The failure of Drug war is glaringly obvious to judges, cops, wardens, prosecutors and millions more. Now calling for decriminalization, legalization, the end of prohibition. Let us investigate the Century of Lies.
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Welcome to this edition of Century of Lies. A bit later we’re going to hear an appeal from a Hungarian Civil Rights Union for you to help prevent a Russian Czar from becoming the new U.N. Drug Czar. But first, hang on to your hats!
You know for the past several weeks it’s been my privilege to interview many great authors producing books with the subject being the Drug War but I want to tell you that I’ve run into one here that just blows my socks off. I’m proud to welcome with us today, here on the Drug Truth Network, Mr. Tom Feiling, he’s author of this book I’m talking about: Cocaine Nation: How the White Trade Took Over The World. Welcome, Tom.
Tom Feiling: Thanks so much, Dean! The purpose of the book really, was to just look at what the prohibition experiment was trying to do, what the premises were and what it would take for it to succeed in all of the areas and pitfalls that it’s met along the way, between production of cocaine in South America, all the way through to the user’s nose or lungs in Europe or the States. Just all the different ways, in which it’s so hard to prohibit drug trafficking and then to move on and say, if prohibition isn’t working, what are the alternatives? What else might be more effective?
There’s a whole huge institution and huge organizations with lots of vested interests, which offer quite different reasons to have a stake in the system as it is at the moment, so it’s much about inertia and a bureaucratic inertia. You know the same problem has been faced by people who campaign for change in lots of different issues, it has to start with these fake irrational debates, so may be a few years down the line but I think you can see attitudes changing.
Dean Becker: You know I’ve never had a Coca-Cola with the actual coca in there but I have been to Bolivia and chewed the coca leaves and found it to be a much better way to imbibe the coca product than nose candy. Your thoughts on that?
Tom Feiling: The people that I met in Colombia, who are indigenous people who have been chewing coca in a traditional setting for thousands of years the whole cocaine itself, cocaine is a relatively a new, well, nineteenth century, but it’s a relatively new addition and it’s a bit like shooting coffee into your veins, it’s really not the right way to be taking it. Again, there are various reasons which I think I pointed out in the book that, the illegal market for drugs and the unfortunate side effects of it is that we get the drug in it’s most concentrated and most expensive form.
And yes that’s why, yes, there’s lots of crack in my neighborhood and there’s powdered cocaine in my neighborhood in England, yet I couldn’t find a coca leaf even if I wanted one. It’s too heavy. It’s too cheap. There’s no value in smoking coca leaf, so people here will never get to see what coca leaf is like. Like you say, coca leaf in its traditional form is a very benign, mild substance.
I’ve tried it, as well, myself after all my friends who gave it me, were saying, and I agreed with them, having tried chewing some coca leaf, was that it wasn’t really a physical effect, like coffee. I mean, you do get some mental sharpness from coffee, I suppose, but you also get a lot of nervous agitation.
With chewing coca leaf or drinking coca tea, there’s a very mild little stimulation to the brain. It feels like your thoughts are a little clearer. It was very pleasant. For example, I was talking to people in Colombia that said, back in the early seventies, when they were growing up, when they were kids, if they had an upset stomach, their grandmother would always make them a coca tea.
Coca tea was used as a general tonic for all kinds of ailments. If you had a headache or backache, you take coca tea. This is a side issue to the main thrust of my book about the criminalization of a completely harmless and long standing culture of chewing coca leaves is one of the effects of the War on Drugs. It’s not one that many people outside of the Andes are likely to know much about but that’s something that only agitates people in South America.
Dean Becker: We are speaking with Mr. Tom Feiling and he’s author of Cocaine Nation: How the White Trade Took Over The World. Tom, your book encapsulates, gives a recounting, if you will, of all of the various government involvement, corruption and so forth. Not just in Mexico, as currently being brought in focus, but in countries around the world. It’s a worldwide endeavor, is it not?
Tom Feiling: Yes. That’s one of the fateful pitfalls, really, is trying to prohibit this drug. The price goes up as a result of it, becoming harder to get it into the market. It’s much more valuable than it should be because cocaine is not particularly expensive thing to grow or produce but it’s illegal status makes it very valuable. There is a healthy demand for it and an unhealthy demand for it in the West. It’s really the context that you find it in.
For example, in Jamaica, a lot of the traditional industries in Jamica have fallen through the floor. Jamaica makes its money from tourism. It makes its money from Jamaicans leaving Jamaica and sending money home. It makes a bit of money from agriculture and a bit of money from Bauxite. Then, you’ve got cocaine.
Cocaine is worth, I think, twice the value of their tourist business, although they don’t produce cocaine. Cocaine passes through Jamaica on its way to the States or on it’s way to Europe. Still, there is such an intensive, there’s so much unemployment, the whole privatization program thing going through in Jamaica means unemployment is going up. The government, the state doesn’t employ people to the extent that it used to.
A Lot of the people growing up there, the people you see on the streets with money are involved in drugs. That’s what people have grown up with, that’s the example that’s being set. So, to resist that and in fact what you find when you look into it is that the DEA, all of the American agencies, they work around this. Someone on the ground is fully aware of this. You can’t stamp out corruption from the local police forces in Jamaica or Colombia or Mexico or even to a large degree in the States. The corruption seeps through and it’s something that you have to work with.
In the Bolivian case, what seems to have happened was, you would make busts from time to time just to show you were making some progress but essentially things were stitched up and the cocaine business was making a lot of rich people even richer. The American standard, they have bigger interests at stake than pursuing the Drug War and they have allies in the region that they didn’t want to correct them. So if they found those Allies involved in cocaine, there would have to be some sort of compromise but there wasn’t a rigorous enforcement of the prohibition of this drug because as I said, there are bigger issues at stake.
The costs, the actual policing costs, as you say, they’re astronomical but it keeps a lot of people in business to police this war. So, if you are able to overlook the terrible health consequences, the number of people sent to prison for small time drug dealing, the number of people with serious drug problems that go overlooked because their problems are criminalized or their concerns are marginalized.
On the plus side, from the prohibition establishment point of view, you have a lot of people working in prisons. You have a lot of police officers. You have a whole framework by which there is a clear set of Goodies and Baddies, for people who aren’t prepared to look at the real political situation on the ground. The nightly news paints a presents a clear picture of Good and Evil, of cops fighting terrible drug traffickers and this keeps people addicted to some kind of, well, it’s a phony narrative. It’s a phony war and it’s a very costly one.
If it shows anything, it shows that a rational political approach or a rational medical approach to drug consumption is the last thing on a lot of people’s minds. As with the corruption, there are bigger issues at stake.
Dean Becker: Once again we’re speaking to Mr. Tom Feiling author of a brand new book, just hitting the shelves, as I understand it, Cocaine Nation: How the White Trade Took Over The World. Tom, another quick quote from your book, talking about mafia culture in Colombia. It says: “Mafia culture seems to thrive wherever the law is weak in rural communities from Mexico to Pakistan. Wherever the state is distant and estranged, Mafiosi are seen as acting as protectors of the people and dispensers of justice.” Yes, when it’s the Hinterlands with no official presence, that’s where this thrives the best, right Tom?
Tom Feiling: Yes, certainly in the in Colombian case and I think in the Mexican case to some extent. You saw a little hint of that with Christopher Coke in Jamaica, the whole attempt to extradite him. Christopher Coke was a typical mafia figure in that he was a supplier of justice in a neighborhood in which police were ineffective suppliers of justice.
People there told me that if you have a problem in your neighborhood, if someone has wronged you, there is little point in going to the police. The police will be looking for bribes. They will be slow and ineffective. So you turn to your local Don, your local Mafia Don and he will dispense justice. So, once you have that kind of relationship with the local criminal power, then it becomes harder to take drugs out of that equation because people have relationships with that Don, with that Mafiosi and that too is what you saw in Jamaica.
A lot of people were loyal to Christopher Coke because he was providing some kind of police services, some kind of justice. In some cases he would help out school fees and health costs. All of these things that elsewhere, you see in States providing that. The economy is working sufficiently well, so that people can buy those services, those products and in a lot of countries, it’s not happening like that. The state is a long way away, so that’s where you get the organized bits of organized crime. Cocaine smuggling takes a lot of organization, that’s why it’s suited to very well organized criminals, in other words, a Mafia.
Dean Becker: We don’t have quite the same situation, currently in Mexico. It’s become more where they have a very terrible economic situation, very few jobs available and those jobs that are available tend to be either with the army, the police or the cartels. From my perspective, all of them tend to be sometimes agents of drug importation -- or exportation, I guess from their stance. Your thoughts on that?
Tom Feiling: What’s really commented in the press, from what I’ve seen, if you go back twenty years or so and cocaine was not moving through Mexico. There were no big Mexican cartels; I mean there had been drug production and drug running in Mexico for a long, long time but that didn’t involve cocaine.
In the eighties, cocaine went through the Caribbean and you saw a lot of these problems in the Caribbean. Mexico hadn’t seen any of this violence. It hadn’t seen this whole failed corruption via drug money. All of this comes down to the movement of cocaine. What I’ve tried to make out, the point I wanted to make in the book was, we need to be looking at, if this is the fruit of prohibition, once you think of criminality, drug criminality, with the corruption and the murder and the constant rivalry, vicious rivalries between cartels.
All of this is really the fruit of prohibition so to start thinking outside of box: How can we get Mexico back to the condition it was in or to move forward? Obviously Mexico wasn’t perfect before cocaine arrived but it’s got a lot worse since cocaine has arrived.
Now there are plenty other dangerous substances that people choose to take. There must be some system of regulation and management whereby this can become a trade which, yes, has health consequences, even the same as alcohol and tobacco too. The trafficking or the distribution of tobacco and alcohol are not in the hands of criminals and there are no cartels and there is no death rate that goes with it. I think in the Mexican case it’s particularly clear that there’s nothing inevitable about this. Mexico has changed an enormous amount in the last twenty years since cocaine arrived.
The attempt to tackle cocaine by going after “at source”, this was a novel strategy in the eighties, until then there were various points in the supply and production chain that you could attack. The last ten or twenty years, what it’s been is a relentless focus on trying to cap the problem “at source”. In other words where the coca bushes are grown and then the focus bleeds off a little bit actually because so much attention has been put on spraying the coca crop in South America.
In fact, a lot of the traffickers haven’t faced the same kind of relentless focus but what I suppose you’re seeing now is more acknowledgment that this tactic is going after the cocaine “at source”. It’s an attractive looking idea from a prohibitionist’s point of view but it’s been spectacularly ineffective. What the people in Colombia will say, politicians and others, is that to tackle the drug problem, however you choose to define it, you really need to start looking at the demand for the drug. Where’s this demand coming form? How can we reduce demand and how can we, and this is within the prohibitionist’s framework.
Obviously for those who are arguing, like myself, that we need to have a legal regulated framework for the cocaine business and then you are able to step outside that. We don’t need to be thinking in terms of “capping it at source” or “capping the demand” but for those who are thinking in terms of “harm production”, within the “still keep the drug illegal”, the thinking from what I can see in the States and in Europe was, the only way you’re going to be effective is to start looking at the demand for the drug because all of these strategies for going after it “at source” is recipe for disaster really, isn’t it?
Dean Becker: It is indeed. Now, Tom, now one sentence I just want to read from you book here: “In this climate of frustration and mistrust” -- and here we’re talking about the involvement, the corruption, the bribery that goes on, all over the world in regards to the Drug War but – “In this climate of frustration and mistrust cocaine has shown the poor that violence can be an effective weapon. It has democratized violence.” Your thoughts on that?
Tom Feiling: Yes, this is something that I came across when I was reading up on the cocaine trade in Colombia. It’s interesting that within the Colombian context, that’s been the growth industry, it certainly was in the eighties. A lot of people, a lot of poor Colombians found that they could make money through cocaine. So you saw a whole new emerging class of people who were basically Mafia and friends of the Mafia. It was a vehicle, really, by which for social mobility, for upward mobility. What went with it was a very cynical attitude to the law and society at large. Whereby what people saw from their social betters is the way that you get ahead and the way that you get out of it is by turning to violence.
Now, the political history of Colombia might encourage that point of view to some extent but the cocaine industry certainly cemented that idea that violence and corruption, the bullet or bribery or violence. Few people would resist either. Now to the extent that the cocaine business has been responsible for that attitude, it’s been a disaster. Colombia was already a politically unstable country but cocaine is the worst thing that could have happened.
I was surprised when I was there, that not many Colombians, there wasn’t much of a movement for legalization as a way out all of this and I suppose initially in Colombia, perhaps it was regarded as an American problem. Then in the eighties with Pablo Escobar fighting the Colombians and the Colombian government realized it was their problem as much as anyone else’s but always within this framework of prohibition and criminalization.
I think the only way you can lance that is to take it out of the hands of criminals. If we were able to do that then Colombia would be able be a much more peaceful country and a more less corrupt country. I think the bottom line in Colombian eyes is that this is an American policy. You can think what you like, until the Americans decide not to criminalize cocaine they will always be asking the Colombians to do a war of their bidding.
Dean Becker: Now Tom, I wanted to ask you something. A lot of times where in the on-line forum conversations, etc., I get the response from people, when I start talking about the legalization is: “Well, you can’t do that because they’ll just move on to more kidnappings and more barbarism”, that somehow, robbing them of the 300 billion dollars a year, to all these criminals worldwide would not make a difference. Your response to that?
Tom Feiling: Yes, I recognize what you’re saying. I’ve heard the same thing myself. Really, the suggestion is that a certain portion of the population will be criminal anyway. At the moment they’re criminals by selling drugs, but if you legalize drugs they’re going to find something else criminal to do. Which to my mind, it’s a very one dimensional and infantile way of looking at the problem.
What happened to the likes of Al Capone when alcohol was illegal in the States? Afterward, of course they looked for other sources of illegal income but, once you’ve legalized what was an illegal trade, essentially all those people who were shooting each other and smuggling this illegal product, they went and found something else to do. They found legal jobs. There’s no progress to be made if people just think that five percent of the population is just going to be criminal anyway. I can’t see a basis for that and it’s a very pessimistic way of looking at things. Isn’t it?
Dean Becker: It is indeed. Once again we’re speaking with Mr. Tom Feiling, author of Cocaine Nation: How the White Trade Took Over The World. If you want to better understand this drug war, I highly recommend you give it a read. Tom, we’ve got just a couple of minutes here and I wanted to talk about the closing chapters dealing with legalization and our prospects. Throughout your book, you have interviewed dozens of people. You’ve got some great quotes from Ethan Nadelmann, Jack Cole from Law Enforcement Against Prohibition and many others, but if you would, kind of close it out for us here and tell us about the prospects for legalization.
Tom Feilding: Well, in the book, I’d say it was easier to go through all the concerns that people have: the reactions, the guts and the instincts that people have: “You can’t legalize this stuff. Everyone will be taking cocaine”. I was happy to go through that and to look at the evidence that any of those fears and to lance some of those fears. It’s much harder to see how and when this might become a reality. How and when hard drugs, potentially dangerous drugs like cocaine might be legalized. Because people’s understanding is still, well, the basic idea that by legalizing, you have more, not less control over the distribution and production of a potentially a dangerous drug. People still don’t get that, do they?
They still tend to think that if you legalize it, what that means is that I can walk to a shop anytime I like – or my children can walk to a shop anytime that they like – and they can just by some cocaine. You have to make it clear that it’s about regulating, not about just leaving it to the free market. One other thing, one of the points I made was when you look at tobacco, there’s more and more awareness of the dangers of tobacco but there is no campaign to make them illegal, to make cigarettes illegal. There’s certainly more pressure to end advertising, to end marketing, to get rid of all the brand name recognition and product placement of cigarettes. There’s a real campaign to educate people. In the UK, if I want to give up smoking, I get free smoking cessation treatments through the National Health Service.
Nobody’s suggesting that we make them illegal. To make cigarettes illegal, that would be a disaster. Then you’d see the same sort of thing now with heroin and cocaine smugglers, the same kind of violence and corruption. No, to make cigarettes illegal would be ridiculous, but the point you’re making is: What are the prospects for legalization?
Well, for example in Portugal, they’ve decriminalized drug possession and that, from what I’ve seen, has generally been a very positive thing, in terms of, in fact, a lot of people had problematic relationships with heroin and cocaine and who are now in effective treatment programs and are working, to a far greater degree than before. It’s generally been judged to be a success, but perhaps when news of that kind of experiment filters though, people can afford to be a little braver.
Out and out legalization is a way off, by the looks. I’ve spoken to enough people who’ve been engaged in, such as I, in the War on Drugs for twenty or thirty years, who said: “I thought all of this, that we still wouldn’t be arguing this, come 2010, but we still are arguing about it.”
I don’t know how it looks to an American audience but I don’t hear enough voices calling for legalization, especially not from politicians, who I assume are very fearful of the reaction that they’ll get from the voters. I’m not exactly sure what will tip the balance.
One of the suggestions I make in the book is that the War on Drugs is simply too expensive a policy. I think there’s more recognition that throwing small time drug dealers in prison is costly and ineffective. Throwing people who have addictive relationships with drugs into prison is costly and ineffective. So I don’t know. We’ll have to see. We’ve got reason on our side. I don’t know if that helps.
Dean Becker: Do you have a website you’d like to point folks towards?
Tom Feiling: I have my own website called: tomfeiling.com and they’ve put a lot of material that I drew from when I was writing the book. A lot of articles and material, well, all aspects of cocaine itself and cocaine production in Colombia and trafficking and a lot of different materials that people might be interested in.
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The following message come to use from the drug policy website from the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union:
Woman: Would you want a Chinese government official to be the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights?
Would you want a North Korean diplomat to lead the International Atomic Energy Agency?
Would you want to have a rebel general in the Congo leading UNICEF?
I bet not.
And would you want Russia to appoint the new Director of the UN Drug Agency?
Because Ban Ki-moon, Secretary General of the United Nations has selected for the position of the UNODC director, a Russian diplomat in the service of the Russian government, a country with one of the worst records of drug policy and human rights. Russia is experiencing the most rapid increases of HIV infections on Earth.
This situation is exacerbated by the conditions in Russian prisons. For drug users, the Gulag is alive and well in these places. Prisoners with HIV and TB are often tortured and left to die. It is not surprising that Russia consistently seeks to block the inclusion of civil rights language from policies. Russia stated that the fight against AIDS is not linked to human rights. The UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, elected a Russian candidate, Yuri V. Fedotov for UN Drug Czar would be disastrous. Send Ban Ki-moon an e-mail telling him you do not want a Russian U.N. Drug Czar.
Dean Becker: The website to urge Ban Ki-moon to reconsider his decision is: sg@un.org
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You know what to do. End the madness.
Prohibido istac evilesco!
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For the Drug Truth Network, this is Dean Becker. Asking you to examine our policy of Drug Prohibition.
The Century of Lies.
Drug Truth Network programs, archived at the James A. Baker III Institute for Policy Studies.
Transcript
Transcript
Century of Lies July 11, 2010
The failure of Drug war is glaringly obvious to judges, cops, wardens, prosecutors and millions more. Now calling for decriminalization, legalization, the end of prohibition. Let us investigate the Century of Lies.
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Welcome to this edition of Century of Lies. A bit later we’re going to hear an appeal from a Hungarian Civil Rights Union for you to help prevent a Russian Czar from becoming the new U.N. Drug Czar. But first, hang on to your hats!
You know for the past several weeks it’s been my privilege to interview many great authors producing books with the subject being the Drug War but I want to tell you that I’ve run into one here that just blows my socks off. I’m proud to welcome with us today, here on the Drug Truth Network, Mr. Tom Feiling, he’s author of this book I’m talking about: Cocaine Nation: How the White Trade Took Over The World. Welcome, Tom.
Tom Feiling: Thanks so much, Dean! The purpose of the book really, was to just look at what the prohibition experiment was trying to do, what the premises were and what it would take for it to succeed in all of the areas and pitfalls that it’s met along the way, between production of cocaine in South America, all the way through to the user’s nose or lungs in Europe or the States. Just all the different ways, in which it’s so hard to prohibit drug trafficking and then to move on and say, if prohibition isn’t working, what are the alternatives? What else might be more effective?
There’s a whole huge institution and huge organizations with lots of vested interests, which offer quite different reasons to have a stake in the system as it is at the moment, so it’s much about inertia and a bureaucratic inertia. You know the same problem has been faced by people who campaign for change in lots of different issues, it has to start with these fake irrational debates, so may be a few years down the line but I think you can see attitudes changing.
Dean Becker: You know I’ve never had a Coca-Cola with the actual coca in there but I have been to Bolivia and chewed the coca leaves and found it to be a much better way to imbibe the coca product than nose candy. Your thoughts on that?
Tom Feiling: The people that I met in Colombia, who are indigenous people who have been chewing coca in a traditional setting for thousands of years the whole cocaine itself, cocaine is a relatively a new, well, nineteenth century, but it’s a relatively new addition and it’s a bit like shooting coffee into your veins, it’s really not the right way to be taking it. Again, there are various reasons which I think I pointed out in the book that, the illegal market for drugs and the unfortunate side effects of it is that we get the drug in it’s most concentrated and most expensive form.
And yes that’s why, yes, there’s lots of crack in my neighborhood and there’s powdered cocaine in my neighborhood in England, yet I couldn’t find a coca leaf even if I wanted one. It’s too heavy. It’s too cheap. There’s no value in smoking coca leaf, so people here will never get to see what coca leaf is like. Like you say, coca leaf in its traditional form is a very benign, mild substance.
I’ve tried it, as well, myself after all my friends who gave it me, were saying, and I agreed with them, having tried chewing some coca leaf, was that it wasn’t really a physical effect, like coffee. I mean, you do get some mental sharpness from coffee, I suppose, but you also get a lot of nervous agitation.
With chewing coca leaf or drinking coca tea, there’s a very mild little stimulation to the brain. It feels like your thoughts are a little clearer. It was very pleasant. For example, I was talking to people in Colombia that said, back in the early seventies, when they were growing up, when they were kids, if they had an upset stomach, their grandmother would always make them a coca tea.
Coca tea was used as a general tonic for all kinds of ailments. If you had a headache or backache, you take coca tea. This is a side issue to the main thrust of my book about the criminalization of a completely harmless and long standing culture of chewing coca leaves is one of the effects of the War on Drugs. It’s not one that many people outside of the Andes are likely to know much about but that’s something that only agitates people in South America.
Dean Becker: We are speaking with Mr. Tom Feiling and he’s author of Cocaine Nation: How the White Trade Took Over The World. Tom, your book encapsulates, gives a recounting, if you will, of all of the various government involvement, corruption and so forth. Not just in Mexico, as currently being brought in focus, but in countries around the world. It’s a worldwide endeavor, is it not?
Tom Feiling: Yes. That’s one of the fateful pitfalls, really, is trying to prohibit this drug. The price goes up as a result of it, becoming harder to get it into the market. It’s much more valuable than it should be because cocaine is not particularly expensive thing to grow or produce but it’s illegal status makes it very valuable. There is a healthy demand for it and an unhealthy demand for it in the West. It’s really the context that you find it in.
For example, in Jamaica, a lot of the traditional industries in Jamica have fallen through the floor. Jamaica makes its money from tourism. It makes its money from Jamaicans leaving Jamaica and sending money home. It makes a bit of money from agriculture and a bit of money from Bauxite. Then, you’ve got cocaine.
Cocaine is worth, I think, twice the value of their tourist business, although they don’t produce cocaine. Cocaine passes through Jamaica on its way to the States or on it’s way to Europe. Still, there is such an intensive, there’s so much unemployment, the whole privatization program thing going through in Jamaica means unemployment is going up. The government, the state doesn’t employ people to the extent that it used to.
A Lot of the people growing up there, the people you see on the streets with money are involved in drugs. That’s what people have grown up with, that’s the example that’s being set. So, to resist that and in fact what you find when you look into it is that the DEA, all of the American agencies, they work around this. Someone on the ground is fully aware of this. You can’t stamp out corruption from the local police forces in Jamaica or Colombia or Mexico or even to a large degree in the States. The corruption seeps through and it’s something that you have to work with.
In the Bolivian case, what seems to have happened was, you would make busts from time to time just to show you were making some progress but essentially things were stitched up and the cocaine business was making a lot of rich people even richer. The American standard, they have bigger interests at stake than pursuing the Drug War and they have allies in the region that they didn’t want to correct them. So if they found those Allies involved in cocaine, there would have to be some sort of compromise but there wasn’t a rigorous enforcement of the prohibition of this drug because as I said, there are bigger issues at stake.
The costs, the actual policing costs, as you say, they’re astronomical but it keeps a lot of people in business to police this war. So, if you are able to overlook the terrible health consequences, the number of people sent to prison for small time drug dealing, the number of people with serious drug problems that go overlooked because their problems are criminalized or their concerns are marginalized.
On the plus side, from the prohibition establishment point of view, you have a lot of people working in prisons. You have a lot of police officers. You have a whole framework by which there is a clear set of Goodies and Baddies, for people who aren’t prepared to look at the real political situation on the ground. The nightly news paints a presents a clear picture of Good and Evil, of cops fighting terrible drug traffickers and this keeps people addicted to some kind of, well, it’s a phony narrative. It’s a phony war and it’s a very costly one.
If it shows anything, it shows that a rational political approach or a rational medical approach to drug consumption is the last thing on a lot of people’s minds. As with the corruption, there are bigger issues at stake.
Dean Becker: Once again we’re speaking to Mr. Tom Feiling author of a brand new book, just hitting the shelves, as I understand it, Cocaine Nation: How the White Trade Took Over The World. Tom, another quick quote from your book, talking about mafia culture in Colombia. It says: “Mafia culture seems to thrive wherever the law is weak in rural communities from Mexico to Pakistan. Wherever the state is distant and estranged, Mafiosi are seen as acting as protectors of the people and dispensers of justice.” Yes, when it’s the Hinterlands with no official presence, that’s where this thrives the best, right Tom?
Tom Feiling: Yes, certainly in the in Colombian case and I think in the Mexican case to some extent. You saw a little hint of that with Christopher Coke in Jamaica, the whole attempt to extradite him. Christopher Coke was a typical mafia figure in that he was a supplier of justice in a neighborhood in which police were ineffective suppliers of justice.
People there told me that if you have a problem in your neighborhood, if someone has wronged you, there is little point in going to the police. The police will be looking for bribes. They will be slow and ineffective. So you turn to your local Don, your local Mafia Don and he will dispense justice. So, once you have that kind of relationship with the local criminal power, then it becomes harder to take drugs out of that equation because people have relationships with that Don, with that Mafiosi and that too is what you saw in Jamaica.
A lot of people were loyal to Christopher Coke because he was providing some kind of police services, some kind of justice. In some cases he would help out school fees and health costs. All of these things that elsewhere, you see in States providing that. The economy is working sufficiently well, so that people can buy those services, those products and in a lot of countries, it’s not happening like that. The state is a long way away, so that’s where you get the organized bits of organized crime. Cocaine smuggling takes a lot of organization, that’s why it’s suited to very well organized criminals, in other words, a Mafia.
Dean Becker: We don’t have quite the same situation, currently in Mexico. It’s become more where they have a very terrible economic situation, very few jobs available and those jobs that are available tend to be either with the army, the police or the cartels. From my perspective, all of them tend to be sometimes agents of drug importation -- or exportation, I guess from their stance. Your thoughts on that?
Tom Feiling: What’s really commented in the press, from what I’ve seen, if you go back twenty years or so and cocaine was not moving through Mexico. There were no big Mexican cartels; I mean there had been drug production and drug running in Mexico for a long, long time but that didn’t involve cocaine.
In the eighties, cocaine went through the Caribbean and you saw a lot of these problems in the Caribbean. Mexico hadn’t seen any of this violence. It hadn’t seen this whole failed corruption via drug money. All of this comes down to the movement of cocaine. What I’ve tried to make out, the point I wanted to make in the book was, we need to be looking at, if this is the fruit of prohibition, once you think of criminality, drug criminality, with the corruption and the murder and the constant rivalry, vicious rivalries between cartels.
All of this is really the fruit of prohibition so to start thinking outside of box: How can we get Mexico back to the condition it was in or to move forward? Obviously Mexico wasn’t perfect before cocaine arrived but it’s got a lot worse since cocaine has arrived.
Now there are plenty other dangerous substances that people choose to take. There must be some system of regulation and management whereby this can become a trade which, yes, has health consequences, even the same as alcohol and tobacco too. The trafficking or the distribution of tobacco and alcohol are not in the hands of criminals and there are no cartels and there is no death rate that goes with it. I think in the Mexican case it’s particularly clear that there’s nothing inevitable about this. Mexico has changed an enormous amount in the last twenty years since cocaine arrived.
The attempt to tackle cocaine by going after “at source”, this was a novel strategy in the eighties, until then there were various points in the supply and production chain that you could attack. The last ten or twenty years, what it’s been is a relentless focus on trying to cap the problem “at source”. In other words where the coca bushes are grown and then the focus bleeds off a little bit actually because so much attention has been put on spraying the coca crop in South America.
In fact, a lot of the traffickers haven’t faced the same kind of relentless focus but what I suppose you’re seeing now is more acknowledgment that this tactic is going after the cocaine “at source”. It’s an attractive looking idea from a prohibitionist’s point of view but it’s been spectacularly ineffective. What the people in Colombia will say, politicians and others, is that to tackle the drug problem, however you choose to define it, you really need to start looking at the demand for the drug. Where’s this demand coming form? How can we reduce demand and how can we, and this is within the prohibitionist’s framework.
Obviously for those who are arguing, like myself, that we need to have a legal regulated framework for the cocaine business and then you are able to step outside that. We don’t need to be thinking in terms of “capping it at source” or “capping the demand” but for those who are thinking in terms of “harm production”, within the “still keep the drug illegal”, the thinking from what I can see in the States and in Europe was, the only way you’re going to be effective is to start looking at the demand for the drug because all of these strategies for going after it “at source” is recipe for disaster really, isn’t it?
Dean Becker: It is indeed. Now, Tom, now one sentence I just want to read from you book here: “In this climate of frustration and mistrust” -- and here we’re talking about the involvement, the corruption, the bribery that goes on, all over the world in regards to the Drug War but – “In this climate of frustration and mistrust cocaine has shown the poor that violence can be an effective weapon. It has democratized violence.” Your thoughts on that?
Tom Feiling: Yes, this is something that I came across when I was reading up on the cocaine trade in Colombia. It’s interesting that within the Colombian context, that’s been the growth industry, it certainly was in the eighties. A lot of people, a lot of poor Colombians found that they could make money through cocaine. So you saw a whole new emerging class of people who were basically Mafia and friends of the Mafia. It was a vehicle, really, by which for social mobility, for upward mobility. What went with it was a very cynical attitude to the law and society at large. Whereby what people saw from their social betters is the way that you get ahead and the way that you get out of it is by turning to violence.
Now, the political history of Colombia might encourage that point of view to some extent but the cocaine industry certainly cemented that idea that violence and corruption, the bullet or bribery or violence. Few people would resist either. Now to the extent that the cocaine business has been responsible for that attitude, it’s been a disaster. Colombia was already a politically unstable country but cocaine is the worst thing that could have happened.
I was surprised when I was there, that not many Colombians, there wasn’t much of a movement for legalization as a way out all of this and I suppose initially in Colombia, perhaps it was regarded as an American problem. Then in the eighties with Pablo Escobar fighting the Colombians and the Colombian government realized it was their problem as much as anyone else’s but always within this framework of prohibition and criminalization.
I think the only way you can lance that is to take it out of the hands of criminals. If we were able to do that then Colombia would be able be a much more peaceful country and a more less corrupt country. I think the bottom line in Colombian eyes is that this is an American policy. You can think what you like, until the Americans decide not to criminalize cocaine they will always be asking the Colombians to do a war of their bidding.
Dean Becker: Now Tom, I wanted to ask you something. A lot of times where in the on-line forum conversations, etc., I get the response from people, when I start talking about the legalization is: “Well, you can’t do that because they’ll just move on to more kidnappings and more barbarism”, that somehow, robbing them of the 300 billion dollars a year, to all these criminals worldwide would not make a difference. Your response to that?
Tom Feiling: Yes, I recognize what you’re saying. I’ve heard the same thing myself. Really, the suggestion is that a certain portion of the population will be criminal anyway. At the moment they’re criminals by selling drugs, but if you legalize drugs they’re going to find something else criminal to do. Which to my mind, it’s a very one dimensional and infantile way of looking at the problem.
What happened to the likes of Al Capone when alcohol was illegal in the States? Afterward, of course they looked for other sources of illegal income but, once you’ve legalized what was an illegal trade, essentially all those people who were shooting each other and smuggling this illegal product, they went and found something else to do. They found legal jobs. There’s no progress to be made if people just think that five percent of the population is just going to be criminal anyway. I can’t see a basis for that and it’s a very pessimistic way of looking at things. Isn’t it?
Dean Becker: It is indeed. Once again we’re speaking with Mr. Tom Feiling, author of Cocaine Nation: How the White Trade Took Over The World. If you want to better understand this drug war, I highly recommend you give it a read. Tom, we’ve got just a couple of minutes here and I wanted to talk about the closing chapters dealing with legalization and our prospects. Throughout your book, you have interviewed dozens of people. You’ve got some great quotes from Ethan Nadelmann, Jack Cole from Law Enforcement Against Prohibition and many others, but if you would, kind of close it out for us here and tell us about the prospects for legalization.
Tom Feilding: Well, in the book, I’d say it was easier to go through all the concerns that people have: the reactions, the guts and the instincts that people have: “You can’t legalize this stuff. Everyone will be taking cocaine”. I was happy to go through that and to look at the evidence that any of those fears and to lance some of those fears. It’s much harder to see how and when this might become a reality. How and when hard drugs, potentially dangerous drugs like cocaine might be legalized. Because people’s understanding is still, well, the basic idea that by legalizing, you have more, not less control over the distribution and production of a potentially a dangerous drug. People still don’t get that, do they?
They still tend to think that if you legalize it, what that means is that I can walk to a shop anytime I like – or my children can walk to a shop anytime that they like – and they can just by some cocaine. You have to make it clear that it’s about regulating, not about just leaving it to the free market. One other thing, one of the points I made was when you look at tobacco, there’s more and more awareness of the dangers of tobacco but there is no campaign to make them illegal, to make cigarettes illegal. There’s certainly more pressure to end advertising, to end marketing, to get rid of all the brand name recognition and product placement of cigarettes. There’s a real campaign to educate people. In the UK, if I want to give up smoking, I get free smoking cessation treatments through the National Health Service.
Nobody’s suggesting that we make them illegal. To make cigarettes illegal, that would be a disaster. Then you’d see the same sort of thing now with heroin and cocaine smugglers, the same kind of violence and corruption. No, to make cigarettes illegal would be ridiculous, but the point you’re making is: What are the prospects for legalization?
Well, for example in Portugal, they’ve decriminalized drug possession and that, from what I’ve seen, has generally been a very positive thing, in terms of, in fact, a lot of people had problematic relationships with heroin and cocaine and who are now in effective treatment programs and are working, to a far greater degree than before. It’s generally been judged to be a success, but perhaps when news of that kind of experiment filters though, people can afford to be a little braver.
Out and out legalization is a way off, by the looks. I’ve spoken to enough people who’ve been engaged in, such as I, in the War on Drugs for twenty or thirty years, who said: “I thought all of this, that we still wouldn’t be arguing this, come 2010, but we still are arguing about it.”
I don’t know how it looks to an American audience but I don’t hear enough voices calling for legalization, especially not from politicians, who I assume are very fearful of the reaction that they’ll get from the voters. I’m not exactly sure what will tip the balance.
One of the suggestions I make in the book is that the War on Drugs is simply too expensive a policy. I think there’s more recognition that throwing small time drug dealers in prison is costly and ineffective. Throwing people who have addictive relationships with drugs into prison is costly and ineffective. So I don’t know. We’ll have to see. We’ve got reason on our side. I don’t know if that helps.
Dean Becker: Do you have a website you’d like to point folks towards?
Tom Feiling: I have my own website called: tomfeiling.com and they’ve put a lot of material that I drew from when I was writing the book. A lot of articles and material, well, all aspects of cocaine itself and cocaine production in Colombia and trafficking and a lot of different materials that people might be interested in.
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The following message come to use from the drug policy website from the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union:
Woman: Would you want a Chinese government official to be the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights?
Would you want a North Korean diplomat to lead the International Atomic Energy Agency?
Would you want to have a rebel general in the Congo leading UNICEF?
I bet not.
And would you want Russia to appoint the new Director of the UN Drug Agency?
Because Ban Ki-moon, Secretary General of the United Nations has selected for the position of the UNODC director, a Russian diplomat in the service of the Russian government, a country with one of the worst records of drug policy and human rights. Russia is experiencing the most rapid increases of HIV infections on Earth.
This situation is exacerbated by the conditions in Russian prisons. For drug users, the Gulag is alive and well in these places. Prisoners with HIV and TB are often tortured and left to die. It is not surprising that Russia consistently seeks to block the inclusion of civil rights language from policies. Russia stated that the fight against AIDS is not linked to human rights. The UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, elected a Russian candidate, Yuri V. Fedotov for UN Drug Czar would be disastrous. Send Ban Ki-moon an e-mail telling him you do not want a Russian U.N. Drug Czar.
Dean Becker: The website to urge Ban Ki-moon to reconsider his decision is: sg@un.org
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You know what to do. End the madness.
Prohibido istac evilesco!
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For the Drug Truth Network, this is Dean Becker. Asking you to examine our policy of Drug Prohibition.
The Century of Lies.
Drug Truth Network programs, archived at the James A. Baker III Institute for Policy Studies.
Transcript provided by: Ayn Morgan of www.eigengraupress.com