It has long been known that the most cost-effective way to combat the drug trade is through treatment, prevention, and education at home.  These methods continue to be underfunded in the the main consumer countries.  Instead, the focus is on supply, a policy choice that has, among many other disastrous implications, served to push routes around the globe in a cat and mouse war of attrition between cartels and law enforcement agencies.  In recent years, West Africa has experienced an uptick in interdictions of illicit drugs bound for Europe.  This has inevitably led to official discussion, mainly among foreign states and agencies, of the need to confront the trafficking problem through militarised, punitive, supply-focused means.  Civil society and observers of the drug war elsewhere have been arguing against such an approach.  GDPO itself has produced two reports on the region.  Last November a report discussed the strategic goals that underlie the agenda being pushed by foreign actors, and this month another policy brief highlighted the risks involved in a War on Drugs type approach to the region.  The Institute of Development Studies released a paper on West Africa this month, written by a technical advisor to GDPO.  The report is a critique of the calls for “building up increased regional law enforcement and interdiction capacities to curb illicit flows.”  In a similar vein, the West Africa Commission on Drugs, a group of experts headed by former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, this month released a comprehensive assessment of the present situation in the region.  The group warn against the adoption of War on Drugs-style policies and reiterate a now common conclusion: “that criminalisation of drug use worsens health and social problems, puts huge pressures on the criminal justice system and incites corruption.”  Instead they recommend partial decriminalisation, and that drugs be treated as a public health concern.  Such high-level advocacy is an important step in saving West Africa from the drug policy related nightmares experienced elsewhere.

The Commission’s report is online here.

The punitive element of the War on Drugs at home has led to record rates of incarceration.  Of the world’s entire prison population, twenty five percent are now in the US.  More than half the inmates are there on drug-related charges, and of these the majority were arrested for simple possession.

On this note, here is an excerpt from a speech given in 1993 by Federal Judge Jack B. Weinstein of Brooklyn, New York, at the Cardozo School of Law, in Manhattan:

“The sentencing guidelines which Congress requires judges to follow result, in the main, in the cruel imposition of excessive sentences, over-filling our jails and causing unnecessary havoc to families, society, and prisons. Most judges today take it for granted, as I do, that the applicable guideline for the defendant before them will represent an excessive sentence. Drug cases, particularly those involving low-level smugglers or “mules” who are poverty-stricken, present a special problem, because the sentences mandated are so overwhelming.  I am now so depressed by the drug situation that this week I sent a memorandum to all the judges and magistrate judges in my district stating:

One day last week I had to sentence a peasant woman from West Africa to forty-six months in a drug case. The result for her young children will undoubtedly be, as she suggested, devastating. On the same day I sentenced a man to thirty years as a second drug offender – a heavy sentence mandated by the Guidelines and statute. These two cases confirm my sense of frustration about much of the cruelty I have been party to in connection with the “war on drugs” that is being fought by the military, police, and courts rather than by our medical and social institutions.  I myself am unsure how this drug problem should be handled, but I need a rest from the oppressive sense of futility that these drug cases leave. Accordingly, I have taken my name out of the wheel for drug cases. This resolution leaves me uncomfortable since it shifts the “dirty work” to other judges.  At the moment, however, I simply cannot sentence another impoverished person whose destruction can have no discernible effect on the drug trade. I wish I were in a position to propose some solution but I am not. I’m just a tired old judge who has temporarily filled his quota of remorselessness. 

Until we can address and deal with the rotten aspects of our society that lead to drug dependence, we will not deal effectively with the drug problem.  I believe that in the future we will look back on this horrendous period of overpunishment as a temporary American aberration. Apart from everything else, the expense of this foolishness is too great for the taxpayers to bear.”

On May 16th the Colombian government announced an agreement had been reached with the FARC guerrilla on the latest issue under discussion at the peace talks in Havana, Cuba: “A Solution to the Problem of Illicit Drugs.”  The points agreed upon, which were provided in an accompanying text, suggest some positive steps away from the repressive, militarised approach which has been so disastrous for the people of Colombia and the region.

In a break with the official discourse of the past, illicit drugs are separated from the internal conflict between the FARC and the government.  There is a recognition that “the continuation of [illicit] cultivation is linked partly to the existence of conditions of poverty, marginalisation and weak state presence, as well as the existence of criminal organisations dedicated to narco-trafficking.”  Eradication operations have been a mainstay of government policy, but if the agreement holds this looks set to change.  The FARC have long been calling for crop substitution and alternative development in rural areas, and while the government has adopted some piecemeal efforts, the text implies such initiatives will now take precedence and will be guided by the freshly created “community assemblies”, thereby granting some local democratic governance to drug policy.  Crop destruction should be voluntary the text says, but in cases where growers refuse the government will go ahead with forced eradication.  Fumigation is not mentioned, but the head of the government delegation to the talks has said spraying would remain an option in “extreme cases.”  The text notes that the FARC remain opposed to spraying and want all eradication to be manual.

There are important prescriptions for consumption-side policies, which will “focus on human rights and public health” and on evidence-based solutions, to be implemented with the participation of local communities.  A shift in approach has been in the works for some time.  “Almost literally, they took what we had said in the Government Advisory Commission on Drug Policy,” one of its members told the Colombian press.  The Commission was created by President Santos last year.  At its head was ex-president Cesar Gaviria, one of the former Latin American leaders who had earlier been part of a report that argued for a “paradigm shift” in drug policy in the region.  The Commission has endorsed the position articulated in a widely-publicised Organisation of American States report, initiated at the behest of Santos and Guatemalan President Otto Pérez Molina and published in May 2013.  Perhaps unsurprisingly given the impact of the War on Drugs in the region, the first multilateral body to present a harsh condemnation of the policies was primarily Latin American.  The two reports represented high-level recognition of the problems inherent in the drugs policies pushed by Washington for the previous four decades.

There are other important elements of the agreement worth mentioning here: a commitment from the  government to focus on the higher-level members of the drug trade, on money laundering, trafficking in precursors, and corruption; a joint recognition of the need for global consensus on drug policy; government recognition of the use of coca by indigenous peoples; and it was also announced that the FARC will give the government the locations of anti-personnel mines used to protect crop growing areas.

But optimism should be tempered, not least by the text’s own caveat that “nothing is agreed until everything is agreed.”  The agreement on one of the most politically charged issues in the country comes just prior to elections in which the incumbents are being challenged by a party openly hostile to the continuation of the talks.  It is difficult not to assume that this was a motivator in getting the deal done on time.  There are indications the FARC made some concessions in the short term.  In a statement released immediately after the agreement was announced, the FARC’s negotiating team said there were one or two elements that still needed to be addressed, as there also were, they added, in the previous two agreements on ‘Integral Agricultural Development Policy’ and ‘Political Participation’.   Three issues were raised in relation to drugs.  First, FARC representatives reemphasised the need for a new government approach that “focused its efforts on the persecution and imprisonment of the main beneficiaries of the illicit drug market, as well as in the dismantling of transnational trafficking networks and money laundering.”  This would be supported by a Commission made up of experts and civil society “for the design of a new democratic and participative national anti-drug policy.”  A second point called for the immediate suspension of chemical spraying and for reparations to be paid to the victims, and a third for the creation of a national conference with a principal task of looking into the commercialisation and production of drugs by the paramilitaries.

The Colombian government’s history of promises and law-making on vital issues also invites scepticism.  The text may acknowledge indigenous use of coca, but the rights of the indigenous population, which are guaranteed in Colombia’s constitution, are routinely violated.  And how can the appalling effect of fumigation be squared with the government’s new commitment to “take into consideration the respect for human rights, the environment and the buen vivir” during eradication operations?  It is also not clear how much of the wording was simply a FARC effort to save face; the mention of a rejection of “intervention in the internal affairs of states” seems almost comical given extent of US involvement in Colombia.  Until these agreements are codified and transferred into practice, it is impossible to judge their merit.

Moving away from the talks in Havana, there are broader issues that need to be addressed before a ‘solution’ can be seriously discussed.  As the talks opened, Colombian officials made very clear that the country’s economic model was not up for negotiation.  But it can hardly be separated from the drugs issue.  Aggressive economic ‘liberalisation’ over the past two decades has exacerbated already shocking levels of wealth and land inequality.  The fact that UNDP statistics show 1% of land owners hold half the agricultural land is central to any discussion of illicit cultivation.  As is the health of Colombia’s rural economy.  One impact of the economic model has been the progressive undermining of traditional agricultural production, a process that reached its zenith in 2012 with the coming into effect of a Free Trade Agreement with the United States.  US-subsidised goods now ‘compete’ with local produce unprotected by tariffs.  Oxfam reported at the time that a predicted 1.8 million farmers in Colombia would be adversely effected.  The charity outlined three survival options for farmers: join the armed groups, leave the countryside and join the millions of displaced living in slums surrounding the major cities, or switch to producing coca.  In this economic environment, crop-substitution and alternative development are merely bandages.  Agricultural workers staged enormous strikes in 2013 and again this year in response to these developments.  In both cases, farmers’ organisations cited the impact of neo-liberal reforms and the need to defend national production as the reasons they had resorted to such measures.

Beyond a meek reference to “corruption” the text makes no mention of the government’s long-established involvement with drug traffickers or its links – well-documented and both tacit and overt – with the paramilitaries, the rural death squads turned criminal syndicates heavily reliant on trafficking and other illicit activities.  One important role of the paramilitaries is to crush dissent to the economic model and the unjust social and political dispensation.  Human rights activists are systematically murdered in Colombia, and the number of killings has been rising in recent years – seventy eight were killed in 2013.  It is the most dangerous place in the world to be a trade union leader; “In Colombia it’s safer to form a guerrilla group or a criminal band than a labor union,” states one opposition political leader.  The declaration of a new left-wing political movement called the Patriotic March notes the following:

“[The] economic model has led to increased degradation of sovereignty, greater concentration and centralization of wealth, increasing social inequality, insecurity and pauperization of labor, social and environmental depredation and the continued appropriation of social wealth and the fruits of labor through the dispossession and displacement of the population.”

Forty eight Patriotic March activists have been killed in the last two years.  In rural areas, paramilitary violence has driven people from their land, paving the way for corporate takeover; a former paramilitary described the nexus of collusion between the paramilitaries, the corporations and the government: “We went in killing, others followed buying, and the third group legalized.”  The number of displaced people, in a country where around 1o% of the population have been forced from their homes, has been rising in recent years, and communities seeking to return to their land face armed opposition; 71 people trying to get back home were killed between 2006 and 2011, with only one case leading to a criminal sentence.

For these reasons, the same context discussed in relation to the drugs issue needs to be applied to any talk of ‘peace’.  An agreement between the FARC and the government is hardly the end of violence in Colombia – there is another very real war where only one side has the weapons.  Here is a recent example, one more story in a history of paramilitary terror so shocking it sometimes defies belief.  In the city of Buenaventura  on the Pacific coast, paramilitaries – often referred to as “successor groups” following a demobilisation process widely considered to have been a sham – “restrict residents’ movements, recruit their children, extort their businesses, and routinely engage in horrific acts of violence against anyone who defies their will.”  Thirteen thousand people, mainly afro-Colombians, fled the city last year.  A report by Human Rights Watch explains why:

“Buenaventura residents in different parts of the city told Human Rights Watch that successor groups have houses known as casas de pique, or “chop-up houses,” where they take victims to dismember them, and from which neighbors can hear their screams and pleas for help. For example, for several months during 2013, residents of a waterfront neighborhood witnessed members of a successor group taking people into a “chop-up house” on a weekly basis. Afterward the members of the group would emerge carrying plastic bags, which the neighbors believed contained the dismembered corpses of the victims. On some occasions, screams coming from the house led witnesses to believe the victims were being dismembered alive. Residents saw the group take several victims’ remains to a nearby island on the bay.”

The report found that “authorities have not protected the population” from the paramilitaries, and, “even more troublingly, several inhabitants reported witnessing members of the police meet with the successor group in their neighborhoods.”  Unsurprisingly, “there is a profound distrust in authorities and a pervasive sense of defenselessness in the face of the groups’ constant abuses.”  As is generally the case with paramilitary violence and terror, impunity reigns.  Government officials have tried to downplay the seriousness of the situation by pointing to a falling homicide rate, but HRW note that this is only the result of “disappearances” not being classified as homicides.  The report gives an example of the price of resistance:

“Many residents of Buenaventura have lost all faith in the ability of the government to protect them. On September 13, 2013, hundreds of them participated in a march for peace led by the local Catholic bishop. The march wound through several of the city’s neighborhoods and ended on a soccer field, where the participants prayed for an end to the violence. The next day, a 23-year-old man’s head appeared on the field, with parts of his body scattered through nearby neighborhoods. When his family sought justice for the murder, they began receiving death threats and fled the city, joining the ranks of Buenaventura’s displaced.”

The group responsible are known as “Los Urabeños”, one of the largest drug trafficking organisations in the country.  In 2012 Human Rights Watch’s World Report noted that such groups “continue to grow, maintain extensive ties with public security force members and local officials, and commit widespread atrocities.”  Until this is addressed, talk of ‘peace’, while an important step, retains a hollow ring.  And, where drug cultivation is so intimately connected to paramilitary violence, displacement, and rural impoverishment, an agreement with the FARC should be welcomed, but with the recognition that it is only one side of the story.

On May 12^th the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London,   hosted a panel debate titled, ‘Rethinking Counter-narcotic Policies in Drug-producing Countries’.  SOAS professor Jonathan Goodhand, chair of the debate, opened the discussion with an outline of a “political economy” approach to the drugs issue, one that would take account of the broader context and rely on evidence-based empirical analyses to guide policy advocacy.  This idea – the need to contextualise the drugs issue in political and economic realities – was a constant in the presentations of the three experts who followed.  Julia Buxton, a lecturer at the Central European University and Senior Research  Officer with the Global Drug Policy Observatory at Swansea University, began her contribution by pointing out that for the first time in a century the global north is a substantial drug producer: the amphetamines market is thriving and the developed countries are self-sufficient in marijuana production. The US and the Netherlands can now be counted among the biggest producers of illicit drug in the world, although they have been spared the drug-related violence almost ubiquitous among the producers in the south. The reasons, Buxton argued, were the kinds of counter-narcotics policies used in the southern countries.  For more than a century now, supply-side approaches have dominated drugs policy without reducing the volume produced; illicit drugs are in fact cheaper and more plentiful than ever.  A focus on eradication and interdiction is today recognised as highly problematic, and in the past decade the conventional methods have been challenged by a new approach: treating drugs as a development issue.  The classic case, Buxton said, was a programme enacted in the 1970s in Thailand.  The Thai government linked drug production to poverty, and in turn adopted a novel legal definition of poverty as constituting a “citizen deficit.”  Later, in 1998, the United Nations General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) on the World Drug Problem  stressed the importance of alternative development, and today it has become a “catchphrase” among the drug policy community.  But alternative development, Buxton said, was really nothing more than a plaster on a serious wound.  It could even be damaging to target countries: not only does it prevent concentration on deeper issues, alternative development attempts to change the socio-cultural-economic structure of the target community; supported by donors wanting quick results, it lacks sustainability; it is part of a prohibition strategy and is entirely market-led; it nationalises what is a transnational issue; it tries to change the individual rather than the context; and it is constrained by the refusal to work with people technically termed criminals i.e. the illicit drug cultivators.  Moving on to a more general discussion of a political economy approach, Buxton said this would imply the exploration of distributions of power, of informal networks, of how legitimacy is understood, and of micro-credit issues, among other areas.  By definition, such a study would be dense, long term, and require embedded researchers. The desire among donors to undertake such an initiative, Buxton said, is non-existent.  Drug policy, she ended her discussion saying, has never been evidence-based, meaning a political economy approach would be ignored.

David Mansfield, an independent consultant widely recognised as the world’s leading expert on illicit drug cultivation in Afghanistan, agreed with the importance of context, and warned against the common tendency to “fetishise” the drugs issue.  Counter-narcotics, he said, had become so conflated with other areas that he was no longer sure exactly what it meant. Metrics of success, like the picture of a strong state able to enforce opium bans and reduce hectarage, were also deeply flawed.  In Afghanistan, a ‘bad’ set of figures showing increased cultivation inevitably led to everyone coalescing around the issue, fixated on a sudden need to “do something about the metrics.”  Mansfield illustrated the importance of context with a video: viewed from a UAV, a group of perhaps a dozen tractors, engaged in an eradication effort as part of a Provincial Reconstruction Team were driving in a haphazard way through poppy fields hidden inside a walled compound (an increasingly common precaution taken by cultivators).  Mansfield pointed out that according to the metrics this may have been a successful operation; tractors were used, petrol was expended. But in rural Afghanistan there are dynamics at play. Driving in a sporadic way, Mansfield said, is not a reflection of Afghan’s inability to drive – as he had heard argued – but is often something drivers do to prevent themselves becoming easy targets for potshots from disgruntled owners of the opium.  Local power relations are an enormously important factor and in the majority of cases eradication is a negotiated process.   Where the state’s authority is weak, it is cautious to go too far to upset local power brokers.  A sub-par effort at eradication like the one in the video is the result, although the metrics might suggest otherwise.  The war in Afghanistan is often seen through the prism of drugs, Mansfield said, but in reality, every community, with their varying resource endowments and power relations, needed to be considered in their socio-economic context.  Moreover, counter-narcotics policies have been used to achieve a myriad of objectives in the country, like building patronage, and, for local actors, drugs have been used as a gateway for development assistance – regional officials have pushed eradication and then asked for international funds to fill the gap.  Counter-narcotics and counter-insurgency have become intertwined: the former can have a political impact, serving to marginalise rivals.  Mansfield gave the example of the National Solidarity Program (NSP), which began as a community development initiative as part of Karzai’s political campaign, was later touted as a Counter-Narcotics effort, and then became an element of the Counter-Insurgency war. The NSP’s policies remained the same, but the stated purpose shifted to fit the needs of the time.  Mansfield ended with a warning: “CN is not what it says on the tin. Beware the numbers, the narrative, and the statistics.”

Working as an economist in Colombia in the 1980s, Francisco Thoumi realised that economic theory was not able to explain the rise of drug trafficking in his home country.  As the theory went, every country capable of producing an illicit but highly profitable crop should do just that.  This didn’t happen in the real world, and in an effort to discover why Thoumi decided to immerse himself in drug research – he is, in his own words, a “recovered economist”.  Thoumi is now a university professor with experience in the research departments of the World Bank and the Interamerican Development Bank.  Since 2012 he has been on the board of the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB), a body tasked with overseeing compliance with international drugs conventions, although too often, Thoumi said, the INCB acts as an apologist rather than an overseer.  Addressing the simple-minded approach to the complex issue of illicit drug production, he recounted how he had once heard the US ambassador to Colombia state, “Americans are a plain people, we like simple solutions.”  Drugs, Thoumi said, have brought international attention to the violence in Latin America, a region suffering from a number of inter-related tragedies: corruption, organised crime, social exclusion and inequality. When 2% of Colombia’s population died in an undeclared civil war during the period known as La Violencia, “no one cared.” But drug related violence in the country has grabbed headlines around the world.  And now there is the growing problem of consumption in a region where addiction is generally considered a family issue, not a social one.  Thoumi then discussed the way violence can spike when there is a sudden drop in authority and control.  In Mexico – for a long time “a one party system where corruption had been institutionsalised” – friction developed when the state lost control of some peripheral regions during the 1990s.  Colombia was offered as another example: Pablo Escobar’s murder in Medellin led to a rise in violence which subsided when the drug trade was again dominated, by Don Berna, only to jump again when he was extradited to the United States.  Prevalent drug policies neglect the roots of the problem, said Thoumi, they are like a static bicycle, going nowhere despite all the effort.  There had been some progressive developments, he said, but he predicted most countries would resist serious change.  Russia, backed up by China, Japan, Sweden and most of the Muslim world, would in particular seek to defend the prohibitionist agenda.

The expert presentations gave way to a floor discussion.  Julia Buxton mentioned the economic liberalisation programmes which have swept the globe since the 90s, facilitating the drug trade by making illegal investment and money laundering far easier. Francisco Thoumi pointed out that trafficking organisations in Latin America have been diversifying their portfolios – illegal gold mining in Colombia is now considered a bigger industry than the drug trade.  David Mansfield commented on the remarkable technological advancement of drug production in Afghanistan over the past three years and was cautious in predicting the future outlook for opium cultivation in the country.  And, concluding, Julia Buxton warned that while the United States has long been at the centre of drug policies, their recent fall-back has shown that “the grass is not always greener,” as Russia steps in to perpetuate or even deepen the most damaging elements of the dominant approach.  While there was agreement across the panel on an urgent need for change in the international drug policy framework, there was also agreement that, regardless of the benefits of a new contextualised, evidence-based approach, instutitionalised factors stand in the way of such alternatives receiving serious consideration by policy makers.