Drug War Strategy Fatally Flawed

by Tom Thompson
Common Dreams

June 21, 2002
(first published in the Seattle Post Intelligencer)

BOGOTA, Colombia -- America's drug war is such a spectacular failure that a visitor from another planet might conclude that it's intentionally that way.

Suppose that we asked President Bush if, for $8 billion or so each year (plus another $12 billion in state and local enforcement), he would be willing to finance a system that would ensure a violent black market network extending from virtually every U.S. urban neighborhood all the way to Mexico, Colombia and other parts of the world? Meanwhile, an additional goal would be, at least in the United States, to crowd our courts and prisons with people having health problems and those who prey on them.

The drug war is designed to raise prices and discourage use, mostly through a strategy of tough enforcement. What in fact has happened is that black-market prices are far higher than the price would be in a legal market, but not high enough to discourage millions of drug users from shopping in the black market. It's an insane scheme in the sense that it is both an enormous expense and an enormous failure. Colombia, for example, now supplies as much as 80 percent of the $50 billion American market.

But despite the war rhetoric from Washington, D.C., the enemy in the supply-side drug war, which is, after all, the U.S. focus, is not Colombia, or this cartel or that drug lord, but rather an entire market system.

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