Drug WarRant

The US Congress funds the drug war each year despite knowing for decades about the war’s ineffectiveness and disastrous consequences. How and why such a war continues has long been a matter of debate:

To say that the war on drugs has failed is not understanding something. It is true that for 40 years, the war on drugs has failed in its stated objectives. Everyone knows that prevention and treatment is the most efficient way to address the drug problem, and that foreign operations are the most inefficient way. One has to wonder just what is in the minds of the planners given the amount of evidence that what they are trying to achieve doesn’t work. … The drug war has not failed. … Its consequences are intentional both within the United States and in the hemisphere.—Noam Chomsky, 2012, [Quote–Kindle p. 19].

In his 2019 book, Drug War Pathologies, Embedded Corporatism and U.S. Drug Enforcement in the Americas, Jamaican born author and researcher Horace A. Bartilow says the consequences may not have been intentional. He provides statistical and other evidence that focuses blame for the current drug war on transnational corporations doing business primarily in Latin America:

While drug prohibition is an important component of the U.S. national security state (National Security Act of 1947, P.L. 114-113, Sec 101, 50 U.S.C. 3001), it has evolved into a larger corporatist regime that is predicated on protecting the operations of free market capitalism. American drug enforcement has now become the security face of corporate capitalism and is an important vehicle for leveraging corporate penetration into foreign markets … as well as facilitating international cooperation to combat threats to capitalism that arise from drug trafficking. The principal actors in this corporatist regime are American transnational corporations. The regime also includes policy think tanks, some members of Congress, civil society organizations, religious and political leaders in the African American community, and foreign governments that partner with the United States in the overseas prosecution of the drug war. [Kindle p. 2]

American policy makers, and the larger drug enforcement regime to which they belong, are addicted less to the drug war’s policy failures than to its budgetary successes, in the sense that they have been largely successful in their perennial ability to increase the drug war’s budget. [Kindle p. 21]

With the Citizens United Supreme Court decision allowing dark money donations to politicians, transnational corporations operating in Latin America will have many new opportunities this political season to further exploit the drug war and its victims.

Chicago’s FBI Office recently tweeted a reminder to those applying for a job with the venerable agency:

Illinois decriminalizes recreational marijuana on Jan. 1, but #DYK federal laws on marijuana aren’t changing? To apply to #FBI, you’ll still need to be marijuana-free for 3 yrs.

The waiting period for applicants appears to affect regular marijuana consumers along with people working in the marijuana industry and anyone taking Schedule 1 restricted drugs. Current FBI agents and staff face risky hurdles should they need to self-medicate with federally forbidden substances. And what’s with the 3 years? Why anabolic steroids for 10 years? Do J. Edgar Hoover’s specter and COINTEL schemes still haunt the hallowed halls of the Washington FBI building named after him?

Hoover refused to recruit long hairs, bearded men, “pot heads” and people he called “pear heads.” If by pear heads J. Edgar was referring to small-minded people and not just individuals with misshapen craniums, then why can’t the FBI be euphoric over mother nature’s herbal-based wonder drugs that lead to mind expansion and even improved mental health? Or will the US face a bleak future of pear heads in the FBI and other federal agencies?

The Nasa—an Indigenous group in Colombia—want their land back, and they want it back now. To demonstrate their resolve, they’re employing eco-terrorism in an eco-friendly way to sabotage agricultural crops of colonial origins or ownership while simultaneously confronting Colombia’s illicit drug industry over its unlicensed use of their land. The Nasa’s goals have not won them many friends:

Since 2015, they have been carrying out direct actions in which they cut down cane fields, plant organic crops in their place, and allow the native vegetation to cover additional areas within the same reclaimed lands. They call this action “the liberation of Mother Earth,” […]

Since the signing of the Peace Agreement between FARC and the government, the United Nations Security Council in Colombia had verified 226 murders through March 2019. The accord led to the formation of armed dissident groups that splintered from the FARC, including right-wing paramilitary groups like The Black Eagles (Las Águilas Negras) — a decade-old moniker adopted by many disparate groups to spread fear — and an increased presence of organized crime groups, who “are fighting over territory for marijuana and poppy cultivation,” said José.

In 1991 a new constitution was enacted in Colombia that included Indigenous peoples’ rights, but according to the Nasa peoples’ documentation, between 1991 and 2005, “15 massacres were carried out in those years, with more than 500 dead.” … [More recently] two members of the Indigenous Guard from the San Francisco reservation in the municipality of Caloto had been killed by an armed group. Five people were also wounded, among them a 7-year-old boy.

“Who did it? It’s an armed group that’s trying to control and manage the drug trade and this has us very concerned, because the threats continue to be very frequent in our territory,” said one of the traditional leaders of the Nasa people, who spoke anonymously for security reasons.

The Nasa and the Liberators of Mother Earth believe that with these development policies, Indigenous people will continue to remain repressed. “The new government says that they’re not going to buy even one more meter of land for Indigenous peoples and they will neither create nor recognize more collective territories for Indigenous peoples,” said José. “On the contrary, the government says that these lands have to join in the development of capitalism. We don’t want to join; we want to liberate the land and live simply.”

Diana, a young Indigenous woman who introduced herself only by her first name, is responsible for the political education of the young people in this village of liberators. “We’re on maximum emergency alert because they’re killing us, and it’s so painful that this is happening in the north of Cauca,” … “Their development policies — and the planting of illicit crops that the government supports — are destroying our way of life.” […]

The history of settler colonialism is rich with the profits from drug wars as prohibitions tend to provide a wide variety of efficient and inhumane tools to repress civilians as well as earth’s liberators.

Examples include Colombian government drug war hype that conflates Indigenous people like the Nasa with FARC. Using similar strategies, international mining and oil companies operating in Mexico are infamous for terrorizing the Indigenous into abandoning their homes and land by getting the government or military to arrest young village men on false drug charges, or by staging phony drug raids outside villages at night, sometimes setting off incendiaries encompassing ten-meter flash zones and sending shrapnel into villages that endangers children and the elderly.

Mexico’s drug cartels—the poisonous fruit of a toxic drug war tree—are overfishing the Sea of Cortez and exterminating the vaquita porpoise, the world’s rarest marine mammal:

Austrian filmmaker Richard Ladkani recorded the shocking and dangerous story of the activists, scientists and journalists risking their lives to save the rare whale in his documentary “Sea of Shadows.”

“The film ‘Sea of Shadows’ for me was one of the most important films that I’ve ever made, … Because here you have an example of criminal syndicates attacking planet Earth. And the clock’s really ticking, because if they continue to do what they do—if they continue their fight against this ocean, for money and greed—they’re actually going to destroy one of the most beautiful places on Earth.”

“Nobody has ever heard about this war even happening,” the filmmaker goes on. “It’s happening in the shadows, but only a five hours’ drive south of Los Angeles. And here you have a species go extinct—the smallest whale on earth, a beautiful creature right out of a Disney movie, the vaquita.” […]

Drug cartels became involved in the … fishing trade partly because … it’s much easier money than selling narcotics. Their … overfishing of the Sea of Cortez … makes it even more difficult for efforts to save the vaquita to take place because of the deadly threat that getting involved poses to activists, journalists and scientists, as well as to the very fishermen entangled in the trade. […]

Cartels that aid the Sixth Great Extinction also make it difficult for researchers working in Mexico’s interior. Environmental protection in Mexico often doesn’t get funded or implemented as meager financial resources get used up fighting an ineffectual and never-ending drug war.

Schools in the US are getting real about drug education by focusing on harm reduction while abandoning prohibitionist approaches that fail to work, such as the D.A.R.E. America (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) program created in Los Angeles in 1983 by the infamous LAPD chief Daryl Gates. Gates is better remembered for proclaiming before a US Senate Subcommittee that infrequent or casual drug users “ought to be taken out and shot” because “we’re in a war” and even casual drug use is “treason.”

In its application, D.A.R.E.’s ridiculously inaccurate anti-drug hype served to make many students more curious (and thereby allegedly “treasonous”) when they experimented with drugs they might never have heard of before D.A.R.E. visited their classrooms. Harm reduction education can avoid these problems:

Instead of “just say no” propaganda, harm reduction reduces risks by helping people make the healthiest choices based on evidence-based research, without judgement. […]

…scare tactics have been replaced with useful facts about how drugs work and why the government made some of them illegal (hint: the history of drug prohibition is steeped in racism and classism) […]

With Safety First, students learn about different marijuana products, from raw buds to concentrates and edibles, along with their effects on the mind and body…in the harm reduction section of the unit, students learn that the best way to avoid these potential harms is abstinence — choosing not to use marijuana. However, Safety First recognizes some teenagers will make a different choice. So, students learn the difference between smoking marijuana and consuming edibles. […]

Drug-use safety tips have typically been available from a person’s drug-consuming peers—not organizations like D.A.R.E. Drug war critics have endorsed policies like those of Safety First for decades, only to be rebuffed by politicians and prohibitionists who apparently want the use of illicit drugs to remain potentially harmful. Drugs made less harmful, or those already benign, do little to support the existence or need of specialized drug enforcement personnel. Nor do they help generate politicians like presidential candidate Joe Biden, who’s ridden a wave of public anti-drug hysteria and violence throughout his 46-year political career to gain political stardom.

Pastor Gary Dull opposes Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf’s concession to state voters who want marijuana legalized, the governor saying he now favors it. Pastor Dull’s response to Governor Wolf’s decision offers the usual inaccuracies about marijuana while adding his own religious views on drugs:

“As a pastor for more than 45 years and serving a church in Altoona for nearly 25 years, I have seen many people agonize over using and abusing marijuana,” Dull said. “I believe it is a great mistake to legalize the narcotic for recreational use for several reasons.” […]

“I make efforts to uphold biblical teaching, and the Bible tells us to avoid anything that may ‘master’ our bodies (1 Cor. 6:12). Most of us know someone who has ruined their life through addictive drugs. Families have been broken, jobs have been lost and lives have even been taken as a result of the use of addictive drugs. Additionally, most people recognize that marijuana is an ‘entrance’ or ‘gateway’ drug that has the great potential to lead to more serious drug use and abuse.” […]

“Various studies have shown that students who used marijuana regularly are less likely to finish high school and go on to higher education than those who do not use the drug,” he said. “This results in future generations that may be less educated and unequipped to teach and lead their families to a more educated and higher-quality lifestyle. Less education and a lower-quality lifestyle contribute to many negative elements in society.” […]

“In the Bible,” he said, “the word used for the administering of drugs is the Greek word pharmakeia, which in some passages is translated to ‘witchcraft’ (Gal. 5:20) and ‘sorceries’ (Rev. 9:21). Thus, the Word of God makes a clear connection between drugs and the occult, implying that the unwise use of certain recreational drugs can lead to having the minds of the users open to wickedness and demonic activity. And that always guarantees a negative effect upon drug users as well as society in general.”

Recently appointed Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch has been applauded by various Christian groups for his applications of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. While on the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, Justice Gorsuch dissented in Little Sisters vs. Burwell where the court found their religious freedom hadn’t been unduly burdened. Gorsuch favored the Hobby Lobby vs. Sibellius decision complicating birth control options. “Yet he won’t allow the religious liberty law to be used as an excuse for all behavior. In United States vs. Quaintance, he rejected drug smugglers’ claims that their marijuana distribution was motivated by religious belief as insincere and thus not protected by the statute.”

This Halloween season many Christians, wiccans, witches, pagans, humanists, and other smart, open-minded citizens will smoke weed for fun and relaxation. Will religious freedom protect them from persecution? Or will Gary Dull and Neil Gorsuch burn autumn festival goers at the stake?

Systemic corruption due to drug war activity south of the border keeps the drug cartel fires lit and the acid vats ready for intrepid journalists who expose secrets that might derail the intricate and exploitative system perpetuating America’s drug hysteria, one that includes a quid pro quo system resembling an ad hoc business co-op with Mexico. Other than greater death tolls and profits, little has changed in the US-Mexico drug war since John Gibler provided a few gritty details in his 2011 book, To Die in Mexico: Dispatches from Inside the Drug War:

Who would believe…that the warden of a state prison would let convicted killers out at night and loan them official vehicles, automatic assault rifles, and bulletproof vests, so that they could gun down scores of innocent people in a neighboring state and then quickly hop back over the state line and into prison, behind bars, a perfect alibi? …Prison director Margarita Rojas Rodríguez…left instructions for the prisoners to be allowed back inside without a fuss. [Kindle pp. 7-8]

…impunity cannot hold without silence. Hence Mexico has become the most dangerous country in the hemisphere for journalists…whose labor requires voice…How many of those murder cases have been solved? Not one. How many of the disappeared journalists have been located? Not one. [Kindle pp. 19-20]

THIS IS WHAT THEY DO NOT WANT YOU TO SAY: The Mexican army and federal police have administered drug trafficking for decades. Drug money fills the vaults of Mexico’s banks, enters the national economy at every level, and, with traffickers’ annual profits estimated at between $30 billion and $60 billion a year, rivals oil as the largest single source of cash revenue in the country. (And Mexico is not the only place where this is so.)…The federal police forces are the main recruitment center for mid-level drug-trafficking operators. The army and the state police are the main recruitment centers for the enforcers, the paramilitary units in charge of assassinations, and the armed protection of drugs and mid- and high-level operators…people working for the various illegal narcotics businesses have directly infiltrated more than half of the municipal police forces in the country. During the seventy-one-year reign of the Institutional Revolutionary Party…the Mexican army controlled the division of territory for drug production and trafficking routes, allocating sub-divisions to local franchises, colloquially called cartels. A given territory under a cartel’s control is known as a plaza. […]

High-level federal officials in United States government know all of this and go along with the theatrics, because, among other reasons, the U.S. economy is also buoyed by the influx of drug money. The defense industries profit handsomely from arms sales to armies, police, and the drug gangs themselves; the police are addicted to asset forfeiture laws; prison guard unions are addicted to budget increases; and the criminalization of drugs has proven a durable excuse to lock people of color in prison in a country still shackled by racism. [Kindle pp. 24-26]

…when approving or covering U.S. aid to the Mexican federal government, such as the $1.4 billion Mérida Initiative. U.S. officials and the press routinely neglect to mention that the Mexican army and federal police very often are drug traffickers… [It is] estimated that the drug organizations’ control over human trafficking along the border brings them another $3 billion a year…The report calculates that drug gangs participated in 30 percent of the recent kidnappings while soldiers and police made up 22 percent of the nation’s kidnappers. [Kindle p. 30, 35]

U.S. intervention in Mexico is simultaneously a grounded historical fear-and-loathing in the population…the insistence of U.S. politicians on an ideological commitment to prohibition that seeks to veil prohibition’s use for social control…Essentially prohibition has been a technique of informal American cultural colonisation.” [Kindle p. 42, 43, 53-54]

Journalists and researchers penetrating the drug war netherworld might want to do a bit of homework first. In Mexico and across the world it’s been a record year for murders of journalists. Anthropologist Jeremy Slack’s recent book, Deported to Death, Appendix, “A Note on Researching in Violent Environments,” provides some useful survival tips.

Criminalizing drugs generates other crimes, often making innocent people’s lives more violent or unsafe. A classic example of drug war collateral damage is the US Mérida Initiative (2007) that prompted Mexican President Felipe Calderón to militarize Mexico’s drug war.

By 2008, migrants traveling from or through Mexico to cross over into the US were being scapegoated as drug traffickers, making it easier for the two governments to dismiss their deaths or disappearances—more than 32,000 so far. The Mérida Initiative, championed and extended by Sec. of State Hillary Clinton, set drug cartels free to exploit migrants, kidnapping them, robbing them, demanding ransoms from contacts in the US, or torturing people to recruit them into smuggling 80-pound bales of marijuana across the border—and worse. Twelve-year-old migrants have been abducted, asphyxiated, and their organs harvested for transplants. People deported to Mexico from the US face worse survival odds than migrants. Jeremy Slack’s 2019 book, Deported to Death: How Drug Violence is Changing Migration on the US-Mexico Border, exposes the corruption at much risk to his own life:

…corruption has acted as a buffer, with clear ties between drug traffickers and politicians serving to lessen the public nature of violence, as targeting the population at large is avoided in return for being allowed to traffic drugs openly and with impunity. [Kindle 954]

Mexico’s political system has often been referred to as the “perfect dictatorship,” because the one-party system was able to remain in power for almost seven decades…subtle forms of oppression, intermixing extreme violence and corruption with government handouts, a populist front, and media-savvy politicians—all combine for a particularly sophisticated form of pseudo-authoritarianism. [Kindle 1209-10]

What is clear is that the movement between places becomes a commodity, something to be prized, nurtured, understood, and controlled…Recruitment of migrants by drug cartels has become a polemic topic, as the anti-immigrant Right has for years conflated migration with terrorism and cartel violence spilling across the border, while the pro-immigrant Left will not touch the topic. [Kindle 1546, 1942]

Drug cartels work as a kind of pyramid scheme, with those on the streets making very little money, taking on most of the risk, and often dying quickly. Those at the top, with real power and influence, need hordes of people working for them, and replacing them can be a challenge. This has, broadly speaking, led to increased reliance on blind mules, and on those trafficking drugs under duress. [Kindle 1974]

…the idea that it is completely natural for the government to kill drug traffickers has provided unique cover for the same type of atrocities committed during the dirty wars, with even less scrutiny. The military still runs rampant in Mexico, frequently using torture and even sexual violence as a method of interrogation. Yet, internationally, there is no outcry. “This is not a ‘dirty’ war; it’s a drug war” is a common refrain. What is wrong with combating drugs? [Kindle 2456]

What’s wrong is the drug war. Effective control of drugs can be achieved with decriminalization and regulation, as cannabis legalization recently illustrates.