Drugs and the world
by Mike Jay
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The US comedian Will Rogers quipped in 1930 that "Prohibition is better than no alcohol at all" - and so it has proved for today's War on Drugs. Since it began in earnest in the 1970s, the illicit drugs market has become, after oil and arms, the largest commodity trade on the planet. Meanwhile, the anti-drugs industry has ballooned just as spectacularly, spending billions a year on everything from customs patrols round the Caribbean to crop eradication in the Andes, training anti-drug units across Africa to locking up half a million marijuana users in the US.
Axel Klein's experience of both these worlds has given him a unique insight into the surreal gulf between them. As an observer on UN and other international drug control programmes, he has studied drug cultures and markets in Africa, Asia and South America. In the process, he has witnessed at first hand the perverse effects of lavishing drug war dollars on developing countries with oppressive governments and shoestring police, customs and drug treatment operations.
In the Caribbean and Central America, the legal system is swamped by US and UN demands to crack down on drug users: prison populations have soared, creating precisely the marginalised underclass that international development is intended to eradicate. In Colombia, anti-drug funding swills around a government and police bureaucracy which has itself become a major conduit for the cocaine trade.
In Central Asia, the picture is even stranger, as an alphabet soup of UN and EU anti-drug agencies attempt to stop the flow of Afghan opium and heroin by setting up customs controls across a patchwork of rudimentary states and disputed enclaves where national borders are more an aspiration than a reality. The effect is to give carte blanche to official corruption and to expand the reach of oppressive regimes. Vehicle searches (or the bribes required to avoid them) have slowed traffic to a virtual standstill across the region, though actual heroin seizures remain elusive. Meanwhile, EU-sponsored treatment centres sit empty, and drug-testing kits gather dust in their factory shrink wrappings.
As Klein observes, all these counterproductive follies are made possible by the assumption of Western governments that drug use in the developing world is an obstacle to development, and must be rooted out before these countries can aspire to becoming modern, functional and prosperous democracies. But as his fieldwork reveals time and again, it is drug control, rather than drugs themselves, that is propping up corruption, the oppression of minorities and the criminal economy.
Why, then, has the War on Drugs - which habitually cites the anti-slavery campaign as its model for liberating the vulnerable and oppressed - turned into a punitive crusade that puts the boot into millions of the most vulnerable people on the planet on a daily basis? The answer, Klein argues, lies in its failure to understand why people take drugs in the first place.
The political response to drugs treats them entirely as a source of negative consequences: as health hazards and agents of immoral behaviour, poverty and criminality. But their prevalence across the globe provides ample evidence for their benefits. Chewers of khat in Yemen, coca in Peru and betel in Indonesia are all weaving a thread of pleasure into their lives that helps to recalibrate the balance between work and leisure, strengthen social bonds and keep their economies ticking over. By casting them as evils to be rooted out, international drug control is not only waging war on the cultures it claims to be protecting but turning everyday activities into vast shadow economies of organised crime.
The roots of this problem lie not in the developing world but deep in Western culture itself. From the 16th century, Europe was flooded with exotic new drugs - tea, coffee, tobacco, sugar, cocoa - that were hailed as miracle drugs by some but viewed with intense suspicion by others; indeed, most of them were prohibited at one point or another. The key to their integration was to shed their initial image of decadent novelties and to find a role in work and the rituals of daily life. We can observe the same process, perhaps, with cannabis today, as it loses its associations with delinquent and dangerous youth and becomes a more widespread adjunct to an evening's relaxation.
In this context, the War on Drugs can be understood as a response to the turbulence produced by the globalised culture of the last 50 years, and an attempt to remake the developing world in the West's image. But its overwhelming effect has been to expand the powers of the state and weaken the rights of its citizens - precisely the opposite of the values that organisations such as the UN are committed to uphold.
Klein is careful to damp down expectations that the crushing dynamics of the War on Drugs will change any time soon, though he concludes with the suggestion that 9/11 might one day be seen as the beginning of the end. When they were drafted a century ago, the drug laws were an effective way of focusing the state's attention on undesirable elements and troublesome ethnic minorities; but today, as drugs diffuse ever more widely through the population, the War on Terror targets these enemies of the modern state with far greater precision. Here, as throughout, Drugs and the World offers penetrative insights both into the largely hidden world of global drug control and the psychosocial conflict that generates it.
