Platform : In the Long Run, Contra Drugs Barely Matter

Several years ago I did an article about the continual claims that, depending on whether you’re hearing from left- or right-wing sources, it’s the fascists or the CIA on the one hand or the Communists on the other, who are supplying drugs to the U.S., and if they weren’t we wouldn’t have a drug problem.

While there is often some nexus between international politics or terrorism on the one hand and drug dealing on the other, that connection wasn’t nearly as easy to stop as it’s sometimes made out to be. Moreover, if it were stopped, the impact on the U.S. drug problem would be small.

I’m not sure whether the FDN [the Spanish acronym for the main Contra organization] were trafficking cocaine to South-Central L.A. or not; given some of the truly appalling things they were doing in Nicaragua, nothing would surprise me.

It’s frequently the case that when the U.S. decides to makes a covert intervention in another country, it will do so through unsavory persons or organizations. Sometimes there’s no one else to back. Sometimes there is somebody else--Eden Pastora, for example, in the Nicaragua case, who had been an opponent of Somoza, was also out there fighting against the Sandinistas. The FDN was basically a bunch of former secret policemen.

But frequently there’s not much of a choice. And, even if the right choice is made, the organization you’re dealing with is still engaged in violence and, frequently, illicit ways of financing it. It’s no surprise if some of the people involved are in the drug business.

As horrible as crack dealing is, it’s important not to overstate the significance of what happened. It’s one thing to say that some of, or most of, or even all of the cocaine that was turned into crack by a particular South Central drug dealer was being brought north by, or on behalf of, the Contras. It’s another thing to say that if it weren’t for the Contras there wouldn’t be a crack problem in South Central. If the market is there, someone is going to supply it. Lots of cities, New York for example, where there has been no suggestion the FDN was active, also developed a serious crack problem. The end of the war in Nicaragua certainly didn’t change the crack problem in Los Angeles.

Cocaine may have been very important to the FDN, but the FDN wasn’t very important to cocaine.

I think one of the worst things about drug policy is that Americans keep looking somewhere else for a solution. “Oh, if only Burma didn’t grow poppies, we wouldn’t have heroin addicts. Oh, if only Colombia only didn’t produce cocaine we wouldn’t have crack-heads.” That’s just not the case.

If we want to solve our drug problem, we have to solve it here, through a combination of preventive education, enforcement and treatment.

There have, however, been other situations when our decision to intervene abroad has come back to bite us--not only in terms of drugs, but the threat of terrorism. We ought to think carefully about any decision to intervene, how to intervene and whom to work with. When the Afghanis were fighting the Russians, U.S. money and arms were funneled through Pakistani intelligence. The Pakistanis, in turn, chose the nastiest, most terroristic, most Islamic-fundamentalist, most anti-Western piece of the Afghan resistance to receive the money and the weapons.

That’s an instance where I think different choices might have led to different outcomes.

It was always going to be true that you were unleashing shoulder-fired Stinger anti-aircraft missiles on the world and that once they were in the hands of bandits they were eventually going to get in the hands of other bandits. On the other hand, I believed at the time that supplying the Afghan rebels and allowing them to give the Red Army a bloody nose would contribute substantially to the collapse of the Soviet Union. And I believe that it did.

That’s not to say that supporting bad guys is anything to be proud of. In the post-Cold War era there ought to be fewer temptations to do so.