Notwithstanding all the compelling evidence to the contrary, let us assume for the next 800 words that recent events in Venezuela were actually an attempt to stem the flow of illicit drugs into the United States rather than a thinly veiled attempt to steal Venezuela’s oil reserves. That assumption presents more questions than answers.
Here’s the biggest question: Is kidnapping the leader of a sovereign nation the best way to prosecute our war on drugs? Kidnapping Nicolas Maduro, blowing up boats without due process for the people killed by the explosions and imposing tariffs on goods imported from countries that also export drugs to the U.S. share one thing in common. They are a supply-side approach to waging the war on drugs.
That approach allows the U.S. to identify foreign bad guys and deploy flashy weapons against them, to maximum dramatic effect, on battlefields, far from our borders. That approach also allows us, and probably encourages us, to disregard the demand side of the drug trade.
I have to think that addressing the domestic demand for illegal drugs is just as important, if not more important, than addressing the supply side. People grow coca in South America and grow opium poppies elsewhere because the demand for cocaine and opiates make coca and poppies the most profitable crops that many farmers can cultivate.
And in areas where drug gangs rule, it is the demand for drugs that has fueled the breakdown of civil society. Indeed, while some Americans decry narcoterrorists south of the border, it seems to me that law-abiding people in areas ravaged by the drug trade have a legitimate grievance against those of us north of the border and our society’s insatiable demand for illegal drugs.
I believe that money spent on military operations to track and sink boats that may or may not be carrying drugs — we have yet to see any proof — could be better spent on discovering and addressing the reasons for our country’s demand for illegal drugs. It’s not so simple as moral weakness, and “Just Say No” is hardly an adequate corrective strategy.
I’m talking about thoughtful comprehensive research into the demand for drugs. I suspect that personal and psychological factors intersect with broader socioeconomic factors. Could overprescription of opiates play a role? We need to understand all the factors, and only when we do will we be able to counteract them.
Of course, the research I hope for costs time and money and doesn’t produce the eye-catching optics of military action on the high seas. But maybe, just maybe, if there were less demand for illegal drugs in the U.S., there would be fewer people trying to send them here. Kill the demand, dry up the supply. Successful drug dealers are nothing if not savvy capitalists.
There is another facet to the project of examining the demand side of the drug trade. That facet is the way we draw the line between the drugs we wage war on and the drugs with which we have decided to live in peace.
President Trump is fond of calling the illegal drugs that flow into our country “poison.” But make no mistake. Whether or not a substance is poisonous is not a quality inherent in the substance itself — it is a judgment we make about that substance. Nothing about marijuana changed in December when President Trump issued an executive order directing the reclassification of marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III under the Controlled Substances Act. What changed was our opinion about marijuana.
The opinions we hold about various substances have enormous consequences. Take cocaine, for example. For nearly 25 years, until 2010, possession of crack cocaine was punished far more harshly than possession of powder cocaine. That disparity in the Federal Sentencing Guidelines was changed when it became clear that there was little difference between the addictive qualities of the two forms of cocaine. The big difference was the demography of usage. Powder cocaine tends to be more popular among white users while crack cocaine tends to be more popular among African-American users. The crack/powder disparity was actually a Black/White disparity.
That brings me to two substances we are at peace with: alcohol and tobacco. There can be no doubt about the devastating effects of alcohol misuse and tobacco use. While alcohol can be consumed with a degree of safety, tobacco does nothing but addict its users and destroy their health. By any measure, these are dangerous substances.
Yet, we do not call alcohol or tobacco poison, demonize their producers and distributors, or wage war with them. Their lobbyists are too good for that. But think about this: Couldn’t the same argument used to protect the tobacco industry — support for hardworking family farmers — be used to place a different label on people in far-away places who grow coca or opium poppies? Poison is in the eye of the beholder.
Parker Potter is a former archaeologist and historian and a retired lawyer. He is currently a semi-professional dogwalker who lives and works in Contoocook.