Conclusions and consequences abroad – Econlib

Consequences of the War on Drugs™ abroad

In 1996, Senate Committee on International Narcotics Control Chuck Grassley testified that a recent poll showed that Eighty percent of Americans consider this their top foreign policy concern stopping illegal drug trafficking into the United States. The senator was responding to his own concerns By elevating the importance of treatment, the Clinton administration was not committed to the long-standing policy of aggressive interdiction as a safeguard for national security. The United States was then and remains the largest market for illicit drugs in the world, with much of the supply coming from foreign countries such as Mexico, Afghanistan, Columbia, Peru and China. As such, efforts to reduce the supply of illicit substances have not been limited to domestic prohibition but have expanded to include efforts to disrupt production in other countries.

While such foreign policies often enjoy broad support at home, they have had a profound negative impact on the countries involved on the other side. As Foldvary (2013) notes, US drug policy tends to exert a destabilizing effect that creates violent cartels, emboldens existing insurgent factions, fuels drug barons’ imperialism, and creates underground shadow states. The tools often deployed in these failed efforts should be familiar to even the most casual observer of contemporary American foreign policy, including foreign aid, military and police assistance and training, intelligence and counterinsurgency operations, development plans, and nation-building efforts (Pemleton & Weimer, 2019). Too often, the objectives of the countries receiving this aid are not fully aligned with domestic drug policies, causing further instability.

Plan Colombia provides an excellent snapshot of such destabilizing policy quagmires. This joint operation between Colombia and the United States had its origins in the struggle between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – People’s Army (FARC), an armed guerrilla group that was one of the main factions in a murderous conflict dating back to 1964. In In 1998, President Andrés Pastrana, hoping to gain their trust and help in promoting peace, granted the FARC a parcel of land approximately the size of Switzerland as a demilitarized zone where military and law enforcement personnel would not enter (Rosen, 2021) . The FARC rewarded Pastrana’s gesture of good faith by relocating their criminal activities – including kidnapping, extortion, illegal mining, and drug production and trafficking – to their newly granted autonomous region.

Pastrana turned to the US for help in ending the internal conflict and the power that organized crime exerted over Colombian citizens. Unwilling to involve America in Colombia’s armed internal conflict, the Clinton administration reoriented Pastrana’s Plan Colombia initiative to align with its own interests in ending the ability of Colombian guerrillas and cartels to smuggle drugs into the US. While Pastrana acknowledged the role of drug production in the US due to instability, his initial concern was containing the FARC, which included the manual destruction of their crops. In exchange for U.S. financial assistance, he ultimately agreed to use eighty percent of the resources to strengthen police and military operations, which would then play a crucial role in protecting the aerial spraying of herbicides on coca crops .

There are conflicting views about it whether these measures were effective in reducing supply. U.S. officials claimed that Colombian coca production fell by seventy-five percent between 2001 and 2011, while United Nations observers reported an insignificantly negligible decline. What is not in dispute is that Colombia had to bypass US interests because it needed the help, and in 2007 Colombian President Uribe guaranteed the Bush administration’s continued cooperation by rebranding armed factions as narco-terrorists, in line with the US desire to control global drug supply chains as well as terrorism. Although Uribe had some success in disrupting larger guerrilla and criminal organizations, they were replaced by smaller ones that were harder to identify. Furthermore, drug trafficking continued unabated and increased counter-narcotics units had somewhat of a balloon effect, driving some production to neighboring states such as Peru and Panama, while increasing Mexico’s importance as a distribution and trade center, worsening that country’s own situation was made worse. destabilizing issues related to US drug policy.

In an earlier post I noted that because the majority of drug production occurs outside U.S. borders, much of the perceived violence occurs elsewhere, displacing and concealing these very real human costs. Aligning with U.S. interests did not work for Colombia in the 1980s, when efforts to capture and extradite popular drug lords were met with nationalist opposition that then encouraged powerful traffickers to assassinate troublesome government officials (Bagley, 1988). It still isn’t working as coca production has reached a historic peak in 2020 the largest producers and traders were paramilitary groups that were trained and financed by the United States as part of its military operations against drugs. This violence and destabilization of society, and the growing power of cartels and organized crime, are being replicated in Central America, Mexico, Afghanistan and other countries where the US exerts its hegemonic influence to prosecute its War on Drugs™.

Conclusion

I titled this series A brief look at the social costs of drug prohibition, and while it is somewhat lengthy, compared to the duration of the ongoing conversations needed on this issue, it is short. These self-justifying policies aimed at disrupting supply simply cannot succeed as long as demand persists. In the absence of a commitment to harm reduction, demand has been and will remain stubbornly inelastic. Meanwhile, our prison system continues to expand, a center of perverse incentives centered on cheap labor and political power. To fill these prisons, the police have increasingly become a military occupying force, too often focusing their efforts on already disadvantaged subgroups, helping to fuel the cycles of poverty, crime and recidivism that they are ostensibly intended to help break. This criminalization of a public health and mental health problem has resulted in more preventable deaths, as treatment is stigmatized and often not an option, while the potency of drugs is increased to maintain profit margins. Not only is violence present in our own communities, but it pales in comparison to the violence and instability that domestic drug policies are causing in countries where illegal entrepreneurs are emerging to meet our demand. But with all these costs imposed on society, supply and demand remain constant and unabated.