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Intro - Why we should stop talking about the 'War on Drugs'

  • Benjamin-Alexandre Jeanroy
  • Mar 29, 2016
  • 8 min read

The persistence of the prohibitive paradigm, despite its many refutations, is indicative of the difficulty to think the complexity of social interactions within the local context and in global relations. As much as possible, great attention has been given in this thesis in regard to the use of specific terms, or rather, the attention not to use certain terms (or at least to use them with extreme parsimony and care). One of them is the infamous “War on Drugs”, a concept which represents the strange rebirth of an hydra with a thousand heads, a "zombie concept", theoretically and empirically disqualified multiple times but which obviously still refuses to die.

When the author started an internship at the UNODC Lao PDR Country Office, one of the first thing inconveniently mentioned to one of the agency personnel was that the topic of this thesis will focus on the consequences of the “War on Drugs” in the region and the potential responsibility of the U.N. agency in its propagation and sustainability. The answer was quite scathingly: “We do not use such term here. This is very american, and in the Southeast Asian context, this is very different. We use terms as “control regime.” (1) Surprised at first, the thesis oughted to recognize for several reasons the validity of such comment. The first is the most obvious: the drug control policy Southeast Asian context is immensely different than the situation in the Americas, notably in regard to the, mostly, lack of direct violence in the former region. The other reasons are linked to the very nature of the concept itself which disqualified the very notion.

In 1971, the fight against drug trafficking reached a milestone when U.S. President Richard Nixon declared ‘narcotic abuses’, "America's number one public enemy.” By launching a "War on Drugs" the Nixon administration strengthened a new paradigm, officially seeking to fight drugs on all fronts (Drug policy Alliance, 2016). However, John Ehrlichman, former Nixon’s chief domestic advisor when the latter was President in 1971 - and who served eighteen months in prison for his role in the Watergate scandal - candidly stated to journalist Dan Baum (2016) the real reason behind the premises of the so-called “War on Drugs”: “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

While the concept has been very useful in order to describe some persistent trend of the current regime, - for example, scholar Hans Van der Veen (2000) has highlighted how the concept has in many aspects took over the function of the Cold War - it is also extremely limiting and to a certain extent, a blunt out lie. By notably legitimizing the use of coercive state powers, in order to foster internal system discipline and order, but equally by “setting up control mechanisms to defend the state and society against external threats, at home and abroad”, the wars created by the drug control regime and its most notorious proponents, have given continuity to the lost of an elementary and existential enemy. Similarly, “The internationalization of police cooperation and the concomitant proliferation of tools to intervene in the sovereignty of individuals, peoples and foreign countries” have furthermore, such as the Cold War did, “decrease the prospect of a world order in which peace, justice and freedom could develop.” (Ibid.) Indeed, as pointed out by Johann Jari and Naomi Klein (2015), it often “seems like the long arc-history of the war on drugs, belongs in a story of symbolic wars where we embody some of our fears into an object and launch a crusade against it”.

However, for some analysts, the “War on Drugs” has never been only a metaphor. Ron Chepesiuk (1999) for example explained that the “War on Drugs” was for a long time used by governments around the world in order to describe efforts to enforce drug laws in their countries. Many political leaders took it accordingly and believed that in order to effectively root out their country of the scourge of drugs abuse and drug trafficking, the issue must had to be dealt as if their country was actually at war. And so, as a very real military conflict, a significant numbers (but not all) of drug users and dealers were treated as enemy of their state. Severe penalties, torture, imprisonment, death, became the norms; civil liberties were restrained and given low-priorities in order to achieve military objectives. The climate, gave way to a “Us versus Them” climate, where “victory” could only be met through the eradication of the enemy.

Regularly, the U.S. still asserts that enforcing the drug control regime outside of its national borders is “vital to the national interests of the United States.” (U.S., INCSR, 2012) These national interests are never clearly explained, and the reason is often very simple: the country uses the argument of the IDCR, so that it can more easily intervene in the internal affairs of other nations. As explained by Helen Redmond (2014): “The drug war allows U.S. foreign policy objectives to be advanced in country after country by an elite force of Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents, who are trained by and partner with each branch of the U.S. military.” This partnership was only formally declared in 2008, when the DoD (U.S. Department of Defense), officially granted permission to U.S. army personnel to accompany U.S. drug law enforcement officials on joint missions.

In regard to sustain such massive lies, deeply rooted in military violence, the economic concept of the “broken window fallacy” is quite useful to understand. The term has been widely used to debunk popular, but false argument that “destruction of property stimulates economic growth by creating messes that people will eventually be paid to clean up.” (The Anti Media, 2015a) We often hear this argument to defend war itself. Indeed, if everyone can agree on the fact that “war is bad”, on the bright side, many argues that military conflict can stimulate the economy and create jobs. However, there is an important flow in this argumentation, namely that it fails to consider a very obvious, yet often overlooked part of the equation: it is possible that these resources used for war would have created much better outcome, if they would have been used for creation instead of destruction. Coined by the nineteenth century economist Frederic Bastiat, the concept points out that in the case of such an argument, we often only think of the gains of the people who profits from the destruction of something, rather than the losses incurred by unseen third parties. In this regard, the result of “finding joy in destruction”, is very much entrenched in the idea of war, and of the drug war. Ethics become irrelevant here because we are able to rationalize conducts that should not have been tolerated in the first place. And this is exactly what is happening in regard to the current drug control regime.

Although actual wars were being fought in the Global South and funded by taxpayers in the Global North, it has been so under false pretense. In her book Drug War Capitalism, Dawn Paley (2014), clearly explains that this so-called “War on Drugs” has actually been all along a war against people and community which standed in the way of powerful political and economic interests, namely those of transnational corporations (2). Like many, if not all wars waged by the Global North, and most notoriously by the U.S. since the end of WWII, the truth often differs from the hyperboles used to sell to the public the exploitation and profiteering of a few over many.

However, as noted by Rafael Custódio (2015), “The war on drug’s failure, and the unacceptable levels of human rights violations it causes is not limited to so-called developing or peripheral countries.” In the Global North, former Scottish Government adviser Mike McCarron explains that “The war on drugs, (…) is a war on the poor, as they are most affected by the performance indicators used by medicine, criminal justice social work, particularly child protection, and the police, enforcement and security agencies.” (Heralds, 2015) Indeed, as noted by linguist Noam Chomsky (2002), “substances tend to be criminalized when they are associated with the so-called dangerous classes, (…) the criminalization of certain substances is a technique of social control.” In this regard, illicit drugs play a similar role than communism yesterday and terrorism today so that people can “huddle beneath the umbrella of authority for protection from the menace.” In the U.S. for example, the “War on Drugs” has replaced Jim Crows laws as a system of racial subjugation. In other words, as seemingly confirmed by former Nixon’s chief domestic advisor, “the intense racial targeting that’s become synonymous with the drug war wasn’t an unintended side effect — it was the whole point.” (Hanson, 2016)

As mentioned by the Transform, Count the Costs initiative, the “War on Drugs” is therefore “a meaningless phrase which has produced incredibly meaningful consequences.” (Count the Costs, 2012a) Ultimately, what we need to understand here is that it is not a “War on Drugs”, it is a “War on People.” Additionally, what is argued here is that similarly to the problematic situation linked to the so-called “War on terrorism”, you cannot wage a war against a “thing” or “something.” and these are the reasons why critical analysis of the current IDCR, including the present work, should not be using the term “War on Drugs”.

 

(1) Informal interview with UNODC personnel, 15/08/15.

(2) As Dawn Paley (2014) wrote, "This war is about control over territory and society [and market share, cheap labor, mineral rights and profits], much more so than it is about cocaine or marijuana.”

 

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