Cocaine has managed to slip its way into the United States’s party scene ever so smoothly, with dire consequences that party-goers rarely see, experience, or read about. Recently, I met a man who works with inner city kids in New York who told me that he would like to blow up the entire country of Perú because of its cocaine production, and because of the effects cocaine usage has on the United States. In my mind, I ignored the human consequences, and immediately thought: It’s a weed. You’ll die before it will. But I’d like to thank that man for the inspiration for this article and my deep desire to explain the cocaine trade from an international perspective.
The coca plant in South America has a lot of medicinal purposes, the most notable being its use to avoid altitude sickness in the Andean mountain ranges. The plant alone is neither addictive nor harmful, and contains less than 1% cocaine, a shocking fact to most tourists who visit these Andean mountain countries (Coffin 2001). T-shirts all over these Andean regions flaunt the saying, “La hoja de coca no es una droga,” or “The coca leaf is not a drug.” Hugo Chávez, president of Venezuela, has been highly criticized for his admission of chewing coca leaves on a daily basis, even though the plant alone is not a narcotic. This seemingly harmless weed which will grow under most any circumstance has had a turbulent life in the international world. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in 2006, the United States had the largest cocaine consumption in the world, at 2.8%, followed closely by Spain and the United Kingdom (all countries of wealth with ‘First World status’). In 2004, consumers spent an estimated $40 billion on cocaine (Canby 2004). The United States’s eradication plans have been laughable, as well as downright harmful. These eradication plans have ignored one key economic factor: demand. Instead of controlling consumption in the United States, our government looks the other way, toward the production.Coca leaves, marijuana, and poppy seeds are all produced in South America by poor peasants who aren’t going to stop their main source of income just because the United States says so. The best known eradication program, Plan Colombia, enforced by Bill Clinton with help from the then-president of Colombia, Andrés Pastrana Arango, used elimination tactics that have caused irreparable harm to Colombia. The usage of hundreds of gallons of herbicides to eliminate coca plants also eliminates village crops, leaving the peasants with land that can only produce coca due to its dilapidated condition. Cocaine is also the only cash crop that keeps pace with inflation in the weak economies of these governments, and therefore offers constant money and lessens the desire to farm any other crop. The herbicides also cause rashes and respiratory problems in the villagers (Knippers Black, 2005).
Politically, peasants are supporting guerrilla operations, which woo with their anti-American imperialism and pro-legal cocaine production talk. These guerrilla groups threaten the attempts at stable government and fight with United States-backed paramilitary groups, increasing the state of conflict and insecurity in Colombia.
After Plan Colombia, George W. Bush updated the drug policy to the Andean Counterdrug Initiative in 2001, a plan which gave a greater amount of money to Colombia, while claiming to also work towards various countries’ economic and social development. According to the U.S. Department of State, Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, in 2005, an estimated $725 million was used in the Andean region. Congress rejected a program in which some of this money would be used for drug reduction programs in the United States. Colombia received $310,694 toward counternarcotics and security. Perú was given $61,504, and Bolivia obtained $48,608 in aid. In all of these countries, there was significantly less given toward economic and social development, and countries such as Brazil, Panama, and Venezuela received no money.
Drug trafficking has been linked to public officials and legitimate businesses, leading the United States government to blame Latin America for its cocaine problems. The most notable examples include two former presidents of Bolivia, Jaime Paz Zamora and Victor Paz Estenssoro. Zamora opposed the U.S. war on drugs mainly because of his personal associations with drug dealers, who gave him large campaign contributions. His predecessor Estenssoro was also known for his associations with drug traffickers. These examples show how influential drug trafficking is in Latin American countries who deal with rising poverty and unemployment levels, and unstable economies and governments. The only factor that has remained stable has been the consumption, and therefore the production of cocaine.
The theory behind eradication programs is that cocaine will become scarcer, and therefore, more expensive, even though the Drug Enforcement Agency records that the price of cocaine has had little effect on consumption. The United States cites as evidence the eradication program in Perú which decreased cocaine production by 30% in 1996 and 1997, but this success was mainly due to a fungus in the region, and only pushed more cocaine production to Colombia in order to meet demands (Coffin, 2001).
So as we face elections now, where is the United States in terms of drug control policy? For the candidates, including a man who has even snorted cocaine himself, the “war on drugs” seems to be a small priority, if even a priority at all. When discussing the “war on drugs,” marijuana takes center stage, and cocaine is somewhere in the background under the category of “other drugs.” Barack Obama wants to keep the status quo in terms of drug policy, while Hillary Clinton opposes trade agreements with Colombia, and supports addressing the drug problem in the United States with treatment programs. John Mccain has admitted that the United States is losing the “War on Drugs”, yet voted ‘yes’ on spending international development funds on drug control. Ron Paul claims that the “War on Drugs” has violated the Bill of Rights and has fiscally been a complete failure. And Mitt Romney, well, I’ll let him speak for himself: “The US must continue to provide strong support for Colombia’s efforts to combat the ruthless narco-terrorists that operate there. Our partnership with Colombia contributes to our security and our quality of life — sowing stability in a critical region and helping keep deadly drugs off our streets” (On the Issues).
Basically all these candidates are saying the same thing: the “War on Drugs” will continue, and most likely continue to be ineffective in an international setting. Taking the drugs out of Colombia by force will not resolve the issue. Other countries and places have the capacity to grow this weed, and this fact seems to be largely ignored.
Knowing all of this, the sight of coked out students in their Che Guevara shirts on campus, and the lenient punishment of Lindsay Lohan, upsets me. With shows like Celebrity Rehab, we use people’s drug addictions for our own entertainment and think there are no global consequences for our actions. Having lived in Perú, I feel a certain responsibility to tell people about the world in which we live. My brother once told me he would never visit Perú because he didn’t want to visit a country that had cocaine as their primary export (which it isn’t). I don’t want more people thinking this way when the problems seem to lie in our own country on a very tangible level. I don’t expect the man who wanted to blow up Perú to read this article and change his mind, nor do I expect my brother to hop on a plane, but hope it lessens consumption at my liberal, human rights-oriented college.
Works Cited
Canby, Peter. “Latin America’s Longest War,” The Nation, August 16/23, 2004, pp. 31-38.
Coffin, Philip. “Coca Eradication,” Foreign Policy in Focus, March 6/7, 2001.
Ed. Knippers Black, Jan. Latin America: Its Problems and Its Promise. Westview Press: Cambridge, MA, 2005.
On the Issues. “Drugs: 2008 Contenders’ Views.” http://www.ontheissues.org/Drugs.htm.