Conclusions and consequences abroad – Econlib

Consequences of the War on Drugs™ Abroad

In 1996, Chuck Grassley of the Senate Committee on International Narcotics Control said that a recent poll found that Eighty percent of Americans consider foreign policy their top concern stopping the trafficking of illegal drugs into the United States. The senator was responding to his own concerns that elevating the importance of treatment, the Clinton administration was not engaged in a long-standing aggressive interdiction policy as a guarantor of national security. The United States was then and remains the world’s largest market for illegal drugs, with much of the supply coming from foreign countries such as Mexico, Afghanistan, Colombia, Peru and China. Thus, efforts to reduce the supply of illicit substances have not been limited to domestic prohibition but have extended to attempts to disrupt production in other countries.

Although such foreign policy often enjoys broad support domestically, it has had a profound negative impact on the nations involved at the other end. Indeed, as Foldvary (2013) observes, US drug policy tends to exert a destabilizing effect that creates violent cartels, emboldens existing rebel factions, foments drug lord imperialism, and gives rise to clandestine states. The tools often used in these unsuccessful efforts should seem familiar to even the most casual observer of contemporary American foreign policy, including foreign aid, military and police assistance and training, intelligence and counterinsurgency operations, development programs, and nation-building efforts (Pembleton and Weimer, 2019). Too often, the objectives of countries receiving this aid are not completely aligned with national drug policy, fomenting even more instability.

Map Colombia provides an excellent overview of these destabilizing political quagmires. This joint Colombia-US operation has its roots in the struggle between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – People’s Army (FARC), an armed guerrilla group that was one of the main factions of a fratricidal conflict dating back to 1964. In 1998, President Andrés Pastrana, hoping to gain their trust and assistance in fostering peace, granted the FARC a plot of land the size of Switzerland as a demilitarized zone in which the military and law enforcement would not be able to enter (Rosen, 2021). . The FARC rewarded Pastrana’s gesture of good faith by relocating its criminal operations – including kidnapping, extortion, illegal mining, and drug production and trafficking – to their newly granted autonomous region.

Pastrana turned to the United States for help in ending his internal conflict and the power that organized crime had over Colombian citizens. Refusing to involve America in Colombia’s internal armed conflict, the Clinton administration reoriented Pastrana’s Plan Colombia initiative to align with its own interests and end the capacity of Colombian guerrillas and cartels to traffic drugs into the United States. While Pastrana recognized the role of drug production in the development of his country. instability, its initial concern was to contain the FARC, which included the manual destruction of their crops. In exchange for U.S. financial aid, he ultimately agreed to devote eighty percent of aid resources to strengthening police and military operations, which would later play a critical role in protecting against aerial spraying of herbicides on coca crops.

There are conflicting views on whether these measures were effective in reducing supply. U.S. officials claimed that Colombian coca production declined by 75 percent between 2001 and 2011, while United Nations observers reported an insignificant and negligible decline. What is beyond doubt is that Colombia had to circumvent U.S. interests because it needed aid, and in 2007, then-Colombian President Uribe guaranteed continued cooperation from the Bush administration by renaming the armed factions narco-terrorists, thus aligning with American desires to fight. both global drug supply chains and terrorism. Although Uribe succeeded in disrupting large guerrilla and criminal organizations, these were replaced by smaller, more difficult to identify organizations. Furthermore, drug trafficking continued unabated and the increase in counter-narcotics units had a balloon effect, deporting some production to neighboring states such as Peru and Panama, while increasing Mexico’s importance as a distribution and trafficking hub, thereby exacerbating that country’s own situation. destabilizing issues related to US drug policy.

In a previous post, I noted that because the majority of drug production takes place outside U.S. borders, much of the violence observed occurs elsewhere, offshoring and hiding this very real human cost. Aligning with U.S. interests did not work for Colombia in the 1980s, when attempts to capture and extradite popular drug lords were met with nationalist opposition that then encouraged powerful traffickers to assassinating troublesome government officials (Bagley, 1988). This still doesn’t work today, with coca production reaching a historic peak in 2020, and the largest producers and traffickers being paramilitary groups which trained and funded by the United States in military counter-drug operations. This violence and destabilization of society, as well as the growing power of cartels and organized crime, is repeated throughout Central America, in Mexico, Afghanistan and other countries where the United States exerts its hegemonic influence to continue their War on Drugs™.

Conclusion

I titled this series A Brief Overview of the Social Costs of Drug Prohibition, and although it is somewhat lengthy, compared to the length of ongoing conversations necessary on this subject, it is brief. This set of self-justified policies, which aim to disrupt supply, simply cannot succeed as long as demand exists. In the absence of a commitment to harm reduction solutions, demand has been and will remain stubbornly inelastic. Meanwhile, our prison system continues to expand, the center of perverse incentives around cheap labor and political influence. To fill these prisons, the police increasingly resemble a military occupation force, too often focusing their efforts on already disadvantaged subgroups, thereby helping to create the cycles of poverty, crime and recidivism that it is supposed to help put an end to it. This criminalization of a public and mental health problem has led to more preventable deaths, as treatment is stigmatized and often seen as an option, while the potency of drugs is increased in order to maintain profit margins. Not only is violence present in our own communities, but it pales in comparison to the violence and instability that national drug policy causes in countries where illicit entrepreneurs arise to meet our demand. Yet, despite all these costs imposed on society, supply and demand remain constant and unchanged.