ABSTRACT: The wars against drug of United States and Colombia have been unsuccessful for the same reason: repression cannot lead on to the victory. To understand why, it's enough to look at the recent american history: prohibition on alcohol. Prohibition doesn't work; it's time to try a better system.
(Notizie Radicali n.224 of October 17th 1989 - The Economist of Semptember 2nd 1989)
With two centuries of prosperous and stable democracy behind it, the government of the United States of America has failed to master its national curse of drugs and drug-financed crime. Colombia, a poor apprentice democracy with a horrendous history of violence, has better excuses for its more abject failure. Yet both, in their different ways, are failing for the same reason: what they are trying to do is incapable of success. Repression, however vigorous, cannot win the war against drugs. It is time to try a better way.
Nobody can accuse the Colombian government of faint-heartedness. For most of last month drug dealers were murdering yet more of their arch-enemies, the country's honest judges, policemen and political hopefuls. President Virgilio Barco deployed his powers under the 30-year-old state of emergency to order the arbitrary arrest of 11,000 people, the sequestration of million's of dollars' worth of property, and the extradition without due process of suspects to face trial in the United States. But the big birds, alerted by their corrupted informers in the government services, had flown.
Most of those captured, and most of the captured property, will be released for lack of proof of their guilty associations. Of the 89 people whose extradition the United States most pressingly seeks, only one mere book-keeper awaits the flight northwards. The big traders ordered their henchmen to bomb banks and government buildings, then slipped across the borders to well prepared retreats and to the Panamanian bank-branches where their money sits secure. Cocaine traders are the world's richest businessmen. Out of their tax-free profits they outspend, outnumber and outgun the law-enforcement powers of poor states, and dent the civil peace and dignity of the world's richest nation too.
President Bush has responded promptly to Mr. Barco's bravery, digging into the Pentagon's reserves to send helicopters, small-arms and other weapons. This support was unusually swift and well calculated (and delivered without pious advice); it was followed by promises of more generous economic aid. Attacking foreign drug-suppliers fits well with the new domestic policy that the president and his "drugs tsar", Mr William Bennett, are soon to announce. Americans want a response to the inter-gang shoot-outs in their cities and the wholesale poisoning of young men, women and unborn children. The new offensive promises to be more comprehensive and much more expensive than the rag-tag skirmishes that have preceded it. But it stands little more chance of success than Mr Barco's more desperate endeavour. To understand why, Americans need only look at their own country's not-too-distant history.
From 1920 until 1933, American citizens were forbidden to buy or sell their favourite dangerous drug, alcohol. The beer-trucks and the whiskey-schooners kept on coming, creating what were then the most profitable criminal organisations in the world. Now mankind has developed the appetite for yet more powerful drugs, and subjected them to a wider and equally fruitless ban.
Drugs are bad for people. They should not want them - legal alcohol and tobacco, illegal heroin, cocaine, marijuana, or cheap and risky "designer" substitutes dreamt up by artful chemists. Yet demand creates supply, despite the panoply of international conventions and national laws whose main effect is to create still vaster profits for the traders. The drug exporters of Latin America - and of Lebanon, Pakistan, the Burma-Thailand golden triangle and the rest - buy up or terrorise governments, and defy even so-far-uncorrupted regimes, just as North America's mafias, yard-crowds and cartels defy the will of Washington.
Prohibition does not work
As long as people spend money for a thrill, prohibition cannot work. It turns an issue of personal choice and health into a crisis of criminality. Governments protect drinkers by quality controls, taxes and licensing that divert demand away from the most destructive forms of booze. For cigarette smokers, governments insist on health warnings. To protect people against damage from bad food or therapeutic drugs, they test and measure the products' effects. Illegal drugs they merely outlaw and, while failing to enforce the outlawry, forgo the power to regulate the trade.
Prohibition, and its inevitable failure, make a bad business more criminal, more profitable and more dangerous to its customers than it need be (see pages 21-24). Lifting the ban, and replacing it with detailed regulation, might certainly expose more people to risky experiments with drugs. That danger is real - even if experience shows that relatively few people are foolish enough to go beyond experiments.
But prohibition's failure is more dangerous yet, both for individual drug-takers and for societies corrupted, subverted and terrorised by the drug gangs. The trade is banned by national laws and international conventions. Repeal them, replace them by control, taxation and discouragement. Until that is done, the slaughter in the United States, and the destruction of Colombia, will continue. Europe's turn is next.
