidden in a false fuel tank… To all appearances, it looked like a government victory.

In truth, however, the whole event had been staged. The marijuana truck was driven by a stooge, a yokel the cartel had set up to be caught. The marijuana itself was real, but to the cartel, its loss represented a cost-effective trade: one million dollars in lost pot in exchange for a major border distraction. A few minutes after the blue marijuana truck entered the border crossing station, the cartel’s real truck, a sleek commercial eighteen-wheeler packed with more than one hundred million dollars of cocaine, entered the same facility five or six lanes away. Normally the truck would have received close scrutiny, but that was now impossible, for virtually all the inspectors on duty were busy dismantling the decoy marijuana truck and arresting its startled drive, who had probably been told the inspectors would be bribed. The small amount of inspectors who remained at their regular posts were totally distracted, watching to see if the lucky agents crawling all over the blue truck would get a bust. When the cartel’s truck pulled up in the inspection lane, the inspector took a cursory look. All he saw were boxes of Mexican vegetables, bound for US tables, loaded professionally in a truck that appeared to belong to a respected American carrier. The inspector asked a few routine questions and then waved the truck through.

Today I will finish Convictions by John Kroger and I just read a very interesting section on public policy related to the mafia and the drug war. It’s John Kroger’s explanation for why the government was able to stamp out wide-spread mafia power yet cannot make any headway when it comes to the war on drugs. I’ve had several conversations with friends about possible solutions- if we just legalize it will the problem go down or up? Will law enforcement costs go up or down? Will public use go up or down? (In the short run I bet it will go up, but after a few years will people grow tired of it or will America be so addicted that drug use will increase?). This post will address the war on drugs; the mafia post will come later. Remember that Mr. Kroger is a successful Federal Narcotics Prosecutor in NYC. Anyways, here’s what Mr. Kroger talks about:

How to Win a War on Drugs?

Considered individually, my cases were successful. They certainly garnered me professional praise. But their aggregate contribution to our goal of a drug-free New York was close to nil. I was working thirteen hours a day, seven days a week. But when I got home at night, I knew in my heart that my work was almost meaningless, for the strategy behind the war on drugs was deeply flawed…

Three Drug War Strategies America has Used

1. Cut Foreign Drug Production (Columbia, Afghanistan, Mexico…)

Imagine, for a moment, that you were appointed the director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, the nation’s drug czar. Your mission would be to reduce and, if possible, eliminate drug abuse in America. Where would you start? For the last 40 years our government has answered: overseas… This effort is politically attractive to both Congress and the White House, for it shifts all blame for our nation’s drug problem from the real culprit– our own deep appetite for drugs– to foreign criminal drug lords.”

Kroger talks about Plan Columbia where the US has spent more than $4,000,000,000 trying to “cut cocaine production”. We fight the drug traffickers, the revolutionary groups that provide protection, and spray herbicide on millions of acres of Columbian countryside to try to stamp out coca and poppy production.

In the US, sixteen million drug users spend sixty billion dollars annually to purchase illegal substances. With such immense amounts of money at stake, producers are not simply going to roll over and die just because we spray some herbicides on their crops. Instead they adjust. When Plan Colombia when into effect, the traffickers responded rationally, as economic actors always do when faced with a change in market conditions. They shifted cultivation to remote hilly areas that are harder to detect and spray; planted crops in smaller, more fragmented plots; and developed new, more productive coca plant strains, with more leaves per plant and higher, more potent alkaloid levels. The result? Today Columbia provides roughly 50 percent of the heroin and 90 percent of the cocaine imported in to the United States, the exact same levels we saw in 2000.

In the 1970s the Turkish government with the support and assistance of the United States and the United Nations led a massive effort to eliminate poppy cultivation and opium production. By all measures, the program was incredibly successful. Today Turkey produces virtually no illicit drug crops. Opium, however, is a valuable commodity, just like coffee or oil. As long as demand stays constant, efforts to control production in one country will be futile because the market will respond by shifting production elsewhere. In the case of Turkey, poppy shifted east, to Afghanistan. Today that country produces more than 85 percent of the world supply.

2. Drug Shipment Interdiction

If the United States cannot cut foreign drug production, we might, as a fallback strategy, try to stop drugs in transit, before they cross our borders, which law enforcement calls interdiction… Today 65 percent of the cocaine consumed in the United States comes over the Mexican border.” He says that often border guards can be bribed by the cartel. “For two minutes of work, a corrupt guard can make twenty thousand dollars, tax free, two-thirds of his annual salary.

The basic thought behind this tactic is that if we can confiscate enough drugs as they come into the country to drive up the price of drugs on the street, then demand will go down. Basic economics right? Right. However, we have been unable to make a dent in the supply (for example see the lead in story of the marijuana distraction).

In a previous post I defended NAFTA (see picture above) for economic reasons, but then again, it also makes patrolling the borders infinitely more difficult. Kroger points out that with new flows of traffic across the southern border, the line would stretch to Guatemala if we checked every car. With the current random border patrol searches, using established borders are too risky, so dozens of tunnels have been built. Some pretty impressive:

In January 2006, for example, Mexican authorities discovered a tunnel running more than half a mile underground from Tijuana to California. The entrance on the Mexican side was in a warehouse near the Tijuana international airport. Drug shipments could be flown in from Colombia, swept past crooked Mexican customs officials, and unloaded in the warehouse. The drugs would then be lowered down an eighty-five foot-deep shaft and transported by wheeled gurneys through the tunnel, which had electric lighting, proper ventilation, and a pumping system to keep it dry. On the American side, the tunnel opened up inside what appeared to be an abandoned industrial building, one with several loading bays for tractor trailers. The traffickers would lift the drugs back to ground level by pulley, load them into trucks, and ship them throughout the United States.

The Rand Corporation’s Research says,

The price record suggests that supply control effects have failed to reduce the use of an established drug… The overall trend in cocaine and heroine retail prices during most of the past two decades has been downward (after adjusting for potency). That suggests greater availability of drugs on the streets of the United States, not less. Greater availability and lower prices are likely to have made use cheaper and more attractive, thus taking some of the pressure off users to quit or scale back and making it easier for youth to initiate.

3. Domestic Law Enforcement

Kroger continues:

Since 1992 drug use has gone up by one-third. Drug related emergency room admissions have substantially increased. Perhaps most worrisome, the percentage of kids trying marijuana, cocaine, and hallucinogens has ballooned. We are losing the war on drugs. The American public clearly understands this. Over the last ten years, polls have consistently revealed that between 70 and 75 percent of Americans believe our drug control policies are failing. Instead, they have simply ratcheted up drug enforcement spending. That approach is, to be blunt, insane.

Because we cannot cut foreign drug production or stop drugs at our borders, the United States winds up fighting the drug war on our on streets.

Every time we took some dealers or suppliers off the streets, new ones sprang up immediately to take their place, to meet the demand for drugs. We were up against powerful market forces, and those market forces had us beat… Our team of agents, cops, and prosecutors took thirty major dealers off the streets between 1997 and 2001, but new groups immediately arrived to replace our defendants. The [East District New York office] busted them too, and then we busted their successors.

Half a billion dollar drug money seizure- Largest $ bust ever

What is the Solution?

For the last 40 years our government has answered: overseas… This effort is politically attractive to both Congress and the White House, for it shifts all blame for our nation’s drug problem from the real culprit– our own deep appetite for drugs– to foreign criminal drug lords.

Since 1992 drug use has gone up by one-third. Drug related emergency room admissions have substantially increased. Perhaps most worrisome, the percentage of kids trying marijuana, cocaine, and hallucinogens has ballooned. We are losing the war on drugs. The American public clearly understands this.

In the US, sixteen million drug users spend sixty billion dollars annually to purchase illegal substances. With such immense amounts of money at stake, producers are not simply going to roll over and die just because we spray some herbicides on their crops. Instead they adjust.

In the 1970s the Turkish government with the support and assistance of the United States and the United Nations led a massive effort to eliminate poppy cultivation and opium production. By all measures, the program was incredibly successful. Today Turkey produces virtually no illicit drug crops. Opium, however, is a valuable commodity, just like coffee or oil. As long as demand stays constant, efforts to control production in one country will be futile because the market will respond by shifting production elsewhere. In the case of Turkey, poppy shifted east, to Afghanistan. Today that country produces more than 85 percent of the world supply.

It seems to be a matter of supply and demand. As long as there is a demand (and billions of dollars to be spent), there will always be savvy suppliers.

He then asks, “When we think about drug policy, we should be asking: Is there a more effective way to fight drug consumption and abuse than our current supply control approach?”

Drug treatment and prevention. I’ll go over these in another post as this one has taken long enough and I don’t even know if it’s interesting… sorry. “Anything that is written merely to please the author is worthless,” Blaise Pascal (from page 35 of the book Writing to Win by Steven D. Stark, a great book I’ll report on someday).

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