In a significant expansion of the war on drugs, the United States has begun training an elite unit of counter narcotics police in Ghana and planning similar units in Nigeria and Kenya as part of an effort to combat the Latin American cartels that are increasingly using Africa to smuggle cocaine into Europe.The growing American involvement in Africa follows an earlier escalation of anti drug efforts in Central America, according to documents, Congressional testimony and interviews with a range of officials at the State Department, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Pentagon.
Some specialists have expressed scepticism about the approach. Bruce Bagley, a professor at the University of Miami who focuses on Latin America and counter narcotics said that what had happened in West Africa over the past few years was the latest example of the "Whac-A-Mole" problem, in which making trafficking more difficult in one place simply shifts it to another.
"As they put on the pressure, they are going to detour routes, but they are not going to stop the flow, because the institutions are incredibly weak -- I don't care how much vetting they do," Professor Bagley said. "And there is always blow-back to this. You start killing people in foreign countries -- whether criminals or not -- and there is going to be fallout."
Yes, it may be possible to push trafficking out of one broken West African nation. But why? What's the point? So we can chase it to the next country? The very fact that Western Africa has become a significant stop on the global trade route is evidence in itself of the failure of the drug war, a failure that won't be straightened out by doubling down on the same strategy. Indeed, drug traffickers are in Africa as a direct result of U.S. pressure on trading routes first in the Caribbean, and then in South and Central America.
Lessons From History
The spraying was part of Operation Condor, a joint Mexican-American venture aimed at eradicating Mexican pot that had been going on since 1975. General José Hernández Toledo, fresh from the 1968 student massacres in Mexico City, led 10,000 soldiers into the hills of Sinaloa, Durango, and Chihuahua. "Tons of drugs were destroyed, production was reduced, prices rose, but drugs continued to flow into the American market, although in lesser quantity of Mexican origin.
The action had several consequences. One, a rise in the price of pot in the United States, was intended. Others weren't. The growth of domestic marijuana farming might have eased pot shortages slightly during the '70s, but the industry was hardly the high-tech, high-efficiency bud-producing machine it is today. The encouragement of a shift from pot to cocaine importation among drug smugglers was a much more significant development in the short term. Coke, more valuable by weight and with a less detectable odor, was more profitable and much easier to move. A minor player in the coke trade in the '70s, Mexico would a decade later come to rival the Caribbean. By the late '90s, it would dominate the industry.
As domestic pot production began to take off in Northern California, the quality of home-grown marijuana available to Americans was steadily improving and U.S. pot farming was allowed to expand with near impunity .Neither California Gov. Jerry Brown nor the Carter administration was particularly concerned with going after West Coast growers. Brown smoked pot himself,
The DEA, for its part, had no clue of how much marijuana was being grown in the United States. In 1984, the agency estimated that domestic annual production was 2,100 metric tons and represented only 12 percent of total consumption. Government officials "were still screaming about all these dynamite, super strength strains of Mexican marijuana. The American marijuana market, however, remained dependent on imported and outdoor herb, which are both susceptible to shortfalls. Pot grown outdoors is harvested in the fall--meaning that, by summer, supply would be depleted nationwide. Combined with foreign eradication efforts, these seasonal shortages helped open the door for cocaine, as users substituted an available drug for an unavailable one.
Federal survey data show that coke use among 18- to 25-year-olds doubled from 1977 to 1979. By the end of the decade, 40 percent of Americans in that age bracket admitted to trying the drug. "If present trends go unchecked," prophesied a 1979 DEA report, "a vast new youth market for the substance could be opened. Carter's own top drug-policy official, Bourne, saw little danger in it, writing in a 1976 article that coke "is probably the most benign of illicit drugs currently in widespread use. At least as strong a case could be made for legalizing it as for legalizing marijuana. Short acting--about 15 minutes--not physically addicting, and acutely pleasurable, cocaine has found increasing favour at all socio-economic levels in the last year."
In July 1981, Time magazine illustrated its cover story "High on Cocaine" with a shot of a martini glass filled with coke. "Whatever the price, by whatever name, cocaine is becoming the all-American drug," the piece suggests. Today, in part precisely because it is such an emblem of wealth and status, coke is the drug of choice for perhaps millions of solid, conventional and often upwardly mobile citizens--lawyers, businessmen, students, government bureaucrats, politicians, policemen, secretaries, bankers, mechanics, real estate brokers, waitresses."
A snort in each nostril and you're up and away for 30 minutes or so. Alert, witty and with it. No hangover. No physical addiction. No lung cancer. No holes in the arms or burned-out cells in the brain. Instead, drive, sparkle, energy. If it were not classified (incorrectly) by the Federal Government as a narcotic, and if it were legally distributed throughout the U.S. (as it was until 1906), cocaine might be the biggest advertiser on television."
Reagan redoubled efforts at curbing imports, further militarized drug policy, and brought about mandatory-minimum sentences for minor drug offences.
"Drugs are bad, and we're going after them. As I've said before, we're taking down the surrender flag and running up the battle flag. We're going to win the war on drugs."
In 1980, the FBI's Uniform Crime Report lists fewer than 100,000 arrests for heroin and cocaine, which are tabulated together. By 1989, that figure had jumped to more than 700,000.
But the first battle Reagan would fight in his war was against marijuana, which required laying siege to the once-ignored base of liberal resistance, Northern California. His Campaign Against Marijuana Production began in the harvest season of 1983. U-2 spy planes and military helicopters flew over the Golden State looking for green crops.The DEA reported seizing 64,579 plants at an estimated value of $130 million. Federal-law-enforcement figures marched in the streets chanting, "War on Drugs! War on Drugs!" The 1984 haul was three times larger. Nationally, pot plant seizures rose from about 2.5 million in 1982 to more than 7 million in 1987. Unsurprisingly, such sustained effort drove up the price of marijuana.
The DEA closely tracks drug prices and purity, although it doesn't often make the data available publicly. It did so most recently in 2004, and the numbers include a startling, if misunderstood, observation. "The marijuana price trends...are not highly correlated with trends in prices of other drugs over time," the report reads. "While the price of powder, heroin, and, to a lesser extent, crack were falling during the 1980s, the average price of marijuana generally rose." An eighth of an ounce of pot in 1981 was going for $25. It stayed roughly the same in 1982. By 1986, it was up to $53, and it hit a high of $62 in 1991, a 150 percent rise over 10 years. Coke, meanwhile, become much more affordable. It cost nearly $600 a gram in 1982. As Reagan directed resources toward the pot battle, coke's price began to tumble. By 1989, it was down to $200 a gram, cheaper in real terms than it had been during the last national coke binge a century earlier. At the same time, average purity nearly doubled.
The use of other drugs either stayed the same or increased as people started looking for a different cheap high. Reported use of inhalants nearly doubled, from 4 to 7 percent between 1981 and 1987. Cocaine, heroin, and meth use also rose in the '80s. Heroin dropped in price by a third between 1981 and 1988. By 1996, it had dropped by two thirds. The price of crack was falling, as well. The DEA started tracking it only in 1986, around the time the drug's use became widespread. Its price fell by about half over the next five years. In rural areas, the price of meth fell by a quarter from the early '80s to the middle of the decade. The stated goal of U.S. drug policy is to lower demand by increasing price. Reagan's drug war did precisely the opposite.
The banking industry had been banged up by the recession, and it was glad to have the influx of capital brought by the cocaine biz. The Economist reported that 44 Miami banks were given international charters in 1982, compared to 10 in 1978. Another 36 foreign banks opened branches in Miami during that period. At least 40 city banks refused to report cash deposits of more than $10,000, as required by law, throughout the '70s and into the '80s. And at least four banks, authorities estimated, were bought and controlled by drug dealers. As their trade spread across the country, dealers found still other banks eager to deal in cocaine cash.
By the late '80s, a few banks had begun to come under suspicion as their money laundering became too blatant. But the penalties were so laughably small that even when the banks did get caught, they often still benefited from the transaction. A Beverly Hills branch of the American Express Bank was caught laundering $100 million belonging to Juan Garcia Abrego, operator of a notorious cartel with close connections to the then Mexican government. In a 1994 congressional hearing, Chairman Henry Gonzalez, a Texas Democrat, noted that the $950,000 fine--less than 1 percent of the laundered cash--meant that the bank still profited from the exchange. Citibank, which since the 1950s had been the most active U.S. financial institution in Mexico, was in a perfect position when cocaine trafficking moved from the Caribbean westward. Mexican playboy Raul Salinas was discovered to have laundered hundreds of millions through Citibank. His brother, President Carlos Salinas, a prominent ally in the U.S. drug war, was estimated to have made off with some $5 billion himself.
In two and a half years of investigation beginning in 1986, Sen. John Kerry's committee looking into links between the CIA and the Contras also turned up ties between drug cartels and the banking industry. One hearing involved the Medellin cartel's top accountant, Ramon Milian Rodriguez, who'd been busted laundering billions through New York-based bank First Boston. A committee member suggested that he "must be very clever" to have cleaned up so much cash. "Well, First Boston paid a fine of $25,000 and I'm doing 42 years," Rodriguez responded. "Who do you think is cleverer?"
Carter and Reagan, for different reasons, had both ignored cocaine as it grew in popularity in the late '70s and early '80s. The market had become so flooded that the price of a gram of coke plummeted from $600 in 1982 to $400 in 1984. The coke industry pulled itself out of this apparent death spiral through an innovation that helped it reach thousands of new consumers: crack. Cheap and packing a quick punch, crack was the perfect $5, five-minute escape. It began to spread throughout the nation, especially in poor African-American communities.
The introduction of the new drug came, predictably, with violence, as rival organizations struggled to control territory and competition. Miami in the late '70s and early '80s was mirrored by Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and New York in the mid-'80s. Murders committed by African-Americans surged beginning in 1984, rising from just over 30 per 100,000 people to more than 50 in the early '90s, according to Justice Department statistics. Coke use steadily fell throughout the late '80s and leveled off toward the end of the decade. It's stayed fairly flat since, although the DEA sporadically claims big victories in disrupting supply.
The most recent chest-pounding began in August 2007. Drug Czar John Walters began making the press rounds, Walters came with a small staff and a stack of glossy pages making the case that the war on drugs was being won. Prices for cocaine, he said according to a person in the meeting, were rising fast. That can only mean a decline in supply, he explained.
Congress was in the midst of a debate over a controversial $1.4 billion aid package intended to help Mexico wage its own drug war. The drug czar, however, had a credibility problem: In the past, he'd pointed to several other price increases and supply drops that quickly reversed themselves and left him and the media looking silly. USA Today finally took the bait, making the price increase its lead story in a September paper. From there, word spread that there was a shortage of coke out there.
When the DEA was asked for price data for the years 2005 and 2006 the agency declined to provide it. When a request was filed under the Freedom of Information Act we were told in a letter that there was no "public benefit" to releasing the data. So did the DEA really have the cocaine cartels in retreat? Quite the opposite, actually: Coke exporters were simply finding more lucrative markets than the economically stricken United States.
Producers are "not going to see a significant impact [from a decline in American consumption] because they've seen huge increases in demand, and therefore profit, from Europe," André Hollis, who was the senior counternarcotics adviser to Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld from 2001 to 2003, told me. Just a few years prior, he explained, Americans were doing about five times more blow than their Old World fellows. Today, coke-consumption levels in the United States and Europe are roughly equal. It's hard to confirm his claim statistically. But United Nations surveys have shown rapid rises in cocaine use in Western European countries during the '00s. And press accounts from across Western Europe have talked about a continental coke binge similar to America's in the '80s
Donald Semesky, the DEA's chief of financial operations, has noted that 90 percent of the 1.7 billion euros that were registered as having entered the United States in 2005 came through Latin America, "where drug cartels launder their European proceeds." As the cocaine market has shifted, use along its new trade routes has grown. A UN report notes increases in use not only in South and Central America but also in Africa, where seizures jumped ten-fold from 2003 to 2006 and then doubled again between 2006 and 2007.
West African nations, which make Colombia and Mexico look like models of transparent governance, have become important stopping-off points for coke traffickers on the way to Europe. Out of work African youth make cheap foot-soldiers and drug runners with expensive equipment and weaponry have little to fear from airports barely electrified and cops cars. with empty gas tanks. "Africa is under attack," warned the UN's Office on Drugs and Crime executive director Antonio Maria Costa in a Post op-ed in 2008. "States that we seldom hear about, such as Guinea-Bissau and neighbouring Guinea, are at risk of being captured by drug cartels in collusion with corrupt forces in government and the military." From West Africa, the coke heads to Spain and Portugal. Spain, according to the UN, had levels of coke use equivalent to those in the United States for the first time ever in 2006.
From the drug cartels' perspective, the beauty of shifting exports to Europe is that the resulting decline in shipments to the United States does indeed lead to an increased price here. While expanding their business elsewhere, the cartels are getting more money per unit of American product. The ultimate goal of the war on drugs, of course, is to reduce addiction, and there are signs that raising the price of coke hasn't done it among hardcore users. Up-to-date data is tough to come by, but some cities have begun drug-testing folks who get arrested. In D.C., where the practice began in 1984, a little more than 40 percent of arrestees tested positive for cocaine in January 2007. That percentage barely budged as the price rose.
