Chapo on the Ropes

No one alive and engaged at the time is likely to forget the farce of President George W. Bush standing on the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003, proudly delivering a victory speech beneath a banner reading, “Mission Accomplished.” To say that the staged event was premature would be an understatement. It would also be missing the point.

The Bush machine didn’t declare victory on that day because they believed it had been attained, nor did they believe it to be at hand. On they contrary, it is clear in hindsight that quite the opposite is true. By May 2003 the administration realized that the war in Iraq could become a very ugly affair, and it was time to rally the public around the flag. “We must push on a little longer until our certain victory” is an infinitely more effective battle cry than, “This is obviously not working, but let’s keep going anyway.”

The same propaganda methodology is used almost daily in the drug war. If you conduct a Google news search for “marijuana bust” or any similar term, you will find an infinite number of articles containing self-congratulatory quotes from police officers, sheriffs, DEA agents, prosecutors and politicians that declare a major victory in the war on drugs. It truly begs the question, “if we’re really winning, then why are we losing?”

One such disgracefully Rove-esque bit of propaganda was recently provided by California Attorney General Jerry Brown. Yes, even Governor Moonbeam has traded his populist-left soul for the rank of foot soldier in the War against Some Plants.

Earlier this week, Brown held a press conference to announce the success of Operation Silver Fox, an eight-month, multi-agency investigation that Brown touted as a “body blow” to Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel. The results of the operation? In eight months, agents seized 191 kilograms of cocaine , 136 pounds of marijuana, $1.7 million, 7 handguns and two rifles. Sixteen individuals were indicted, all but four of whom are at large.

At first blush, this may seem like a significant operation. However, to make that mistake would be to grossly under appreciate the economic realities of the drug trade.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, approximately 600 metric tons of cocaine was shipped to the U.S. last year from South America, about 90 percent of which transited the Mexico-Central America corridor. The government further estimates that the Sinaloa Cartel, led by Joaquin “Chapo” Guzman-Loera, controls between one third and half of Mexico’s wholesale cocaine trade. Those official estimates would indicate that Chapo controls the importation of between 180 and 270 metric tons of cocaine per year. That’s between 180,000 and 270,000 kilograms.

California’s “body blow” to the Sinaloa cartel, then, probably deprived the cartel of a little less than one one-thousandth of their annual sales total. And the money? $1.7 million is a lot of money to me, but not to Chapo. He was named to this year’s Forbes Magazine list of the world’s richest people and is estimated to be worth more than $1 billion.

Mission accomplished.

Drug War Lies, continued

One of the more prescient elements of George Orwell’s 1984 is the observation that perpetual war requires dishonesty on the part of those who wage it. There are several important premises behind this observation. The first, and one which we must never forget, is the fact that warfare unnatural. Violence itself may be encoded deep within our DNA, but warfare’s requirement that we kill people we have never met and with whom we have no quarrel must be learned. The second is that we can be trained to fear. The third is that this fear can be manipulated to such a degree that it squelches, distorts and ultimately supplants our gentler natures. This is why, as Aeschylus said, “truth is the first casualty of war.”

In the drug war, the assault on truth has been relentless. Some of the lies are so grandiose that they aren’t even verbalized-- “the government has the right to control the chemicals that enter your body”, for instance. Most, however, are small enough to go unchallenged. Yet it is these small lies that are used to carefully and deliberately craft public opinion.

In this month’s Reason magazine, Ryan Grim has written a brilliant expose of one of these small lies: the assertion by the drug czar that cocaine prices are skyrocketing, and that that dynamic is indicative of the success of the prohibitionist model. It is a small point, perhaps. Another government bureaucrat espousing the party line in order to justify current doctrine. But I would encourage you to remember that the drug czar is a public servant. If he is lying to us, he is lying to the people who pay his salary. If he doesn’t care, then for whom exactly does he work?

Mexico and Argentina: Baby Steps

In the past two weeks, there have been two significant drug policy developments in the international arena. On August 21, Mexican President Felipe Calderon signed into law a bill that essentially decriminalizes the possession of marijuana and other drugs. Under the law, users caught with very small quantities—less then 5 grams of marijuana, half a gram of cocaine, 50 milligrams of heroin, or 40 milligrams of methamphetamine—will not be subject to prosecution. One third offense, users will be forced into treatment. Two days ago, the Argentine Supreme Court declared unconstitutional a law that provided penalties of up to two years in prison for simple possession of marijuana. In the ruling, the court encouragingly wrote:

"Each individual adult is responsible for making decisions freely about theirdesired lifestyle without state interference. Private conduct is allowed unlessit constitutes a real danger or causes damage to the property or the rights of others."

As the AP reported, the ruling has been met with support from the Fernandez administration:

Cabinet chief Anibal Fernandez declared that the ruling brings an end to"the repressive politics invented by the Nixon administration" in the UnitedStates and later adopted by Argenina’s dictators, to imprison drug users as ifthey were major traffickers."

The ruling sets a precedent that goes beyond marijuana by striking down anarticle in Argentina’s drug law that applies to people caught with personal useamounts of any narcotic.President Cristina Fernandez has supported drug law changes, saying in July 2008 that "I don’t like that an addict is condemned as if he were a criminal. The ones who need to be punished are those who sell the drug."

These legislative changes in Mexico and Argentina are positive to the extent that they will keep non-violent drug users out of jail; however, they will in no way alleviate the greater harms to society that prohibition currently causes. By keeping their country’s narcotics trade in the hands of organized crime, the plagues of violence, corruption, overdose deaths and injection-transmitted disease will continue unabated. The only solution to these problems is to legalize all substances, regulate and control the safety of those that are addictive and dangerous and focus harm reduction efforts on education and treatment. Anything short of that—including the incremental decriminalization that Mexico and Argentina recently adopted—is tantamount to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Mexico Musings

While American foreign policy under the Obama administration continues to focus its attention on supporting the reconstruction of Iraq and halting the deconstruction of Afghanistan, the security threat at our southern doorstep deteriorates by the day. During the first six months of this year, Mexico has experienced an estimated 2,954 drug-related homicides, up from 2,030 during the same period last year. Despite President Felipe Calderon’s deployment of more than 75,000 regular army troops to fight the country’s drug war and to patrol the streets of its most dangerous cities—or, some would argue, because of it—Mexico now stands in danger of losing its de facto civil war against the cartels.

If this sounds alarmist, consider the statistics. So far this year, there have been more police officers assassinated in Mexico than there have been U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq or Afghanistan. In 2008, Mexico saw a total of approximately 6,300 drug-related killings—more than the total U.S. death toll in Iraq and Afghanistan combined since the onset of those campaigns (March 2003 and January 2001, respectively). Disturbingly, traffickers are turning to increasing degrees of torture and mutilation to maximize the intimidation factor of these killings. So far this year, more than 300 murder victims have been found bearing signs of torture, and more than 100 have been decapitated.

In addition to the raw numbers, the strategies, tactics and weaponry used by both cartel members and government forces all more closely resemble low-intensity military conflict than law enforcement. In the past two years, Mexican officials have seized more than 34,000 firearms and approximately 4.5 million rounds of ammunition. Since the beginning of last year, they’ve seized more than 2,600 fragmentation grenades. Plastic explosives and improvised explosive devices (IEDs) have also been seized. Tactically, the cartels, unlike U.S.-based organized crime groups, are one the offensive.

The one great distinction between Mexico’s war with the cartels and traditional, declared warfare is that the conflict is entirely the construct of one of the warring parties. For all of its complexities, the fundamental basis of the war is simple: the prohibition of substances for which there exists substantial consumer demand. Prohibition is the sine qua non of every beheading, every murdered soldier, every grenade attack, every lifeless body dissolved in a drum of acid. Mexico’s cartels have no ideology; if the central government can be said to have one, it is only to fight beyond any reasonable expectation of victory.