How can I put this diplomatically to our newly appointed drugs tsar, Chief Constable Keith Hellawell? It is pretentious vanity of governments, international agencies or private lobbies to seek to suppress the supply of narcotics. They might as well attempt to reverse the oceans' tides. They are wasting their time and our money in a chimerical operation riven by double standards. The supply of narcotics to those who want them and are prepared to pay for them is impossible to stop; the effort to mobilise the world in a "war on drugs" is ridiculous, particularly while so little is done to fight the damage wreaked by tobacco and alcohol.
Alcohol-like money, chess, country walks and treacle toffees-can bring great enjoyment to the human race when enjoyed in moderation. It has had a respectable place in most human societies over the ages, from the ancient Israelites to the Chibchas. It has woven itself into the culture of our own civili-sation from Homer and Moses to Shakespeare and Goya. Of course it is also the source of much excess, illness and misery, a drain on the National Health Service and a brake on productivity.
To presume that the social drinking of alcohol can be ended by government action is ridiculous. This was demonstrated in the 1930s when US federal authorities were obliged to outface the Christian Scientists and other enthusiasts for total abstention and repeal their country's laughable legislation. Laws in favour of prohibition had been passed by a large majority in the US Congress and were repealed with an equally large majority. After almost 14 years, from January 1920 to December 1933, the US law enforcement agencies-or those of them which had not been thoroughly corrupted by brewers and distillers-returned to pursuing real crime.
Now history seems to be repeating itself-not, this time, in one country-but on a global scale and with drugs rather than alcohol as the target. The whole anti-drugs strategy is built on the flimsiest of intellectual bases. In the hall of mirrors which is the world of drugs, reliable statistics are hard to come by-the UN International Drug Control Programme (UNDCP) is first to admit it. (Its officials confess that their efforts are powered by sentiment and politics, as they thrash around with scarcely a reliable statistic.)
In the UNDCP's admirable World Drug Report, Kofi Annan, the UN secretary-general (no less), appeals for "comprehensive information to help in responding to the challenge of international drug control." Giorgio Giacomelli, executive director of the programme, talks of the need for drug control but states: "Information and a better understanding of the problem are essential prerequisites for progress in meeting this aim."
The World Drug Report admits: "Our stock of hard knowledge is woefully inadequate. Data is inevitably partial, of poor quality and liable to massage for political purposes." Failure to ascertain the number of addicts and the size of the drug barons' profits "has left a vacuum which all too often is filled by an unsubstantiated hotchpotch of myth and anecdotal evidence." The report comments wistfully that information on everything from cultivation, manufacture, trafficking, consumption and investment (money laundering) should be based on direct observation, but admits, "since most of this data is either not available, or at best partial and of uncertain validity, the extent of the illicit drug market can only be measured by indirect indicators."
Nor is there a clear view about what the experts call "substance abuse related mortality" (Sarm)-a coy euphemism. The report says: "According to a global study of Sarm carried out for the UNDCP, 'there is no clear consensus regarding which types of death should be included in a definition of Sarm,' nor is there even a common classification to distinguish 'direct' and 'indirect' causes of death."
The report says that global figures about drugs are "a combination of aggregated (partially standardised) estimates. It goes without saying that any such figure has to be interpreted with caution." Indeed. When the reader comes to page 264 it is obvious that estimates of the seriousness of the narcotics problem do not vary within a narrow band-like currencies within the exchange rate mechanism-or just by 5 per cent here and 10 per cent there. Supposedly authoritative estimates are totally at variance. The US government, for instance, anxious to demonstrate that the money and effort spent on trying to control drugs in Colombia has a positive effect, says that in 1995 that country grew coca sufficient to produce 80 tonnes of cocaine. The Colombian government's figure is 356 tonnes.
Plainly we have a ridiculous situation, where tens of thousands of officials and agents are moved by politicians to spend billions of pounds each year on a problem about whose seriousness no one has much of a clue. All we do know is that it is a relatively minor problem compared to other plagues afflicting mankind.
In his book Smoke & Mirrors, Dan Baum, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, enlivens an already entertaining debunking exercise by quoting sta- tistics at the end of each chapter. The first ends: "Number of Americans who died in 1969 falling down stairs: 1,824. Number who choked to death on food: 2,641. Number who died from cirrhosis of the liver: 29,866. Number who died from legal and illegal drugs: 1,601."
At the end of chapter two he records: "Number of Americans who died in 1970 from legal and illegal drugs: 1,899. Number who died from the flu: 3,707."
Chapter three ends: "Number of Americans who died in 1971 from legal and illegal drugs: 2,313. Number who died in gun accidents: 2,360."
Chapter four finishes: "Federal drug-enforcement budget in 1969: $65m. Federal drug-enforcement budget in 1974: $719m."
the idea of a "war on drugs" was born out of Richard Nixon's desire to become president in 1968. Two months before the election he declared to a Republican party rally: "As I look over the problems of this country, I see one that stands out particularly. The problem of narcotics." This conveniently pushed other US problems such as poverty, urban decay, alcoholism and racism to the margins of the political agenda and helped to get him elected. Thereafter he didn't look back-until Watergate.
Drug enforcement in the US has been directed mainly against poor people with black skin. Baum points out that 99 of 100 defendants in drug traf-ficking cases in the US between 1985 and 1987 were black. Expenditure on drug control has been rising rapidly since 1974; the budget rose from $4.7 billion (nearly ?3 billion) in 1988 to $12.3 billion (?7.7 billion) in 1993. During this period, the White House confirms, the street price of both heroin and cocaine dropped, indicating that these narcotics were increasingly available. So most of the money was poured down the drain.
On the basis of its admittedly wobbly information, the World Drug Report estimates that half the po-pulation of the world consumes alcohol; at least a fifth consumes tobacco. Those who consume illicit drugs amount to no more than between 3.3 per cent and 4.1 per cent of the human race. The bulk of these (2.5 per cent) crave nothing more powerful and addictive than cannabis. The UN estimates that the number of cocaine addicts in the world is no higher than 0.23 per cent of the population; heroin addicts make up 0.14 per cent.
Figures quoted by Noam Chomsky of MIT, the deflator-in-chief of the US drug war hyperbole, show that whereas tobacco kills more than 300,000 smokers a year in the US (with perhaps 46,000 more dying from passive smoking) and alcohol dispatches anything from 50,000 to 200,000, deaths recorded from the use of illegal drugs came to 3,562 in the US in 1985. None of the 60m US citizens who have smoked marijuana can be shown to have died from it.
The yawning discrepancy between the harm done by tobacco and alcohol and the threat posed by narcotics, as presented by the "warriors," makes the intellectual basis for the war on drugs a rickety one. The US tobacco industry has indeed come under a little well mannered pressure from the anti-smoking lobbies and you can't smoke in many Californian restaurants. But Chomsky points out that the US authorities promote sales of dangerous US tobacco products in export markets with all the zeal that Warren Hastings put into forcing Indian-grown heroin on to the wretched Chinese empire two centuries ago. In the 1980s, US tobacco exports doubled in value to $5 billion a year. In 1989, when US domestic to-bacco consumption fell by 5 per cent, its exports rose by 20 per cent. Former US Surgeon-General C Everett Koop said pithily: "When we are pleading with foreign governments to stop the flow of cocaine it is the height of hypocrisy for the US to export tobacco."
Chomsky also notes that Washington's drug strategy steers clear of taking any punitive action against the American chemical companies who prosper from their position as the world's largest providers of the chemicals ("precursors") needed to produce cocaine and other narcotics, or against the US banks whose deposits swell with laund- ered drug money. The UN World Drug Report shows that between 1990 and 1994 three quarters of all seizures of precursors took place in Colombia. Given that most of these chemicals are manufactured in the US and that successive US governments are pursuing the narcotics threat with such zeal, it is strange that the precursors elude the export controls which Washington imposes so zealously on the sale of goods to Cuba, Libya and Iran.
the principal factor in the global drugs trade is booming demand from the US. But policy makers and editors focus relentlessly on the supplier countries. We have all read horror stories about the Cali and the Medell?-n cartels in Colombia. Given that the big money is made on the retail mark-ups charged on the streets of American cities, why are we not told of the cashmere-suited members of the Chicago, the San Francisco or the Miami cartels? Why do the big figures in US drug wholesaling never face trial? Are we to believe that the amazing profits of the US drugs trade are concentrated in the grubby hands of semi-literates in Harlem and Watts?
The debate in the rich countries is often conducted in sublime ignorance of the realities in the producing countries, mostly poor, whence the raw material is dispatched at a fraction of the price fetched on the streets of Mayfair or Manhattan. It is in these countries that the real battle is being fought-and lost-at enormous cost in human blood and misery.
Take the case of Colombia, widely stigmatised as the centre of the world's manufacture of cocaine. Colombia is often presented as a country plunged into chaos by a combination of drug traffickers and left-wing guerrillas. It would be more truthful to say that it is a bitterly divided country, run for much of its recent history by a reactionary oligarchy supported by a venal military. Political violence began in earnest in 1948 when Jorge Eli?cer Gait?n, a popular, anti-communist Liberal leader, was assassinated. This set off a ten year wave of violence between Liberals and Conservatives which killed about as many people as Britain lost in the entire second world war. La Violencia, as it became known, had nothing to do with the cold war or with drugs; at the time, Colombia was not a source of narcotics.
But the narcotics trade has exacerbated Colombia's problems as the American, British and other governments have exerted pressure for a military solution. Although Colombian narcotics dealerships' financial turnover is only a tiny proportion of that earned by retail traders in the US and Europe, it is enough to have subverted every level of society. Ernesto Samper, president of Colombia, is only allowed into the US to participate in activities of the UN, having been found guilty of securing his term in office by means of a donation of about $6m from the narcos. If a presidency has been bought, what other offices cannot be bought? The Colombian army, trained to protect the old establishment oligarchy against the guerrilla bands, has been pulled into the war against drugs. Predictably, the soldiers have been bought off at wholesale prices by the narcos.
There are some cases of the narcos paying protection money to guerrillas in those areas which they control. But the general picture is either one of the narcos buying protection from the military against guerrillas or of the military collaborating with the paramilitary death squads which the narcos have established to protect their wealth and the large tracts of land they have bought with it. Ricardo Vargas, a Colombian academic and noted authority on the drug trade, suggests that of the 5.8m hectares of good grazing land in Colombia, drug traders have purchased more than 3m.
Colombia's paramilitary death squads have been flourishing. They argue that the power of the state is insufficient to maintain control over the guerrillas: neither the government nor its armed forces can ensure the rights of property owners against the depredations of these guerrillas-so private organisations must take the initiative. This argument is proudly asserted by the most notorious of the paramilitary groups, ACCU, the "peasant self-defence organisation of C?rdoba and Uraba"-a singularly ill-named body which is directed by rich narcos, not by poor peasants. Its present head is Carlos Casta?o, a man supposedly being sought by the authorities, who is at liberty despite the fact that many government officials have frequent contact with him. In a recent series of newspaper interviews, Castano boasted that his followers fought alongside the army.
Human Rights Watch, a US-based lobby group, says in a report published in 1996: "Based on our interviews with witnesses and former participants, the government's own investigations and abundant material collected by human rights groups and journalists, we believe that the military high command continues to organise, encourage and deploy paramilitaries to fight a covert war against those it suspects of support for guerrillas."
So the Colombian army, well paid and well equipped with weapons imported from the US and elsewhere, is actively engaged on the side of the narco establishment and their paramilitary death squads. The result of this bizarre concubinage has been tabulated by Cinep, the think-tank where Vargas works. It examined the political killings reported in Colombia in the first quarter of this year and concluded that narco death squads are killing six Colombians for each one killed by the guerrillas.
The horrendous mess which Colombia has become might have a point-if the quantity of narcotics it produces showed any sign of diminishing. In fact no one-neither the US nor the UN nor the brightest agronomists in the world-has found a crop which provides the peasants of Colombia with more than a fraction of the income they can earn from the bountiful and easily tended coca bush and the only slightly more demanding poppy.
Statistics contained in Drugs-linked Crops and Rural Development in Colombia by Ricardo Vargas and Jackeline Barrag?n, one of a series of papers published in London by the Catholic Institute for International Relations, show the extent of the failure to halt the cultivation of narcotics in four regions of Colombia. In an eight year period beginning in 1985, the area under coca did not fall, but rose from 19,513 hectares to 29,000 hectares, an increase of just over 50 per cent. Nationally, 300,000 peasants and small producers were involved directly or indirectly in the production of narcotics in 1992. This figure cannot but have increased in the meantime.
europe's position is important in this world- wide debate. Europe is a big consumer of both poppy and coca-based drugs, which are supplied from the western and eastern hemispheres. In its great variety of national and regional responses to the drugs question the EU may also be capable of coming up with some civilised solutions. Several city governments-Glasgow, Edinburgh, Zurich and Amsterdam, to name but four-have tested humane and commonsensical policies with varying degrees of success. Although the European commission itself has some involvement in the world campaign against narcotics, so far the Europeans have largely rejected the Nixonian war on drugs solution.
In Britain, there has never been the taboo about discussing methods of treating addiction which has long paralysed action in the US. Within the British medical profession there has been a free exchange of views. Within the media The Economist-from a position of the free-market right-has been advocating decriminalisation of drugs; it has recently been joined, for different reasons, by the Independent and the Independent on Sunday.
But the appointment of Keith Hellawell is not a good omen, particularly because the Blair government has ruled out of his terms of reference any obligation to discuss the decriminalisation of cannabis-a prerequisite of coming to terms with drugs. It smacks too much of Americanisation. More seriously, Hellawell may become a rallying point for those many government departments and individual civil servants whose careers have been put at risk by the end of the cold war and by the gradual erosion of national frontiers within the EU. The only promising feature of Keith Hellawell's appointment is that he doesn't seem to have been given a budget. We must be grateful for small mercies.
