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Doped again!
Two stories, on drugs, one french, one english, food for thought,ds
Comment:
Interesting story, in French, and how the French see what Washington is doing
in its so called War on Drugs, in Columbia. Part of the global drug trafic linkage
how the SuperStates can turn the drug war into a war against ethnic minorities
many of them dependant on drugs to buy arms in their struggle for democracy
against bloody lawless dictators.
If Super-States can intervene to supply naroc-states with
means to smash drug-financed rebels, does intervention and international
politics then have a war on drugs, or a war on demcracy ?
Democracies, sure to be the big question for
the next century ("A world safe for Demcracy?" rather "Is Democracy Safe?")
are being severely challenged and entrapped by this so called war on drugs,
in order to satisfy popular opinion at the polls.
Education, not war seems like a more proper and
effective response.
Here, you will see that the CIA gets a little bashing again, and then not,
but remember, when the old boys were hanging out with Chiang and the KN
in northern Burma and Taiwan, they were also sending parachutists, and air
lifts into Tibet to the the fearless Khampa warriors from Mustang country
in upper Nepal and lower Tibet.
Eradication of drugs is virtually the eradication of minority groups
taking their livelihood away, without replacing it, leaving
them defenseless, and destoying them as target, instead of the drug crop.
The fact that the Wa is said to have Sam missles and scared off Thai
rangers and aircraft says something about how this drug war is escalating
rather than lessening tensions. Follow the money trail... ds
fr The NATION (usa) web
20 9 1999
BEYOND LEGALIZATION
NEW IDEAS FOR ENDING
THE WAR ON DRUGS: A FORUM
It's Time for Realism by MICHAEL MASSING
Among readers of The Nation who follow the drug issue, it's an
article of faith that the war on drugs has failed miserably. The
clogging of our prisons with low-level drug offenders, the
widespread curtailment of civil liberties in the name of drug
enforcement, the strained relations with drug-producing nations
to our south, the whole puritanical mindset associated with Just
Say No--all have contributed to a consensus on the urgent need
for change.
As to what that change should be, there are some clear areas of
agreement. Virtually all liberals, for instance, would like to
see the police stop making so many drug arrests, which currently
number more than 1.5 million a year. Everyone, too, would like to
see an overhaul of the nation's harsh and discriminatory
drug-sentencing laws--a step that would, among other things,
reverse the relentless flow of black and Latino men into prison.
Beyond that, though, the consensus breaks down. And this has
helped stall the movement for reform. Despite growing
dissatisfaction with the drug war among the general public,
progress toward change has been minimal, and the inability of
liberals to propose a persuasive alternative helps explain why.
On the left, three schools of drug reform prevail. Each has
something to offer but, by itself, is an inadequate guide to
change. The most sensational is the CIA-trafficking school.
Actually, this is less a school than a tendency, limited to
certain sectors of the left, but it has absorbed much
intellectual energy over the years, beginning with Alfred McCoy's
1972 study The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia and extending
through Senator John Kerry's Congressional investigation in the
eighties and, more recently, Gary Webb's book Dark Alliance.
According to this perspective, America's drug problem cannot be
fully understood without examining the CIA's periodic alliances
with drug-running groups abroad, from the Hmong tribesmen in Laos
to the mujahedeen in Afghanistan to the contras in Nicaragua. By
teaming up with and providing cover to these forces, it is
alleged, the CIA has facilitated the flow of drugs into the
United States at critical moments. In the most eye-popping
version of this theory, advanced by Gary Webb, traffickers linked
to the CIA-backed contras are said to have supplied cocaine to
major dealers in South Central Los Angeles, thus helping to set
off the nation's crack epidemic. Though well aware of this
activity, the CIA did nothing to intervene. (This theory was
seized upon by some leaders of the black community, including
Congresswoman Maxine Waters, who wrote a glowing foreword to
Webb's book.)
With its chronicling of the CIA's ties to drug-tainted groups,
the CIA-trafficking school deserves credit for exposing the
hypocrisy of the drug war. It also raises important questions
about the types of alliances the United States sometimes makes
abroad. As a guide to drug reform, though, it's a dead end.
However much the contras were involved in drug trafficking (and
the evidence strongly suggests they were), they were clearly no
more than bit players in the overall cocaine trade. If any one
group was primarily responsible for the flow of cocaine into the
United States, it was the Colombian traffickers, and no one has
accused the CIA of abetting them. On the contrary, the US
government has for the past fifteen years been waging all-out war
on the Colombian narcos, with little to show for it.
Adherence to the CIA-trafficking school leads one into some
strange policy terrain. In focusing so strongly on the
intelligence agency, this school seems implicitly to accept the
idea that Washington could actually do something about the flow
of drugs into the United States if it really wanted to. If only
the CIA would fight the traffickers, rather than shield them,
it's implied, we could reduce the availability, and abuse, of
drugs in this country. Yet, after thirty years of waging war on
drugs, it should be apparent that with or without the CIA's help,
the United States is incapable of stemming the flow of drugs into
this country. The CIA-trafficking school unwittingly bolsters the
idea that the true source of America's drug problem lies outside
our borders, and that the solution consists in cracking down on
producers, processors and smugglers. In an odd way, then, this
school actually reinforces the logic underlying the drug war.
By now, it should be clear that America's drug problem is
home-grown, and that any effort to combat it must be centered
here. In particular, we must confront the real source of our
problem--the demand for drugs. On this point, many liberals
subscribe to the "root causes" school. This holds that the
problem of drug abuse in America reflects deeper ills in our
society, such as poverty, unemployment, racial discrimination and
urban neglect. To combat abuse, we must first address these
underlying causes--through policies to promote full employment,
increase the minimum wage, provide universal health insurance,
end housing segregation and create opportunities for
disadvantaged youths.
In focusing attention on the link between poverty and drug abuse,
the root-causes school provides a valuable service. Studies
indicate that drug addiction in the United States is
disproportionately concentrated among the unemployed and
undereducated. And certainly most liberals would endorse measures
to improve their lot. This, however, takes us far beyond the
realm of drug policy. To maintain that we must end poverty and
discrimination in order to combat drug abuse seems a prescription
for paralysis. The key is to find a strategy that is humane,
affordable and sellable--to find a strategy, in short, that could
actually work.
Certainly such a standard would seem to rule out the third main
school of left/liberal drug reform--legalization. On the surface,
drug legalization has undeniable appeal. If drugs were legalized,
the vast criminal networks that distribute them, and that
generate so much violence, would disappear. Prison space would be
reserved for the truly dangerous, black motorists would no longer
be stopped routinely on the New Jersey Turnpike, relations with
countries like Mexico and Colombia would improve and Americans
would no longer be hounded for the substances they decide to
consume--a matter of personal choice.
Yet legalizing drugs would entail some serious risks, the most
obvious being an increase in abuse. While legalizers tend to cite
drug prohibition as the source of all evil when it comes to
drugs, drugs themselves can cause extensive harm. Heroin,
cocaine, crack and methamphetamine are highly toxic substances,
and those addicted to them engage in all kinds of destructive
behavior, from preying on family members to assaulting strangers
to abusing children. In all, there are an estimated 4 million
hard-core drug users in the United States. Though making up only
20 percent of all drug users nationwide (the rest being
occasional users), this group accounts for two-thirds to
three-quarters of all the drugs consumed here. They also account
for most of the crime, medical emergencies and other harmful
consequences associated with drugs. If drugs were legalized, the
number of chronic users could well increase.
History is full of cautionary examples. In the early seventies,
for instance, doctors routinely began prescribing Valium (a minor
tranquilizer) for everyday cases of anxiety. As the number of
prescriptions increased, so did the incidence of abuse; by the
late seventies Valium was sending more people to hospital
emergency rooms than any other drug, heroin and cocaine included.
As physicians became aware of Valium's dangers, they began
writing fewer prescriptions for it, and the number of emergency
cases began dropping as well. Clearly, making drugs easier to get
can increase the extent to which they are abused, and one can
only imagine what would happen if such potent intoxicants as
heroin and crack suddenly became available by prescription or
were sold openly. Under the regimes favored by some libertarians
and free-marketeers, legalized drugs would be sold commercially
and marketed aggressively, with potentially disastrous results
for addicts and kids.
From a political standpoint, the liabilities of legalization are
no less obvious. According to opinion polls, most Americans
strongly oppose legalizing drugs. While the unpopularity of an
idea should not automatically disqualify it, legalization seems a
long-term loser. Indeed, the fact that legalization has so often
been presented as the sole alternative to the drug war has
hindered the movement for reform.
By now, the risks of legalization have become so evident that
even onetime supporters no longer advocate it. Instead, they have
embraced a variant of legalization called harm reduction. Not
always easy to define, harm reduction generally holds that the
primary goal of drug policy should not be to eliminate drug use
but rather to reduce the harm that drugs cause. Those who can be
persuaded to stop using drugs should be; those who can't should
be encouraged to use their drugs more safely. To that end, harm
reductionists favor expanding the availability of methadone,
setting up needle-exchange programs, opening safe-injection rooms
for heroin users and establishing heroin-maintenance programs
that provide addicts with a daily dose of the drug.
There is much to admire in harm reduction. Its encouragement of
tolerance for drug addicts provides a welcome alternative to the
narrow moralism of the drug war. At times, though, harm
reductionists take tolerance too far. In their eagerness to
condemn the drug war, they sometimes fail to acknowledge the
damage that drug addiction itself can inflict. While rightly
condemning the political hysteria surrounding "crack babies," for
instance, harm reductionists tend to overlook the havoc crack has
wrought on inner-city families. And, while commendably calling
for more needle-exchange programs, they rarely acknowledge that
syringes are often handed out indiscriminately at these
exchanges, with little effort to intervene with addicts and get
them to address their habits.
Nonetheless, harm reduction--by recognizing that chronic users
are at the core of the nation's drug problem and that they
constitute a public-health rather than law-enforcement
problem--can help point the way toward a more rational drug
policy. The key is to develop a policy that is as tough on drug
abuse as it is on the drug war.
In formulating such a policy, a good starting point is a 1994
RAND study that sought to compare the effectiveness of four
different types of drug control: source-control programs
(attacking the drug trade abroad), interdiction (stopping drugs
at the border), domestic law enforcement (arresting and
imprisoning buyers and sellers) and drug treatment. How much
additional money, RAND asked, would the government have to spend
on each approach to reduce national cocaine consumption by 1
percent? RAND devised a model of the national cocaine market,
then fed into it more than seventy variables, from seizure data
to survey responses. The results were striking: Treatment was
found to be seven times more cost-effective than law enforcement,
ten times more effective than interdiction and twenty-three times
more effective than attacking drugs at their source.
The RAND study has generated much debate in drug-research
circles, but its general conclusion has been confirmed in study
after study. Yes, relapse is common, but, as RAND found,
treatment is so inexpensive that it more than pays for itself
while an individual is actually in a program, in the form of
reduced crime, medical costs and the like; all gains that occur
after an individual leaves a program are a bonus. And it doesn't
matter what form of treatment one considers: methadone
maintenance, long-term residential, intensive outpatient and
twelve-step programs all produce impressive outcomes (though some
programs work better for certain addicts than for others).
To be effective, though, treatment must be available immediately.
Telling addicts who want help to come back the next day or week
is a sure way to lose them. Unfortunately, in most communities,
help is rarely available immediately; long waiting lists are the
rule. In New York State alone, it is estimated that every year
100,000 people who would take advantage of drug or alcohol
treatment if it were available are unable to get into a program.
Such numbers reflect the government's spending priorities. Of the
$18 billion Washington spends annually to fight drugs, fully
two-thirds goes to reduce the supply of drugs and just one-third
to reduce the demand. In all, less than 10 percent of federal
funds go to treat the hard-core users, who constitute the real
heart of the problem. Closing the nation's treatment gap should
be a top priority for the government.
How can we make this happen? According to federal estimates, the
government would have to spend about $3.4 billion a year on top
of current treatment expenditures to make help available to all
who want it; the states would have to spend roughly an equivalent
amount. If the current 67/33 percent split in the federal drug
budget between the supply and demand sides were equalized, this
would free up close to the sum in question at the federal level.
Actually, a strong case could be made for reversing these
proportions and allocating two-thirds to the demand side, but a
50/50 split seems as much as can be hoped for in the current
political climate.
Finding a more effective means of preventing drug use among young
people is another urgent need. Today, prevention consists mainly
of Just Say No messages broadcast on TV or preached in the
classroom. Unfortunately, research shows that such messages by
themselves do not work. To succeed, prevention, like treatment,
needs to focus on those most at risk. The problem is not so much
with kids who smoke an occasional joint but with those who
regularly use drugs and/or alcohol. For youths living in poor
neighborhoods, effective prevention would mean more recreational
programs, after-school activities and summer job opportunities (a
key plank of the root-causes school). For more privileged
students, prevention might take the form of early-warning systems
in which teachers, counselors and parents work together to
intervene with youths who show signs of getting into trouble with
drugs, legal or otherwise.
As for the nation's drug laws, the goal should not be abolishing
them--keeping drugs illegal can help contain abuse--but making
them more rational so that small-time offenders are not hit with
excessive penalties. And, whenever possible, nonviolent addicts
and sellers who are arrested should be offered treatment as an
alternative to incarceration. More generally, arresting low-level
offenders should be society's last, not first, line of defense.
A word on marijuana. At present, almost 700,000 people a year are
arrested for the sale or possession of pot. This is madness.
Marijuana is far less toxic than heroin, cocaine or even alcohol,
and the idea of putting people in jail for possessing it seems
absurd. At the same time, marijuana is not innocuous, especially
for young people, and we do not want to do anything that would
make it even more available than it is now. Legalizing marijuana
would certainly risk that. A far more rational approach would be
to decriminalize the drug; people caught using pot in public
would be subject to a civil penalty punishable by a fine, much as
a traffic violation is. The production, importation and sale of
marijuana, however, would remain illegal (though not subject to
the ridiculously harsh penalties now in place). Decriminalization
offers a realistic middle ground between the excesses of our
current approach and the potential perils of legalization.
In my recent book The Fix, I argue that a public-health approach
to the drug problem can work based on the one time we actually
tried it--during the Nixon Administration. Nixon, a staunch
law-and-order advocate, is remembered for having launched the war
on drugs, but, drawing on his pragmatic instincts, he in fact
made treatment his main weapon in that war. Confronting a
national heroin epidemic, the White House created a special
action office headed by physicians and addiction specialists, who
spent hundreds of millions of dollars to set up a national
network of clinics that offered help to all those who wanted it.
The result was a marked decline in heroin-related crime, overdose
deaths and hospital emergency-room visits. The national heroin
epidemic was thus stanched.
Unfortunately, that network largely disintegrated during the
Reagan years, so that by the time crack struck, treatment clinics
were completely overwhelmed. Today, our drug problem is far
larger and more complex than it was under Nixon. But the research
confirming treatment's effectiveness has grown, too, and in light
of the ongoing failure of the drug war, a public-health approach
stressing treatment over prosecution, counseling over
incarceration, would seem to offer our most humane, practical and
politically viable alternative.
E-mail this story to a friend.
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Michael Massing's The Fix (Simon & Schuster) won The Washington
Monthly's Political Book Award for 1998. He is an adjunct
professor at the Columbia School of Journalism.
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Le Monde
Guérilla et narcotrafic : les relations complexes de deux « ennemis de l'Etat »
BOGOTA de notre correspondante ( M. Ds.)
31 août 1999
L'Etat colombien affronte deux ennemis de taille :
une guérilla communiste qui, imperméable aux
chamboulements du monde, ne fait que croître
depuis dix ans et des trafiquants de drogue
toujours habiles à contourner les mesures
répressives mises en place avec l'aide des
Etats-Unis. Lutte armée et cultures illicites se
retrouvent dans les régions isolées où la présence
de l'Etat est faible ou inexistante.
Au-delà de la logique territoriale, les deux
phénomènes se renforcent mutuellement : la
guérilla tire aujourd'hui l'essentiel de ses
revenus des prélèvements sur le narcotrafic tandis
que celui-ci prospère dans les zones sous contrôle
des organisations armées. Leur relation complexe
rend difficile, pour le gouvernement, la mise en
place d'une politique efficace pour affronter les
uns et les autres.
La convergence d'intérêts entre guérilla et
narcotrafic n'a pas toujours été de mise. Dans les
années 80, à l'époque de Pablo Escobar, Rodriguez
Gacha et autres grands barons de la drogue,
l'affrontement fut violent. La première milice
antiguérilla, le MAS (« Mort aux racketteurs »),
fut ainsi créée par les trafiquants de drogue.
Aujourd'hui devenus propriétaires terriens,
ceux-ci financent encore partiellement les
paramilitaires. Ricardo Vargas, sociologue,
explique : « Les relations entre mafia et guérilla
se posent dans des termes radicalement différents
selon les régions.
Dans le Nord du pays, les narcotrafiquants sont en partie intégrés à
l'économie formelle et mettent en place, avec
l'aide des paramilitaires, des stratégies de
contrôle territorial en expulsant la guérilla et
la paysannerie traditionnelle. Dans le Sud, le
développement des cultures de la feuille de coca
- dont la Colombie est devenue le premier
producteur - et des activités de transformation et
d'exportation de la cocaïne a rapproché de fait
guérilla et trafiquants. »
Bernardo Perez, sous-directeur de Corpoamazonia
(organisme régional chargé de l'environnement)
souligne, pour sa part : « Dans la région
amazonienne du Sud du pays, où se concentrent 85 %
des cultures de coca, les Forces armées
révolutionnaires colombiennes [FARC, la principale
organisation armée du pays] ont sciemment stimulé
le développement de celles-ci afin d'augmenter
leur assiette fiscale et de consolider leur base
sociale. Aucune activité n'est dans cette région
aussi rentable que la coca. Narcotrafiquants et
petits paysans partagent avec la guérilla un même
ennemi : l'Etat. »
Ricardo Vargas considère, en revanche, que :
« C'est le marché et la marginalisation de la
paysannerie et non la guérilla qui ont suscité
l'explosion des cultures. Le démantèlement des
grands cartels de la drogue [Medellin et Cali] et
la fragmentation de la mafia ont également
contribué à placer celle-ci sous la coupe de la
guérilla. »
Pour Klaus Nylhome, directeur en Colombie du
Programme des Nations unies pour le contrôle
international des drogues (Pnucid), les FARC ne
sont toutefois pas un « cartel » : « Les FARC
régulent et taxent mais n'agissent pas comme une
mafia sur le marché des substances illicites. » Le
terme de « narcoguérilla », lancé par un
ambassadeur américain, tend à accréditer l'idée
que la guérilla aurait perdu toute dimension
politique. Pour beaucoup, à commencer par l'actuel
gouvernement, tel n'est pas le cas. En engageant
un processus de négociation avec les FARC, le
président de la République, Andrés Pastrana, se
devait de reconnaître leur statut politique.
Depuis un an, le terme de « narcoguérilla » a donc
complètement disparu du discours officiel.
Alejandro Reyes, chercheur de l'Université
nationale, est catégorique : « Il est tout aussi
néfaste d'appliquer des politiques antimafia à la
guérilla que de militariser la lutte contre les
cultures illicites. La fumigation aérienne des
cultures et les interventions militaires contre
une population paysanne marginalisée ont pour seul
résultat d'accélérer l'expansion des cultures dans
de nouvelles zones et de légitimer socialement la
guérilla. Seul un processus de négociation
politique peut mettre fin au conflit avec les
mouvements armés. »
De l'avis de Klaus Nylhome, la Colombie est restée
à la traîne en matière de développement
alternatif. La lutte contre le narcotrafic y garde
un caractère essentiellement répressif. La
politique d'éradication des cultures et sa
militarisation sont en bonne partie le résultat
des pressions exercées par les Etats-Unis. Les
Américains veulent des résultats rapides et
visibles pour leur opinion publique. Ils ont, au
cours des dernières années, augmenté
substantiellement leur coopération en matière de
lutte contre la drogue ; elle devrait atteindre en
1999 près de 300 millions de dollars
(283 millions d'euros).
La priorité donnée à la lutte contre le
narcotrafic est-elle compatible avec le soutien
formel apporté par Bill Clinton aux négociations
de paix engagées par Andrés Pastrana avec la
guérilla ? Le gouvernement américain affronte les
mêmes dilemmes que son homologue colombien.
© Le Monde 1999