DEAD END DRUGS WAR

Washington is flirting with the idea of changing its tack on combating the world's illegal drugs trade

by Stephen Filder

The Financial Times, wednesday June 10, 1998

In the US war against drugs, upsetting Mexico has been a long tradition. More than 80 years ago, as lawmakers in Texas debated the first ordinance to outlaw marijuana in the US, a Texas senator declared: "All Mexicans are crazy and this stuff is what makes them crazy."

Last month, Mexicans howled in protest after a US ',sting" operation to lure Mexican bankers appeared to have been carried out without the knowledge of Mexico's government. More than Mexican sensibilities have suffered in what many view as one of the US's least successful exports: drugs prohibition. Since 1875, when San Francisco city authorities banned opium smoking, US strategy has emphasised legal prohibition. This approach has been followed in much of the western world. The trouble is most drugs transactions bring together willing sellers and willing buyers. Neither is anxious to report a crime. Dissatisfaction with existing policy, at least among some opinion formers, greeted leaders from around the world as they arrived in New York this week for a three-day special session of the United Nations General Assembly on drugs policy. It was contained in a letter published in a two-page advertisement in the New York Times from about 350 public figures and academics - including Javier Pérez de Cuellar, former

secretary general of the UN, George Shultz, former US secretary of state, and George Soros, the prominent international financier. "We believe that the war on drugs is now causing more harm than drug abuse itself," they argued. The strategy, which "focuses largely on criminalisation and punishment", had helped create an illegal drugs industry worth an estimated $400bn a year (equivalent of 8 per cent of world trade). "The industry has empowered organised criminals, corrupted governments at all levels, eroded internal security, stimulated violence and distorted both economic markets and moral values." It had hampered public health efforts to

counter the spread of diseases such as HIV. In its name, human rights had been violated, environmental assaults perpetrated and prisons inundated. Though thin on concrete proposals, the letter argued that there was an alternative: to "reduce the harms associated with drugs" as opposed to a no-holds barred attack. Proponents of a "harm-reduction" approach, such as US-based academics Peter Reuter and Jonathan Caulkins argue that the traditional goal of US drugs control policy - reducing drug use - is too narrow.

In a 1995 paper they wrote: "The principal goal for drug policy should instead be to reduce harms to society arising from the production, consumption, distribution and control of drugs. Total harm (to users and the rest of society) can be expressed as the product of total use and average harm per unit of use ... Attention has been focused on the first; greater attention to the second would be beneficial."

Many proponents of harm reduction lean towards decriminalisation of the consumption of some drugs, though most do not favour outright legalisation. Nonetheless, their approach meets no favour with current policymakers in the Clinton administration, who see it as the thin end of a wedge leading to legalisation. The administration is sensitive to the charges of being "soft on drugs" given Mr Clinton's admissions about flirting with marijuana. General Barry McCaffrey, the director of the US Office of National Drug Control Policy, denounced the harm reduction approach this week. He said there was "not a shred of support for drug legalisation" among the US people. "That will not happen in the United States, no matter how you word the question, and that's why we are seeing some very subtle indirect approaches to drug legalisation: the medical marijuana issue; hemp as a solution to the nation's textile problems; whatever." Gen McCaffrey may not be just blowing smoke over worries about legalisation. The case for it

depends largely on the assumption that demand for drugs is inelastic - in other words not affected significantly by price changes. Not much research has been done on the subject, but some of it weakens the case for legalisation. A 1995 paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research on demand for illicit drugs concludes: "Drug use is more price responsive than people had previously thought." The authors, Henry Saffer and Frank Chaloupka, studied extensive data about patterns of drug abuse in the US. "It is estimated that legalisation would lead to about a 100 per cent increase in heroin use and about a 50 per cent increase in the quantity of cocaine consumed," they said. This conclusion is based in part on other work suggesting criminalisation increases the price of drugs fivefold. Though it has maintained the essence of its anti-drugs strategy, the administration has shifted its approach. One example is its conduct of the "drugs war" abroad, which is recognised to have contaminated its relations

with much of Latin America. The administration has softened its rhetoric and is now willing to lay as much stress on demand as supply, even conceding that it is also an important drugs producer (as well being the principal market). Moreover, the emphasis is being reduced on the annual "drugs certification" by the US, through which the administration assesses how other countries are doing in the drugs fight and levies sanctions against those deemed not to be co-operating. While not removing the certification law from the statute books, Washington is placing more weight on multinational bodies, such as the Organisation of American States, through which other countries will be able to criticise the US too. The administration has also made soothing public noises about the "visionary thinking" of Pino Arlacchi, the new director of the UN Drug Control Programme. He has used this week's meeting to seek funding for a programme to use alternative development strategies to eradicate all cocoa and opium poppy plants i

n the world by 2008. This is not to say US officials do not have their doubts, partly because they do not want to pour money into producing regimes, such as those in Afghanistan and Burma. Many politicians in the US and elsewhere remain unconvinced of the necessity to take a new approach. Spencer Backus, a Republican congressman from Alabama, incensed by Mexican criticism of last month's sting operation, said yesterday: "The war on drugs will always be stymied if we put diplomatic concerns first and let drug dealers continuously hide behind national borders."