America's unwinnable war on drugs Bernd Debusmann

Tag : Bulk Drugs
SAN YSIDRO – Looking south out of a window at the busiestborder crossing in the world, the phrase looking for needles in ahaystack comes to mind, along with the realisation that America'swar on drugs cannot be won. Unless the laws of supply and demandare miraculously suspended.
What you see from the window looks like a gigantic traffic jamslowly moving along 24 lanes stretching from Tijuana, on theMexican side of the border, towards inspection booths where agentsof the U.S. Customs and Border Protection check identity papers anddecide whether to wave a vehicle through or order it into'secondary inspection' for hidden drugs or people.
There is no day without drug busts and arrests. There is, in allprobability, not a day when some drug loads slip through threelayers of inspections. The brutal wars Mexico's drug cartels arewaging against each other in major cities south of the border arelargely over access to gateways into the U.S., the world's mostlucrative market for illicit drugs.
How big is that market? According to expert testimony to aCongressional committee in June, revenues from illicit drug salesin the U.S generated about $60 billion in 2000, the last year thegovernment compiled figures for an annual report on drug spending.To get that $60 billion into context: it equals what the 22 richindustrialised countries spend on foreign aid to the world's poor.
As President George W. Bush phrased it at the beginning of hisfirst term in office: 'The main reason why drugs are shippedthrough Mexico to the United States is because United Statescitizens use drugs.'
The United States leads the world in using marijuana and cocaine,according to a study by World Health Organisation researcherspublished this week. It was based on a survey of 54,000 people in17 countries.
The statistics about the San Ysidro port of entry, some 20 miles(32 km) south from San Diego, are mind-boggling: an average of150,000 people enter the United States there every day, some 30,000walking through turnstiles and into a long tunnel, the rest in53,000 vehicles.
'That means one out of every eight people that enter the UnitedStates, whether it be by land, air or sea enter through here,' saysAssistant Port Director William Ward.
LOW-TECH, HIGH-TECH
Ward, whose airy office provides the grandstand view of themulti-coloured river of metal rolling north, has seen San Ysidro'spersonnel grow from 60 officers to 850, working round the clock,assisted by high-tech radiation monitors to detect nuclear materialthat could be used for a dirty bomb and low-tech help in the formof dogs to sniff out drugs and people.
On a recent visit, an 8-year-old German shepherd named Dadademonstrated the dogs' ability to pick up the faintest odourtraces. She dragged her handler across two lanes to a white pickuptruck and pointed her nose to its spare tyre. It turned out to bestuffed full of packets of marijuana, tightly wrapped in plasticand blue masking tape, some 30 kg in all. It was the first of fivemarijuana seizures that day, totalling 139.2 kg.
The driver, a burly man in his 30s, was led away in handcuffs, toeventually join the roughly half a million people who are behindU.S. bars for drug offences on any given day.
While cocaine tends to dominate the headlines and the drug debatein Washington, the bulk of the drugs seized at San Ysidro ismarijuana, the most widely used illegal substance in the UnitedStates by a large margin. '27 percent of all the marijuana seizuresnationwide occur here,' according to Ward.
Marijuana use has been flat for the past few years, with anestimated 15 million Americans using the drug. In large parts ofthe country, it is more easily available than alcohol for Americansunder 21, the legal drinking age.
Since President Richard Nixon first declared war on drugs in 1969,seven successive administrations have pursued strategies thatfocused not on reducing demand but on eradicating drug crops abroad– in Latin America and Asia – blocking shipments at thecountry's borders, and enforcing tough drug laws at home. The costhas been staggering.
John Walsh, a drug policy expert at the Washington Office on LatinAmerica, a think tank, estimates U.S. government spending on drugcontrol between 1970 and this year at $920 billion (adjusted forinflation). The returns have been unimpressive. Despite temporaryblips, the price of illicit drugs has declined steadily over thepast three decades.
One of the reasons for the uninterrupted flow is what drug expertscall the balloon effect. You squeeze it in one place and it bulgesout in another. You eradicate a coca or marijuana field in one areaand it is replanted in another. You fortify one part of the2,000-mile border with Mexico and smugglers switch to anotherroute.
Or burrow underground. 'They've been building more tunnels underthe border,' Ward said. Agents take that as a measure of theirsuccess but it does little to stop the flow. Only a drop in demandwould do that. The prospect of that happening is remote. Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed arehis own.