Supply, Demand, and the Mexican Drug War
Political analysis
ANDREW BAST
The war looks eerily familiar: beheadings, assassinations of police and public officials, terrorized businesspeople, extorted schoolteachers, and in five years more than 230 American civilians dead in the crossfire. All this could easily describe the battle in Afghanistan or Iraq, but the reality is closer to home, where an increasingly gruesome war is threatening to boil over the United States’ southern border with Mexico.
Summing up decades of policy, three former Latin American heads of state recently declared, “The war on drugs has failed.” Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil, César Gaviria of Colombia and Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico, working together on the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy, argued, “Prohibitionist policies based on eradication, interdiction and criminalization of consumption simply haven’t worked. . . . Today, we are further than ever from the goal of eradicating drugs.”
Considering the money and resources committed to the War on Drugs over the years, the claim is mind-boggling. Pinning down exact figures is difficult, but some experts estimate that nearly $1 trillion has been spent in total. In 2009, $14 billion more has been budgeted to programs spanning twelve agencies of the US federal government, from the Small Business Administration and Veterans Affairs to State, Interior, and Defense Departments. Every one of them, according to the Office of National Drug Control Policy, is an “important partner.” Experts at the Drug Policy Alliance say the money spent this year by state and local governments could top $40 billion, noting that many others would place the number higher.
A recent sweep cracked down on cartels operating in Canada, Mexico and across the United States, demonstrating that this is still the same old war. Without a doubt, the 755 arrests yanked offenders off the streets. But the strategy of stemming supply has, over the long run, proven shortsighted.
More money and guns abroad will prove ineffective in increasing US influence over cartels and drug supply routes flowing into the country. Instead, American influence over the scourge of international narco-trafficking will be best leveraged domestically: Quelling what is rapidly becoming an imposing foreign policy issue depends on increasing treatment at home rather than waging a bigger battle abroad.
Arresting traffickers and aiding the Mexican government to combat the cartels focuses on the supply side of the problem. Accordingly, Congress passed the Merida Initiative last June, providing a half-billion dollars in aid annually to Mexico as a partner in trying to shut down the supply chain. As the cartels grow more capable, as well as more brazen, it seems that taking them down is a logical first step. But a few harsh realities suggest that stepping up the offensive will do little, if anything, to actually cut the flow of narcotics into American cities.
In his testimony before Congress last year, John Walsh of the Washington Office on Latin America offered three convincing arguments why US drug policy has to “move beyond the self-defeating supply-control fixation.” First, the “balloon effect” turns the war against drug cartels into a game of whack-a-mole. Narco-supply chains are too vast and sprawling to turn off like a spigot. Controlling supply is like squeezing a balloon: A pinch in one place expands it in another. Walsh says this is exactly what happened in the early 1990s. Enforcement officials clamped down on supply routes through the Caribbean and South Florida. In turn, Colombian traffickers quickly struck new alliances with illicit groups in Mexico, laying the groundwork for the eruption of warfare today.
Second, Walsh points matter-of-factly to the ready availability of cocaine, despite the time and money spent to stem supply. Targeting cartels was supposed to drive up cocaine prices inside the United States. But as Walsh noted, “Cocaine prices have in fact been falling, not rising.” Since peaking in the early 1980s, both retail and wholesale prices of cocaine subsequently dropped to about a third of what they were, where they have remained for the last two decades.
Lastly, there is the “needle in a haystack” problem with regard to Mexico, the United States’ second largest trading partner. Recent statistics show that a million people and 300,000 cars cross the border each day, as do tens of millions of shipping containers each year. With the benefits of all this trade comes the impossible challenge of picking out the illicit from the licit.
At some point, one has to consider the demand side of the equation. First, no matter how much aid is delivered to Colombia or Mexico, stopping the flow at the source will prove impossible. And more importantly, if no one in America wanted to buy all these drugs, the cartels would have to take their business elsewhere.
“The traditional approach to addressing demand has been to throw them in prison,” Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of Drug Policy Alliance Network explained to me in a recent conversation. “Why not define treatment more broadly?”
Nadelmann said that many tend to think that tackling demand means instituting more D.A.R.E. programs to keep kids off drugs, but it is actually hardcore users who account for the bulk of consumption. However, serious addicts have few options to get themselves out of the downward spiral of addiction.
“It’s more and more difficult to get treatment unless you get arrested,” Nadelmann said.
For instance, users now can only get methadone in a clinic. Making it available in pharmacies by prescription–as is done in many European countries–would make a popular treatment far more accessible. Accessibility to treatment would mean fewer users, reduced demand and less incentive for cartels to angle for power and position on the country’s border.
Nadelmann offered two more options. The first is legalization. Across the country there is a widening discussion, and greater policy momentum, toward decriminalization and a new understanding of what is acceptable. Second, Nadelmann said, “The most effective form of treatment is actually not the threat of incarceration, but it is actually paying users for staying clean, like a reward.” Nadelmann acknowledged the difficult politics involved, but pointed out, “It actually costs less than locking them up.”
Both proposals, in fact, are politically flammable. But in the face of ineffective policies and the threatening violence next door, all options have to be on the table.
Few foreign policy issues are so intimately tied to domestic policy as the War on Drugs. For the first time in decades, America is faced with the gruesome reality of a nearby war. A recent Pentagon study suggested that Mexico could soon be the world’s newest “failed state,” pushing refugees into the United States and creating havoc in a region that has been wholly at peace for more than a century. Yet, demand at home drives the conflict as much, if not more, than ills abroad. Facing that fact will put users, and not cartels, at the heart of a new policy.
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