Junkie Nation

Dope, especially the business of dope, and the response it provokes in various governments, not to mention the breathless response it provokes in such institutions as the press, is a thrilling spectator sport, and nothing is more spellbinding than the numbers.

Colombia exports to the United States about a ton of cocaine a day, an average of 1,000 kilograms. It costs the larger of the cartels about $4,000 to put a kilo on the street in Los Angeles, about 25% of the average wholesale price. According to a former accountant for the Cali cartel, that $4,000 cost-to-market includes raw material, processing, protection, storage, bribery, pilots, aircraft, airstrip, aircraft insurance, flight fuel, transportation of the dope through Mexico, and wholesale distribution in the United States.

Yet, even by the most economical, in-house methods, it costs the same cartel an additional 25% to launder its money. Handling the proceeds of the sale, in terms of organizational cost, is just as expensive as the product. More expensive, in fact. The burden of laundering and investing profits has now become so onerous that it has spawned an entire collateral service industry in Colombia, an illegal one, which has attracted the interest of more than a hundred venture capitalists there. They’re known as money brokers, and many major traffickers simply subcontract the work to them, paying about 30% after investment.

The late Tom Forcade, founder of High Times magazine, once said that there are only two kinds of smugglers: those who need fork lifts and those who don’t. That was 20 years ago, in the early days of the industry’s expansion. Today you know you’re a major trafficker when the money is a bigger headache than the dope.

An estimated $25 billion in U.S. dope revenue is repatriated by Colombian traffickers annually. And that’s just the money generated by cocaine. Of the 13 million regular users of illicit drugs in America, 77% spend (or also spend) their money on marijuana; about a million buy heroin regularly (or at least frequently) half of whom are considered addicts. But what we pay in hard currency for the dope we use--even after adding the $17 billion budgeted annually at the federal level, and perhaps that much again at combined state and local levels, to combat its use, a total of about $50,000 a minute--is dwarfed by the price we have paid over the last two decades in the erosion of our civil liberties and corruption of our public institutions to wage what the government promotes as its War on Drugs.

Much has been written about drug policy in the United States, and much oratory has been expended in support of the current offensive, but only an animated feature could convey the story of this nation’s disastrous attempt to legislate morality. Only a cartoon could effectively communicate the slapstick. It was Lord Byron, a man who could be trusted to misbehave in the absence of drugs, who said: ‘And if I laugh at any mortal thing, / ‘Tis that I may not weep.’

‘Drug Crazy,’ by Mike Gray, is one of the few contributions to the recent dope literature that displays any sense of humor on the subject. That is not to say that his book is not serious, merely that Gray does not let his passion for reason subvert a felicitous and very entertaining prose style. The sanity he brings to the subject is refreshing. His is easily the most enjoyable, and arguably the most instructive, of four new books on drug policy, three of which cover what is pretty much the same territory. If you pick only one, pick his.

Stipulating the inarguable, that prohibition as policy has produced the opposite of what was intended, Gray makes an airtight case for reform and a very convincing case for legalization, concluding that “a drug-free America has no more chance of success than an alcohol-free America.” (Page 188) Opening his book in present-day Chicago, and flashing back from there to the early 1920’s, when bootleggers ran the city, he shows how the failure of the current drug war was inevitable.

Examining modern drug policy without first considering the sordid history of alcohol prohibition in the United States is like trying to appreciate Revelation without ever having read Genesis. Gray’s research, among other things, counters the claims of those who argue that dope use would automatically rise in the absence of criminal sanctions. The effect of Prohibition, he reports, was a dramatic drop in the consumption of beer, while the sale of hard liquor doubled. The equation was reversed by Repeal, and for the next 10 years the total amount of alcohol consumed remained about the same. “State liquor laws held down consumption about as well as Prohibition, but without all the gunplay,” he writes.

It is difficult to imagine any circumstance under which cocaine and heroin might be more accessible than they are today. They travel virtually unimpeded into the country. Wholesale prices are lower, street-grade purity levels are higher, and availability is greater than ever. Interdiction is merely notional, a consoling hypothesis: It’s not substantive; it’s a state of mind. Dope of all kinds today, with the possible exception of cheap marijuana, is just a phone call away, and anyone can get his hands on as much as he cares to ingest. As Gray points out, “You can buy it in the schoolyard, in the alley, and you can buy it in small Indiana farm towns that just a few years ago had never even heard of the stuff.” (Page 189) Not only is it cheap, but chances are you can have it delivered.

In the 1970s interdiction efforts significantly disrupted the importation of bulk shipments of Colombian marijuana to the United States, especially in the Caribbean. And among the more palpable fruits of that success was the industrialization of cocaine, which Colombian traffickers found to be far easier to transport and by far the better bargain profit-wise, pound-for-pound. Spawned by that same success was a domestic marijuana-growing enterprise of enormous scope in the United States, the commercial and esthetic iterations of which parallel those of the California wine industry.

Gray points to a University of Maryland survey of high-school students who said that the drug most difficult to score today is not marijuana, but alcohol. Which should not be surprising, he suggests: “Alcohol distribution is controlled by the government. Drug distribution is controlled by the mob.”

The history of the U.S. drug war is a history driven by various zealots--office holders, empire-building bureaucrats and others--who in the main know little about drugs, but who have found a hard line on their use be an easy position to hold. Discovering a wealth of emotional rhetoric open to almost effortless manipulation, they have promoted the drug threat often for no greater reason than to make political capital.

As a result, the “U.S. Constitution is now so riddled with drug-emergency exceptions it looks like the flag over Fort Sumter,” writes Gray. (196) And it is therefore not surprising to find the forces of reform being led by the nation’s libertarians, among them William F. Buckley, Jr., former Secretary of State George P. Schultz and economist Milton Friedman, all of whom see in current policy an eating away of our civil rights. Ours is a republic at least predicated on the notion that rights are not something the government grants but something the government cannot take away.

Dirk Chase Eldredge is among those conservative who advocate legalization. His book, “Ending the War on Drugs,” while as incisive in many ways, is not so sophisticated as Gray’s, but that may be one of its strengths. Square by comparison, in both outlook and style--there is nothing elegant about the way Eldredge writes--it may be that much more persuasive to those on the other side of the issue.

Pointing out that 80% of the deaths associated with heroin and cocaine are the result not of drug use, but of the illegal nature of the market, Eldredge gives special weight to the crime and corruption of public officials engendered by current policy. Everybody is on the take. A further danger of that policy, he notes, is the disrespect for the law that it breeds: “It is estimated that 63 percent of Americans born since 1955 have used illegal drugs at one time or another. Each year, more than 1.1 million of our citizens are arrested for either possession of or trafficking in illicit drugs.”

Criminalizing the behavior of a substantial number of the country’s citizens, at the expense of pursuing truly dangerous felons, has led to a near collapse of the criminal justice system in the United States. Courts have become virtually inaccessible. In many jurisdictions today the typical probation or parole officer had more than 200 offenders to supervise. What remained a fairly stable prison population throughout the nation’s history has more than tripled since prosecution of the drug war. The U.S.Bureau of Prisons--the federal system alone--spends about $2 billion a year to house drug offenders. Between 1980 and 1990 the number of men and women being held in state and federal custody more than doubled, to just over a million. In the next six years it doubled again. By 1992 many facilities were operating at over 200% capacity. That year the federal system was holding about 60,000 prisoners, operating at 162% capacity, and half of them were in for dope.

Eldredge, in delivering the bad news from the front, arrives with logic, coherence and common sense on his side, but Gray, reporting from the same battlefield, offers the more rewarding and comprehensive analysis.

Michael Massing’s “The Fix” is executed very professionally, and written strictly by the numbers. He opens with a picture of drug addiction on the streets of New York, cuts from there to the making of policy in Washington, and after that all you need to know is in the subtitle. A persuasive advocate of increased spending on drug treatment 7/8 Nixon’s policy--Massing offers beyond that little more than more of the same. His beef is not with the bloated budget itself, but merely with its priorities. The current budget is weighted 66% on the supply side (enforcement) and 34% on the demand side (treatment). He would like to see the percentages reversed. The government’s preoccupation with recreational dope use is a mission he enthusiastically supports. Massing’s enlistment is permanent--choosing sides among bureaucrats, he is in the drug war to stay.

“Webs of Smoke,” by Kathryn Meyer and Terry Parssinen, examines the development of the international narcotics trade, specifically the traffic in opium, and the relationships that developed between traffickers and politicians, chiefly from 1907 to 1949. Academic without being particularly scholarly, the book will appeal to only the more strung-out dope policy junkies.

It is hard to envision a time when any of the chest heaving will end. The drug war accounts for the livelihood of thousands of people whose interests are heavily vested in its structural inability to deliver any positive results--politicians, traffickers, bureaucrats and law-enforcement officials employed by the drug enforcement industry, not to mention everyone on the take--good guys and bad guys on all sides of the issue and on both sides of the gun. We prosecute the drug war not because it is effective, but because it is fundable. The DEA, many of whose agents will admit as much off the record, was budgeted last year at $1.2 billion. Ask the police chief in your local community what percentage of his budget is earmarked for drug enforcement; ask him to explain “equitable sharing,” authorized by Congress in 1985, whereby local law-enforcement agencies share in the proceeds of assets forfeited in federal drug cases in which they participate. We are a nation hooked on drug enforcement. Like the citizens of Colombia and Mexico, we now live in a narcoeconomy. We’ve seen this policy in action before. We heard the same government line from soldiers prosecuting another of our disastrous wars: those GIs quick to inform us from the jungles of Indochina that in order to save the village we had to destroy it.