The Dark Art: My Undercover Life in Global Narco-terrorism
By Edward Follis and Douglas Century, Gotham, 288 pages, $28
Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs
By Johann Hari, Bloomsbury Circus, 400 pages, £12.91
“Modernising Drug Law Enforcement The International Drug Policy Consortium”
(www.idcp.net)
There are few subjects more emotive than the so-called “war on drugs” and drug legalisation. They are very hard to think about clearly and very easy to get angry about. Nuance tends to get drowned out in the roar of strong opinion, whether from the families of addicts, fundamentalist libertarians or — in a recent commercial addition to the debate — the public relations officers of the United States’s foundling legal cannabis industry.
And that is only in traditional consumer markets. For real anger — as well as horror and pity — look to the traditional supplying countries. That is where the most grievous damage is done — far above the worries parents might have about their children smoking high-potency pot or taking ecstasy at all-night raves instead of studying for exams or getting a first job. It is in countries such as Mexico, Colombia and Afghanistan that the war on drugs shows its bloodiest face.
To put the casualties into perspective, an estimated 15,000 people died in Iraq last year as a result of its various conflicts, including those involving the Daesh (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant). That is around 40 violent deaths per 100,000 people — 10 times the US murder rate and 40 times the UK’s.
More shocking still is that proportionately more people were murdered last year in El Salvador and twice as many in Honduras, victims of the violence spawned by these hapless Central American republics’ position along key cocaine trafficking routes.
Small wonder that Latin America has led calls for a rethink of drugs prohibition — and that the United Nations will hold a special assembly next year to hammer out a new, global, position. Combine that with the state-by-state march of cannabis legalisation across the US, and drug reform is likely to be coming to you soon.
Edward Follis’s “The Dark Art”, Johann Hari’s “Chasing the Scream” and the Modernising Drug Law Enforcement project led by the International Drug Policy Consortium help frame this difficult discussion. It is difficult partly because so many people’s lives are touched by drugs and their often malign, sometimes tragic effects. And it is difficult because, somewhat like global warming, drugs policy is such a huge subject, involving so many aspects of human behaviour and questions about social and moral norms.
These readings helpfully cover the terrain. (Although for policy buffs, the “2011 Drugs and Drugs Policy: What Everyone Needs to Know’, by Mark Kleiman, Jonathan Caulkins and Angela Hawken, is not only wonderfully clear and succinct, it also lives up to its label.)
“The Dark Art” is a hard-boiled memoir of the days when tackling illegal drugs seemed a simple affair of dark glamour, fast cars and powerful guns — and one where the good guys would, surely, eventually win. Follis spent almost 30 years as an undercover agent for the US Drug Enforcement Administration, battling some very evil Mexican, Thai, US and Afghan criminal kingpins, and his bravery in getting close to and then apprehending these villains is remarkable; he is deservedly a decorated hero.
Yet Follis also represents much of what is futile about prohibition. Nicknamed “Custer” by his colleagues, he gives fresh meaning to the phrase “gung-ho”, and his explosive tales of derring-do, although true, often resemble a blow ’em up blockbuster film. (Serpico, an idealistic New York police officer played by Al Pacino in the 1973 film, was even Follis’s childhood hero.)
Indeed, reading “The Dark Art” I was often returned to the early 1990s, when I lived in Colombia. Then, drug lords such as Pablo Escobar were doing their damnedest to take over the country, and even Hollywood films seemed pale versions of the grisly reality of mass murders and bombings that took place, off-screen, every day. Living through such a situation, it does not take long to realise that the war on illegal drugs is never conclusively winnable.
Follis, while no fan of drug legalisation, believes the same. “The only ‘war’ — if we are to insist on that military term — consists of battles targeting individual drug traffickers,” he writes. “For me, the idea of a War on Drugs was irrational: no matter how good a federal agent you are, no matter how big your cases, you could never simply seize enough narcotics to make any appreciable difference.”
Hari’s “Chasing the Scream” shifts the focus from the thugs to the drugs they peddle and to their users, especially addicts. You could say Hari was well suited to the job: he is a recovering newspaper columnist. Four years ago the young Anglo-Swiss writer was one of the stars of the Independent. Then his career suddenly fell apart. Hari was accused of taking quotes from other writers’ stories and passing them off as his own. It later emerged that he had also been using a false Wikipedia identity to smear journalists who disagreed with him. Shame and dishonour followed, a casting-out that apparently led him to the celebrities — Elton John, Russell Brand, Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein — whose endorsements adorn this book. Cruel world.
Yet “Chasing the Scream” is more than an act of rehabilitation; it is a fluent and often gripping narrative about the “first and last days of the war on drugs”. Hari describes the early days of drug illegality, when mobsters such as Arnold Rothstein and federal agents such as Harry Anslinger, the first head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, defined the parameters of modern prohibition policies. He is especially moving about Billie Holiday, the jazz singer persecuted for her heroin habit by the sadistic and racist Anslinger — in stark contrast with Judy Garland, whose heroin addiction Anslinger indulged.
“Chasing the Scream” is also deeply researched. Hari crisscrosses the US by Greyhound bus, seeking out dealers, addicts and police agents. He visits Portugal and Uruguay to investigate the effects of decriminalisation. He looks at the cost of prohibition in Mexico, where more than 60,000 people have died since former president Felipe Calderon launched an offensive on organised crime eight years ago, and he makes the obligatory ghoulish trip to Ciudad Juarez, once known as the “city of death”.
Hari is polemical in a right-on leftwing kind of way, and these occasional incitements to pity can irritate. “Drug addiction is not what we have been told it is,” he writes, hinting at dark conspiracy. Why not “mistakenly believe it to be” instead? Yet this is a quibble. Hari strives to be truthful and even-handed. He recognises that different drugs need to be treated on the basis of their relative harms: where one stands on legalising and regulating drug sales should therefore depend on each drug. Unlike many proponents of relaxing drug laws, Hari also makes the crucial point that legalisation of even cannabis has consequences, not all good, although the end result might improve on the status quo.
Here it is worth spelling out some of the debits and credits. The biggest cost will mostly be carried by those who might lose control of their drug use. This is unavoidable, even if the general increase is modest (as in Portugal). Still, while a cannabis habit may be far less destructive than alcohol — which accounts for more problems than all illegal drugs combined — it is still plenty bad if it happens to you, or someone in your family.
The benefits, however, include raising state revenues from taxing a global business estimated to be worth more than $380 billion (1,395 billion) a year; freeing up police time to investigate other crimes; reducing (even if not eliminating) revenues to criminal gangs and terrorist groups; bringing on to the right side of the law the 80 per cent of consumers whose drug use is occasional and mostly harmless; and making huge savings on what is now spent arresting and imprisoning drug users and sellers. The US spends over $40 billion a year on this alone, making drug prohibition a surprising example of a big government programme.
Here it is worth remembering that Milton Friedman, the Nobel-prize winning economist who grew up during Prohibition and concluded that it caused more problems than alcohol itself, saw the war on drugs as a criminal waste of money.
How police policy should respond is the subject of the multiple papers and three rounds of seminars on “Modernising Drug Law Enforcement” published by the IDPC, a consortium of well-respected drug policy NGOs, with the support of two British think-tanks, Chatham House and the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Its contributors and main audience are senior police officers and government officials. Yes, drug reform has gone mainstream. Even the US has officially dropped the phrase “drugs war” (although not much of Asia has: Indonesia recently executed six small time drug-traffickers, including a Canadian and a Brazilian).
The starting point is to decide: what should be the aim of drugs policy? The consensus is that we should seek to reduce harm. That means a change of focus from, say, increasing drug seizures or incarcerations to pushing levels of violence down. This approach can lead to obvious conclusions, such as the merit of heroin-replacement therapies.
In the UK, as much as 50 per cent of acquisitive crime is committed to feed a drug habit, usually heroin. Stabilise the lives of these most chaotic drug users, therefore, and not only do crime levels fall, it also becomes possible to think about weaning the addict off drugs. But prioritising harm-reduction also leads to more surprising recommendations. Online drug marketplaces such as the Silk Road, for example, may be preferable to tolerating drug dealing in public places, as these tend to concentrate violence.
Paradoxically, drug legalisation also requires better, not less, enforcement. Of particular importance is collecting tax revenues from drug sales, a difficult task as the contraband trade in regulated drugs such as tobacco and alcohol shows. Furthermore, the idea that legalising all drugs would suddenly rid the world of narco-criminals does not wash. Mexican organised crime, for example, runs diversified lines of business almost as profitable as drug trafficking, from kidnapping and extortion to iron ore smuggling to China and oil theft (alone worth $1 billion a year).
Solving such problems has less to do with illicit drug markets than building the rule of law.
The old assumption that it is possible to have a drugs-free world is erroneous. Intoxication may even be a basic human drive — from the Psalmist who sang of “wine that maketh glad the heart of man” to the giggling child spinning on a merry-go-round. But if the illegal drugs market cannot be eliminated, that implies a discussion about what kind of drugs markets society is willing to tolerate.
This can be confusing and, for many, frightening. But at least a frank discussion has begun. Let’s hope it will continue to be an honest one, based on evidence rather than prejudice. “I long ago got out of the judgment business,” as Follis remarks at one point. It is a wise comment, and a necessary starting point for any sensible discussion too.
–Financial Times