War on Drugs

The War on Drugs was started by Ronald Reagan, and the Andean Initiative--granting overall survelience to the Pentagon was introduced by George H.W. Bush. Many American Taxpayer Dollars have went since then to fund Latin American military forces to counteract the Drug Trade. How well has it done?


DRUGS AND DEMOCRACY IN LATIN AMERICA

The Impact of U.S. Policy
Coletta A. Youngers and Eileen Rosin, Editors
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
http://www.wola.org/publications/ddhr_exec_sum_brief.pdf

1) The United States’ insistence on zero tolerance for drug crops has led to massive forced eradication of coca and opium poppy crops, often the principal source of income for impoverished farmers. With few alternatives available, these families are ratcheted down into deeper poverty when their most important cash crop is destroyed.

2)The region’s militaries, which have not been held accountable for widespread human rights abuses and authoritarian dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s, have been brought back into domestic law enforcement because the local police forces are either incapable or too corrupt to dealwith the threat from drug traf. cking and its associated violence.

3) The drug trade is more like a balloon than a battle. eld—when one part of a balloon is squeezed, its contents are displaced to another. Similarly, when coca production is suppressed in one area, it quickly pops up somewhere else, disregarding national borders. Arrested drug lords are quickly replaced by others who move up the ranks; dismantled cartels are replaced by smaller, leaner operations that are harder to detect and deter. When drug-traf. cking routes are disrupted by intensive interdiction campaigns, they are simply shifted elsewhere.

4) U.S. international drug control policy is designed to reduce or eliminate the supply
of illicit drugs in this country. In theory, their scarcity would then drive up prices and
consequently discourage demand. However, the price of cocaine and heroin are at or near
all-time lows in spite of intensive efforts to eradicate crops and interdict drug shipments.
Meanwhile, the Justice Department considers cocaine and heroin to be "readily available";
powder and crack cocaine use are apparently on the rise, and heroin use remains stable
after surging during the 1990s.2 Clearly, the supply-reduction model does not work.
In Latin America, the source of most of the cocaine and heroin on U.S. streets, the drug
war has not only failed to curb production and traf. cking, but has weakened democratic
institutions. It also disproportionately targets the rural poor, who have few economic
alternatives aside from growing illicit crops and who bene. t the least from the drug trade.
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The Pentagon and U.S. military already have too much on their plate, and the Andean Initiative did not work out as planned. The Executive Summary only suggests greater complication with the effort in Latin America, what with the suggestion of non-coersed crop supplantation. This suggestion will fail as well. Drug traffickers will force the planting of Drug plants, they will also pay higher per hecture of Drug plants than can be supplied by market forces for other Crops.

This Author would apply a different enforcement measure:
1) He would decriminalize Drug use in the regular sense
2) Define Illegal Drugs as Illegal Trade Products
3) Charge Possessers of such Drugs the full market price for such Drugs, starting with anything up to a Kilo, then per Kilo thereafter; this would entail an original fine to the User of somewhere around $2000 per Kilo for Marijuana, $14,000 per Kilo of Cocaine, and $22,000 per Kilo of Herion.
4) Arresting American officers will be granted 25% of the Fines assessed, to ensure rapid and prompt law enforcement, and markedly reduce the incidence of Bribery. lgl