Pyrrhic Victories in the Drug War

That all of our well-intentioned efforts to interdict the supply of illegal drugs to this country have not succeeded is hardly news. Extensive coverage of the so-called war on drugs has even made the reasons for the failure familiar to the casual newspaper reader or television viewer. Our borders are vast and penetrable. Major drug suppliers are active, mobile--and clever. If we cut them off at the Florida coast, they reappear in Houston, Boston or Los Angeles. Above all, the demand for drugs has been steady, and expanding. The result--huge profits flowing from a brisk trade.

Despite the defeats, we continue to engage in what has become almost a ritual of law enforcement. We fear that if we don’t at least try to stop the flow, the nation will be ever more heavily swamped in the flood-tide of dangerous and illegal substances. And so persists the costly but ineffectual business of interdiction.

Rarely, however, has anyone considered the positive side of failure--or, more to the point, the dangers of success.

Our most spectacularly dangerous victory was the Nixon Administration’s 1969 “Operation Intercept.” This not only tied up the San Ysidro checkpoint every weekend; it also introduced the poison paraquat into Mexican marijuana fields. The program unquestionably discouraged the importation of marijuana from Mexico into California.

But Californians did not cease using marijuana. On the contrary, while the Mexican variety declined, the leaf appeared in large quantities from Colombia, Panama, Thailand, Hawaii and similarly exotic places. Some enterprising Californians even decided to go into the agri-drug business themselves and planted substantial crops in Humboldt and Mendocino counties.

The new domestic and imported varieties, however, were different from the Mexican stuff. Law-enforcement success at interdiction resulted in what could be called “drug-hardening.” When we raise the risks of illegal drug production by making it more costly, producers respond by developing more potent varieties. When I studied drug law enforcement in the 1960s, confiscated marijuana typically contained around 0.5% to 1.5% tetrahydrocannabinol--THC--the drug’s active ingredient. That is still being sold on the streets but both kids and cops call it “ragweed.” The drug of choice, Humboldt County’s finest, is sinsemilla, a sophisticated agri-product containing up to 8% THC. Parents who smoked marijuana 20 years ago may not realize how much more addictive and disabling sinsemilla can be for their teen-age children.

The most recent example of the unintended drug-hardening phenomenon is our joint federal-state effort attacking sinsemilla fields in Northern California. Whatever might be the effects of the enforcement drive on the economy of Garberville, it has encouraged a portion of the Los Angeles and Bay Area markets to shift from the moderately dangerous sinsemilla to the even more destructive hard pellets of cocaine known as rock or crack.

Now suppose we could destroy the Bolivian cocaine fields and cut off the flow of 90% of the cocaine traffic to the United States. Would that solve the drug problem or make it even worse?

Lurking in the background are the much more potent synthetic “designer” drugs that might replace cocaine. Fentanyl, for example, is around 100 times as powerful as morphine and 20 times stronger than heroin. Fentanyl’s medicinal analogs, sufentanyl and lofentanyl, are 2,000 and 6,000 times stronger than morphine. This kind of wallop can produce bizarre, destructive and unpredictable toxic effects. Moreover, those trained in faster living through chemistry can synthesize these powerful narcotics relatively inexpensively and with readily available materials.

Law-enforcement officials recognize the dangers, but seem not to comprehend entirely the potentially destructive link between interdiction strategies and drug-hardening.

Is there fentanyl in our future? Look at our past interdiction efforts.

Instead of pumping enormous amounts of money into efforts to stop drug traffic, Congress would do better to allocate those funds for education and rehabilitation.

The good news is that even with the huge amounts of money that were allocated to them, efforts to cut off drug supplies failed. The bad news is--Lord help us if we succeed! We could find ourselves looking at a designer-drug problem more potent and destructive than anything we’ve yet seen.