Another nail in the prohibition coffin?

The Washington Post has an interesting opinion piece by Peter Moskos showing an alternative system to our drug war.

As a police officer, I responded when citizens called 911 to report drug dealing. Those calls didn’t tell me much, though, because I already knew the drug corners. And what could I do? When a police car pulls up to a drug corner, the corner pulls back. Dealers, friends, addicts and lookouts walk slowly away…

But soon enough I’d have to answer another 911 call for drugs. And when I left, the crew would reconvene. One of my partners put it succinctly: “We can’t do anything. Drugs were here before I was born, and they’re going to be here after I die. All they pay us to do is herd junkies.

As I’ve said many, many times, that’s a function of our current law enforcement regime.  Departments (and officers) are rewarded for making arrests and seizures of illegal material.  The easiest people to arrest are drug users, who are committing a crime by possessing and using drugs as well as the numerous crimes of opportunity they engage in to acquire more drugs so they overwhelmingly are the ones who get arrested.

But, arrests shouldn’t be an end in themselves.  The goal should be reduced crime and increased public safety.  Making arrests the only tool we use to get there would be like…using military force to solve every diplomatic problem we encounter.

Without declaring a war, authorities there have managed to lower addiction rates, limit use and save lives. The United States, by contrast, spends $50 billion a year on its war on drugs and leads the world in illegal drug use, with millions of Americans regularly using marijuana, cocaine and ecstasy.

In Amsterdam, the red-light district is the oldest and most notorious neighborhood. Two picturesque canals frame countless small pedestrian alleyways lined with legal prostitutes, bars, porn stores and coffee shops. In 2008, I visited the local police station and asked about the neighborhood’s problems. I laughed when I heard that dealers of fake drugs were the biggest police issue — but it’s true. If fake-drug dealers are the worst problem in the red-light district, clearly somebody is doing something right.

The results are telling. In America, 37 percent of adults have tried marijuana; in the Netherlands the figure is 17 percent. Heroin usage rates are three times higher in the United States than in the Netherlands. Crystal meth, so destructive here, is almost nonexistent there. By any standard — drug usage rates, addiction, homicides, incarceration and dollars spent — America has lost the war on drugs.

Now, I’ve talked to people who give me the old “Yeah, but that wouldn’t work here.  Our population is different.”  Like all those windmills and wooden shoes makes a kindlier, gentler breed of criminal.  I’m not sure that’s it at all, however and suspect that it might have a lot more to do with all of the unexamined assumptions we have about crime, criminals and deterrence.  Of course, it’d be nice to actually try an alternate approach to see if it works without having to worry about a bunch of yahoos screeching about how we’re just coddling criminals.

But that, in itself, is a telling response.  I wonder if crime prevention figures into how most people think about criminal justice or if crime punishment is more important.

Still, the fact that these sorts of discussions are happening more frequently is a good sign.  maybe we can get away from this hamster on a wheel drug war and start the serious work of making our neighborhoods, towns and cities safer.  As Moskos says about the Dutch:

Police in the Netherlands are not involved in a drug war; they’re too busy doing real police work.

One step backwards or forward?

This AP story about counter-narcotics activities in Afghanistan was a frustrating one to read:

But the economy of this village sputtered to a halt last year when the government began aggressively enforcing a ban on opium production. Villagers were not allowed to plant their only cash crop. Now shops are empty and farmers are in debt, as entire communities spiral into poverty.

…

The villagers say they did as the government told them, and planted their fields with wheat, barley, mustard and melons. But these crops need more care than the tough opium poppy, which will bloom with little water or fertilizer.Most of the wheat fields yielded little because the farmers couldn’t afford to fertilize the land. Even where yields were decent, farmers say they could have earned between two and 10 times more by planting the same land with opium.

Ok, let’s chalk that ‘10 times’ earnings estimate up to exaggeration.  Still, the point is true.  With poor irrigation, land, transportation infrastructure and available markets Afghan farmers (dirt poor in the best of times) are going to have to work that much harder to make ends meet.

Weren’t we supposed to be applying the principles of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan?  This certainly doesn’t sound like we’re trying hard to win over the local population:

Villagers say desperation is pushing hundreds to immigrate to neighboring Iran, where they work as day laborers. Farmers throughout the region are also sinking deeply into debt.

Oh…and listen to this jackass:

“These poor farmers are going to get stepped on and get hurt in this effort,” says former Drug Enforcement Agency official Doug Wankel, who organized the U.S. counternarcotics effort here in 2003. “But it’s a pain that has to be endured for the good of the masses.”

Said like only someone with a six figure salary, nice house and never a worry about getting his family enough to eat could.  Of course, the DEA has a brilliant record of counternarcotics operations in Afghanistan (production has gone up every year but 2005 since the war started) following up on their stellar jobs in Columbia, Mexico and the U.S.

Most of these actions seem to  be conducted by Afghan forces.  And the challange is that the Afghan government is still on the ‘crush the farmers‘ bandwagon.  I don’t know how much things have changed but in the past eradication efforts have been selectivly carried out based on who was or wasn’t making the appropriate pay offs to government officials or competing with the local governors opium operations.  Hopefully things are different now.

Still, it’s not all bad news.  American forces (with the exception of Mr. Wankel) seem to be sticking with their strategy (outlined earlier this month) that they would no longer target the fields of individual poppy farmers and move up the food chain to traffickers, processors and distributors instead.

This is a good step since farmers can still make money but I’d like to see it go farther.  The development of a purchaser which can compete with the Taliban for opium production would be another great way to put pressure on the group instead of just hunt and peck operations hoping to get a warehouse or two.  All those operations do is drive up the cost to the end user, regardless if we’re talking about speakeasy customers in the Depression or junkies today looking for some good H.  Rather, we should be harnessing the power of good old fashioned capitalism and either foster a pharmaceutical industry to develop opium based drugs for the developing world or (worst case scenario) have the government act as a buyer of the crop.  The farmers get their pay either way, don’t have to worry about government censure, and forces the Taliban to exert more of their resources just securing one of their primary funding sources.

The U.N. drug problem

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime recently held the 2009 session of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs in Vienna (nice work if you can get it) and they published a whole host of reports to go with it.  I checked out two of them:  “Organized Crime and its threat to Security” and “World situation with regard to drug trafficking“.

The Organized Crime paper is interesting.  So interesting in fact that if all government documents were written like this I might stop reading books.  The frustration of the author(s) is palpable over the lack of rational governmental policy regarding narcotics production and distribution.  Page after page you can feel the author(s) struggling with their desire to slap some people around.  Their solution is rooted in both common sense in unrealism.

“…a number of countries now face a crime situation largely caused by their own choice.  This is bad enough.   Worse is the fact that, quite often their vulnerable neighbours pay an even greater price.”  [italic in original]

Yeah…can you see any politician running for office in the U.S. on this idea?  Hillary Clinton made huge headlines for stating the obvious just a few weeks ago.  Are we really prepared to take a good, long look in the mirror?

Why do states abandon masses of unemployed, illiterate youth that face no other option than a day of money, notoriety and death as foot soldiers in rag-tag armies of mafias and rebels? [italics original]

The challenge is to re-integrate marginalized segments of society and draw them into, rather than push them out of the law.

Uh oh…that’s starting to sound a little to bleeding heart to be good.  What a good time to mention Jim Webb’s prison reform bill:

We have 5% of the world’s population; we have 25% of the world’s known prison population. We have an incarceration rate in the United States, the world’s greatest democracy, that is five times as high as the average incarceration rate of the rest of the world. There are only two possibilities here: either we have the most evil people on earth living in the United States; or we are doing something dramatically wrong in terms of how we approach the issue of criminal justice.

Back to the U.N. report.

The author(s) take a very strong position against any sort of drug legalization, arguing that it “would be a cynical resignation of the state’s responsibility to protect the health of its citizens and tantamount to accepting that a portion of every generation will be lost to addiction.”

Unfortunately, the authors don’t explain how they came to draw their line in the sand where they did, allowing tobacco and alcohol to be acceptable.  In fact, their paper, perhaps unintentionally, makes a decent case for the legalization for marijuana and continued illegal status for other drugs.  In fact, I’d recommend reading it from both perspectives.

While other drugs require specific production processes which can create distribution chokepoints vulnerable to interdiction, “cannabis requires very little attention and grows virtually anywhere…[so] farmers can be difficult to deter since they invest so little in its cultivation.”  In fact, cannabis cultivation is so difficult to deter that its ease of production makes it unattractive to ‘high level criminals’ outside of Canada, Mexico, Morocco, Paragua, and Afghanistan.

The authors do tip a really big hat to the idea of a comprehensive approach to the narcotics problem:

Arrests and seizures are necessary, but insufficient. The principle behind them is to incapacitate offenders and to deter potential ones. But this is fruitless when social conditions continue to generate whole new classes of people with strong incentives to offend. Those willing to risk death by ingesting a kilogram of condom-wrapped cocaine pellets (for a few thousands dollars), are not put off by the risk of jail.

As they later note, however, that sort of thinking just isn’t popular in most places where everyone wants to be seen as the heir to the ‘Dirty Harry’ empire and be seen as ‘tough on crime’.

I can’t tell if the authors are tilting at windmills here or see some reason for optimism.  Their recommendations are interesting and one about applying the lessons of tabacco reduction are a big reason why, respite what they write, I suspect there may have been some closet legalization fans among them.  After all, if you’re going to recommend a successful program for reducing the supply and demand of an addicting drug, why highlight the one which is univesally legal and so subject to the full weight of governmental and social controls if you’re a prohibitionist.

Kill ‘em all!

The Armchair Generalist has an interesting post commenting on a rant by Eeben Barlow telling his readers that we need to stop pussy footing around when it comes to illegal drugs and kick some ass.

Fighting the illegal drug trade requires a strong strategy – a strategy that governments will not be afraid to implement, regardless of the human rights of the dealers, syndicates and cartels. It, additionally, requires a genuine desire to eradicate the problem. If the drug wars are to be won, it requires determination from governments to do exactly that. This requires courage and national will – character traits few governments seem to have.  It is time for governments to either take the politically correct avenue and legalise drugs or do the correct thing and fight it in order to stop it. If the decision is made to destroy this trade, then strong action is called for. This action should call for an intensification of real intelligence gathering and hard action to attack and destroy the dealers, syndicates and cartels.

I find it hard to believe that Barlow is such an idealist that he thinks things like the law of supply and demand and corrupt government officals can be overcome if we just all had the will.

If just implementing a strategy that didn’t worry about silly things like human rights was all it took to stop the drug traffickers than these places would be drug free.

If we’re going to wish for honest governments willing to forgo national and personal interest for the greater good of the world, drugs might not be a problem.  Either would war, environmental damage or greed.

You might as well put a pony on your list while you’re at it.

Cracks in the facade

In what looks like what may be the first federal baby step to ending prohibition, the Attorney General has issued a new policy saying they will go after marijuana distributors only if they are in violation of federal and state law.

This means that states which have decriminalized/legalized marijuana to a greater or lessor extent will now be the tripwire to determine if federal authorities get involved.

In the Bush administration, federal agents raided medical marijuana distributors that violated federal statutes even if the dispensaries appeared to be complying with state laws. The raids produced a flood of complaints, particularly in California, which in 1996 became the first state to legalize marijuana sales to people with doctors’ prescriptions.

Legalizing marijuana nationally is probably a non-starter for the foreseeable future but pushing it to the states has the advantage of appealing to both states rights/libertarian types as well as the anti-prohibition constituents.

Expect to see more states enact medical marijuana laws, especially if legislatures can figure out how to tax the proceeds.

Drugs, drugs, drugs (pt. 1)

I’m working my way through the latest National Drug Threat Assessment put out by the National Drug Intelligence Center.  My thoughts thus far:

Their section on marijuana is very disappointing.  After stating that production and potency of marijuana continues to climb is leaves out the very important questions of why or what impact existing or new medical marijuana/decriminalization laws have on production or usage.  I suspect we won’t see any ‘official’ big picture discussion of marijuana usage since our current position encourages current production trends and enriches the very drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) that we claim to want to fight.  At some point I think we’re going to need to decide which is more dangerous to public safety:  legal marijuana (with the risk that it might, like alcohol and tobacco, get in the hands of the young) or increasingly sophisticated criminal organizations which are sustained through illicit marijuana sales.  Note in both cases marijuana ain’t going away.

Speaking of which…Mexican DTOs are now identified as the ‘greatest organized crime threat to the United States’.

It’s starting to feel like an awards ceremony…’And the greatest organized crime threat goes to…Mexican DTOs!’

Continuing with the ‘greatest threat’ theme, cocaine is the ‘leading drug threat’, followed by methamphetamine and marijuana.  That’s right marijuana is more of a threat to society than heroin and prescription drugs.  This is where their shoddy methodology comes through.  They made this bold statement by surveying agencies around the country about which drug is the biggest threat and then just totaling up the answers.  That means (I think, their methodology section is pretty puny) that is New York City says their biggest drug threat, based on cost to public, number of deaths and associated crimes is cocaine and Podunk, Idaho says their biggest threat is marijuana based on the fact that someone had just watched ‘Refer Madness’ those each carry equal weight.

I could write, at length, about my frustrations with surveys conducted of law enforcement agencies but let me just take a deep breath and let it pass for now.

On the positive side…Their cocaine section is pretty good.  Particularly their ‘intelligence gaps’ and ‘outlook’ section.

More to come…

Thank goodness for the reserves

I saw this today (thanks) which says that for the first time in history, more than 1% of the U.S. population is incarcerated in either federal, state or local prisons and jails.

During 2007, the U.S. prison population increased by more than 25,000 inmates to almost 1.6 million inmates, and local jails throughout the United States held 723,131 inmates at the end of 2007.

I saw that and then, out of curiosity checked the number of people serving in the military. From Wikipedia:

As of June 30, 2008, about 1,427,546 people are on active duty in the military with an additional 1,458,400 people in the seven reserve components.

That’s right, there are more people in prison than who are serving in the active duty military (which is probably an accurate comparison since both can be considered ‘full time’.

And what does it say about us when its easier to fill our prisons than fill the ranks of our military?  Ok, that’s a bit of hyperbole but these statistics really bug me.

If you needed another reason why our current prohibition policies regarding narcotics is a bad idea, this is it.  Can a democracy sustain itself for long when 1% of its population is incarcerated and prospects are for that number to continue to grow?  And remember, if 1% of the population is locked up, than some greater number (5%?  10%) have been through the criminal justice system and are on parole, probation or have ‘paid their debt to society’.  How many of those people are disenfranchised by not being allowed to vote, live in certain areas or have decent prospects for work?  Is that really good for our country?

I’m really not sure who this benefits…other than the prison industry that is.

So, let’s quit screwing around and have a mature debate about legalization.

More Afghanistan poppies

I don’t seem to be able to resist stories about Afghanistan and how our lack of a good policy regarding the poppy crop is making our job there very, very difficult.  Earlier this week the NY Times printed an article by the senior U.S. counternarcotics officer in Afghanistan (hat tip to J. over at the Armchair Generalist). He has some interesting insight and I’ll have to rethink some of my previously held beliefs about what drives the poppy growing in Afghanistan but ultimately I think he comes to the wrong conclusions.

He’s a strong advocate of aerial eradication of poppy fields and claims it’s resulted in great successes around the world. I’m no expert on that so I’ll take his word for it but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea for Afghanistan.  He writes that time and time again, people tell him that local populations will be fearful and hostile to an aerial eradication campaign.  Now he chalks this resistance up to corrupt officials wanting to keep their poppy crops safe or Karzai sucking up to the Pastun population who votes overwhelming for him.  He argues that there’s no reason for Afghan locals to be upset with spraying since it’s been proven to be totally safe.  Now, I’m sure there is a great deal of truth in the fact that corruption and pandering contributes to resistance to eradication efforts but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t serious concern among the local population to aerial spraying.

1. I don’t know how many Afghan farmers read FDA reports.  I suspect they may be a bit dubious of foreigners stopping by to say “Trust us, it’s totally safe.”
2. The Soviets engaged in defoliation operations and were alleged to be involved in some chemical warfare, I’m guessing, your average farmer, who either remembers those days or grew up with stories about how green and lush Afghanistan was before the Soviets is not going to be thrilled about seeing planes spraying the same areas that he and his family lives and works.  It’s this lack of appreciation for local situational factors that causes me to view this article with suspicion.

He also mentions the prevalence of corrupt, poppy profiting warlords in senior government positions.  That’s certainly a major obsticle to any good eradication program.  I believe (and think the author agrees) that’s a function of the reluctance of the U.S. government (and specifically the Department of Defense) to take narcotics seriously.  While I was in Afghanistan in 2003-2004, the impression I got was that the issues of warlordism and narcotics control were seen as peripheral issues, at best, that only threatened to interfere with the ‘real’ business of dealing with the Taliban.  If the article is correct, that mindset remains alive and well within the halls of the Pentagon.

Poppies are part of the fuel that fires the Taliban engine.  They aren’t the whole component though, which is why destruction of the crop alone risks making the problem worse since it might drive the locals into the arms of the Taliban.  What is needed is a strategy which deprives the Taliban of the income derived from poppy cultivation and binds the local population to the central government (or at least to something which won’t result in people blowing themselves up and flying planes into buildings).

The author argues against the idea that poverty is the reason why farmers grow poppies citing a UN report which (apparently) says that poppy cultivation is focused on the ‘wealthiest’ parts of Afghanistan.  Now, in a country where the average wage is less than $2 a day, talking about ‘wealthy’ parts of the country seems a bit shady.

I still believe the answer is a massive buying program which pays Afghan farmers for harvested poppies.  This avoids the problem of farmers taking money not to plant poppies and then having them plant it anyway for sale.  The U.S. should be the biggest purchaser of poppies in the world and then we should destroy the entire crop.  In that way we starve the Taliban of a major source of funds.  Yes, farmers will continue to grow poppies and some will even switch to poppies in order to get this check.  But, our initial focus needs to be the elimination of the Taliban as a significant player in Afghanistan.  Once they’ve been reduced to the point of irrelevance, then we can eliminate the subsidy, perhaps replacing them with subsidies for other crops and begin serious eradication efforts.

In the end the recommendations he mentions are generally lame.

1. More DEA agents in Kabul to ‘get tough’ in prosections. Because that’s worked wonders here in the U.S. where 30 years after the ‘War on Drugs’ started we haven’t reduced availability, price or purity of drugs but have managed to put 2 million people in jail.
2. Tell our allies to get with the program or get out of Afghanistan. Uh, haven’t we figured out that the ‘go it alone’ strategy isn’t a winner?
3. Bring President Karzai to heel or tell him he’ll lose U.S. support. Yeah, that’ll happen.  Under what circumstances would we pull out of Afghanistan without getting Bin Laden and/or letting the country fall back into complete anarchy.  We’ve put all our chips on Karzai and he knows it.  There’s no way we’ll abandon him.
4. Get the DOD on board with working counternarcotics. I agree with this one.  It would be nice to have a unified strategy regarding poppy cultivation across the whole country rather than leaving it up to unit commanders.
5. Use development money as a corrot to get areas to give up poppy cultivation. Again, I agree (I figured I’d end on a positive note).

Drugs, gangs and keep your hand on your wallet

It’s very easy to see criminals as two dimensional caricatures that exist only to commit criminal activities.  That can lead to bad analysis, decisions and policies and so it’s important to try to understand where criminals are coming from (both literally and figuratively).

Sudhir Venkatesh has written a book titled ‘Gang Leader for a Day‘ where he documents his years of research of a gang in Chicago.  He spent a lot of time with the gang, gained their confidence and was able to get a level of access and understanding that would be virtually impossible for other outsiders to get.  In the process he was able to not only understand how the gang worked but also how its members interacted with the larger community.  It’s interesting in demonstrating how a complete breakdown in social/governmental/family institutions leads not only to gang recruitment but to the gang taking functions to achieve some sort of order.

I haven’t gotten around to reading the book yet but I can highly recommend this presentation (free mp3 version) where he talks about his book in the U.K.  The talk runs about an hour and you won’t be disappointed.

My other recommendation is from The Moth podcast. The June 27th episode (I think you can get it from iTunes) has a short (15 minutes or so) story about O.T. and his career as a pickpocket.  There are a number of interesting points in the story (my favorite was the use of letters of introduction between criminals) but I think its real value is the potential this and similar sources of information could be used in training analysts in the law enforcement field.  We’ve gotten so used to seminars, traditional assessments, etc. that I think we’re overlooking potential learning tools which could not only inform but do it such a way that will ’stick’ in peoples heads better and encourage critical thinking.

The New Yorker has an interesting piece on medical marijuana in California (demonstrating yet again why we are in desperate need for a cool, reasoned discussion about legalizing and regulating marijuana in the U.S.)

Finally, the Atlantic Monthly has a great article in their last month’s issue about the rise of homicides in suburbs and how it looks to be the result of ‘revitalization’ policies which knock down inner city housing areas and encourage the residents to move to outlying areas.  For years the law enforcement community has been talking about gang migration to suburban/rural areas as being a function of a planned expansion to expand drug markets and recruitment.  What if, instead, it’s an unintended consequence of anti-poverty policies designed to help people escape the third world conditions of inner city housing projects and move into middle class areas via the section 8 housing program?