Prohibition and drugs Press down, pop up - economist #drugpolicy

The Economist
May 24th, 2014

Prohibition and drugs
Press down, pop up
http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21602693-cracking-down-illicit-drugs-m
eans-they-surface-another-form-press-down-pop-up?zid=305&ah=417bd5664dc76da5
d98af4f7a640fd8a

Cracking down on illicit drugs means they surface in another form

BEFORE "Breaking Bad", there was "Miami Vice". The 1980s television show
pitted detectives in white linen suits against drugs traffickers who used
the Caribbean as their point of entry into Florida. The route, at least, is
back in fashion. The proportion of cocaine imports entering the United
States via the islands is rising (see article), as clampdowns in Central
America and Mexico push drugs gangs back to their old haunts.

The revival in Caribbean drugs traffic is just the latest example of the
"balloon effect", in which squashing down on illicit activity in one place
causes it to pop up somewhere else. Colombia's war on drugs in the 1990s and
2000s is another: coca crops moved back to Bolivia and Peru, now the world's
biggest grower; cocaine-processing shifted next door, to Ecuador and
Venezuela; Mexico's drugs gangs grabbed market share. A subsequent bloody
clampdown on Mexican gangs diverted traffickers to Central America:
Honduras became the region's largest entry point for airborne smugglers.
With the shift back to the Caribbean, the trade has come full circle.

The balloon effect also operates among consumers. Cocaine and heroin usage
is dropping in places like the United States and Britain, partly because of
educational campaigns, partly because of falling levels of purity (cocaine
in Europe, for example, is often adulterated with a cattle-worming drug).
But consumption of synthetic drugs like methamphetamine, ketamine and
mephedrone is rising to compensate, in both developing and developed
countries. Seizures of methamphetamines have tripled in Asia in the past
five years. New ways of getting high proliferate faster than the authorities
can keep tabs on. A report from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime says that
348 new psychoactive substances have been reported to the agency, most of
them since 2008 (see article).

Prohibitionist drugs policies do have an effect. Traffickers are being
inconvenienced; prices are raised. But the war on drugs surely aimed higher
than merely altering the stuff people that take and how they get hold of it.
It cannot count as a success if global consumption of illicit substances is
going up, not down.

Worse, the spillovers can be grave. Attacking gangs in one country does not
just increase bloodshed there, it also exports violence abroad.
Seizures of drugs create scarcity further down the supply chain, giving
traffickers a greater incentive to use force. Researchers have estimated
that Colombian interdiction policies may explain as much as half of the
increase in drug-related homicides in Mexico between 2006 and 2010. The
extraordinary homicide rates in Central America-Honduras is the world's most
murder-prone country-partly reflect the influx of narco-traffickers after
Mexico's own crackdown. Once the gangs arrive, they are hard to dislodge
entirely; the side effects, like corruption and extra weapons, outlast them.

Consumer countries suffer, too. No one yet understands the long-term health
effects of the new psychoactive substances that people hoover up, but some
synthetic cannabinoids are clearly more dangerous than farmed marijuana. And
production is more mobile, which means that the violence associated with
supplying drugs is creeping closer to sources of demand.
Meth labs are being discovered in the United States and Europe on a daily
basis.

Circular logic

This newspaper's views on drugs are well known. Legalisation is the best way
to prevent harm to users, and to shove the gangs aside. To work, prohibition
requires an almost impossible sustained level of international co-operation
and resourcing. The drugs war needs a rethink, not endless repeats.




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