Official: War on Drugs at 'Tipping Point'

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[LesbianThespianGymnasticMidget]

By DAN MOLINSKI, Associated Press Writer

BOGOTA, Colombia - Amid record seizures of cocaine and massive spraying of coca plantations, a senior U.S. official says the "tipping point" in the war on drugs has finally been reached. But skeptics are unconvinced and say the war remains unwinnable.

At first glance, the drug warriors have a lot to crow about:

_ Last month, the U.S. Coast Guard (news - web sites) and U.S. Navy (news - web sites) seized 28 tons of cocaine from two fishing boats off the coast of the Galapagos Islands (news - web sites). State Department officials said they were the largest seizures on record during a one-week stretch.

_ In 2003, 160 tons of cocaine were seized — breaking all previous annual records, State Department officials said.

_ A U.S.-financed campaign in Colombia to fumigate coca crops, the main ingredient of cocaine, has cut the number of acres under cultivation to about half of 1999 levels, about 212,000 acres last year, according to the United Nations (news - web sites).

"I've been at this for 15 years and I have truly never been more optimistic than I am right now," U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Robert B. Charles, the State Department's top anti-narcotics official, said from Washington in a telephone interview with The Associated Press.

Charles claimed the drug war is "at a tipping point both in Colombia and the region" and predicted authorities would "break the backs" of drug cartels within the next two years.

But another key indicator has stubbornly refused to conform, casting doubt on the claims of victory: cocaine prices in the United States remain stable, and availability has even surged in some areas.

Some 388 tons of cocaine were available in U.S. markets in 2002, according to the most recent U.S. government figures, and officials say this flow remained steady into 2004.

According to simple market theory, if less cocaine is entering the United States from Colombia, by far the world's biggest producer of the drug, then availability on the streets should be going down and prices should be going up.

"These guys are delusional to think they're close to winning the so-called drug war," said Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the New York-based nonprofit group Drug Policy Alliance.

Nadelmann said, and drug agents agree, that in addition to street prices being stable, the purity of cocaine on U.S. streets has remained the same for years — so smugglers are not diluting the cocaine more than they normally do to make up for a supply reduction.

Washington officials say prices are unchanged because traffickers have stockpiled tons of cocaine along smuggling routes.

But Francisco Thoumi, an economics professor and an expert on drug trafficking at Bogota's Rosario University, doubts that.

"That's a hard theory to swallow," Thoumi said. "If there's one business in the world in which stockpiling isn't such a good idea, it's cocaine."

Thoumi said traffickers would want to keep their cocaine flowing through the smuggling networks and not cache tons of cocaine along the way because it would have to be guarded and could be stolen by rivals or discovered by police.

Thoumi said "significant advances have been made this year" in the war on drugs, especially in the record number of seizures and a rise in drug traffickers being sent to prison. He said he is "puzzled" that cocaine prices have remained unaffected.

One possible factor, he said, is that growers are reportedly planting their coca more densely together. So although more acres have been fumigated, the plots that have escaped being sprayed are producing more cocaine.

Also, coca farming is increasing elsewhere. It is the so-called balloon theory: squeeze production in one area and it pops up in another.

Coca cultivation has risen 8 percent in Bolivia since 1999, to 59,000 acres last year, the United Nations said. And in Peru, coca cultivation has jumped 14 percent from 1999, to 109,000 acres, the U.N. report said.

Still, cultivation in the Andean region has dropped overall by about 30 percent in the past five years, the U.N. said, and continued to fall in 2004.

Fears that Ecuador and Venezuela would also begin producing large amounts of coca have not come to pass. A 2004 U.S. State Department report says coca cultivation is still "not significant" in Ecuador, and less than 600 acres of coca or other drug crops are being cultivated in Venezuela.

[uncbob]

The HBO show the WIRE shows the drug war in all its glory and how stupid it is especially the captain using the bag anology for booze

Now he is esentially legalizing it in his district by getting it to move into an isolated area

What really is the irony is almost every segment one or more of the cops gets blotto on booze after spending the day fighting SOME DRUGS

[festus]

Well if a senior us official said it then it must be true.

I mean if you can't trust senior us officials who can you trust ??????????

[SteveMcKing]

With the WoT in full swing, I don't think the feds are screwing around anymore when it comes to drugs. Hopefully the gloves are off, finally, and someone's gonna get hurt. Good.

[Wolfie]

Why Drug Cops Can't Win"

[Balto_Boy]

The DEA has been getting billions of our tax dollars for the past 2 decades at least. If they have been "screwing around" and the "gloves" have not "been off", then what have we been paying for?

[pooh fan]

Give me a break. You can't compare a TV show to real life...no matter how much your live resembles Jerry Springer, Survivor or Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire.

[Charlotte Corday]

When you have seen the emotional trauma in the eyes of a child trying to come to grips with a parent who is getting high, it can no longer be considered a "private" problem.

And putting that parent in jail helps, exactly, how??

[rmmcdaniell]

I worked for three months in an addiction treatment center, which taught me clearer than anything, that looking at drug alcohol use as a non-issue because it is something someone does in private could not be further from the truth. No man is an island. When you have seen the emotional trauma in the eyes of a child trying to come to grips with a parent who is getting high drunk, it can no longer be considered a "private" problem. When you have seen the physical and emotional scars that spouses of drug users alcoholics carry, it is hard to argue that it is a "private" problem.

Nothing but rehashed prohibitionist nonsense. Same crap, different century.

[SteveMcKing]

then what have we been paying for?

Cops' overtime pay in order to run D.A.R.E. and other afterschool programs that don't work.

[Frumious Bandersnatch]

Yep. Why don't we just relegalize slavery? After all, drug addiction is just another form of it.

[TKDietz]

According to the National Survey on Drug Abuse & Health cocaine use is on the rise again and has been the last few years. As for price, I don't know about the rest of the country but at least where I live the price has dropped considerably over the last few years according to narcotics officers I have spoken to and clients I represent as an attorney. Price here has dropped to a little over half what it cost twenty years ago and purity is up from where it was back then. That may just be a local phenomenon.

[Ken H]

While the Drug Policy Alliance has been pushing false numbers and false logic on the mainstream for years,

What are some examples?

Is the war on drugs expensive? Yes. is the War on drugs difficult? Yes. But is it worth it? Absolutely.

What is the supply/demand situation in late 2004 compared with 1989, when Dr. William Bennett was appointed as the first drug czar?

IOW, has supply been reduced and has demand fallen since this was made a cabinet level position?

[eno_]

and availability has even surged in some areas

Maybe adult use of Ritalin is displacing coke. Why buy nose candy when insurance will pay for your zoom zoom.

[eno_]

but i would rather have full prison cells than full morgues

You should look into the relative lethality of even hardcore needle drugs versus alcohol addiction. You might change your mind about the effectiveness of prisons keeping the morgues empty.

[eno_]

The DEA has been getting billions of our tax dollars for the past 2 decades at least

Make that 35-70Billion per year, depending on how much local law enforcement and prisons you factor in. Over 20 years that adds up to hundreds of billions - several times what it cost to fight Operation Iraqi Freedom and run the occupation.

[eno_]

a couple million more in funding

They'd be done with a couple million before the morning donut.

[lemura]

The smugglers can afford large losses because the difference between manufacturing costs and street value are enormous.

Like most things in economics, the pricing mechanism is very rational. Similar to how Pepsi/Cokes costs are governed in large part by marketing and advertising expenses (ie the costs of selling flavored water), illegal drug prices merely factor in such elements as loss rate, risk, etc. to determine a 'fair' street price.

Where the economic pricing mechanism fails in the case of the WOD is that it doesn't accurately reflect the **total** societal costs, such as direct support payments (ie taxes), corruption, erosion of civil liberties, habituated reduced willingness to restrain gov't, etc.

[bvw]

. When you have seen the emotional trauma in the eyes of a child trying to come to grips with a parent who is getting high, it can no longer be considered a "private" problem.

Look, the drug problems a person has are hidden from social remediation for ONE reason, that reason weighty beyond all others. The criminal risk.

We see user abuse problems coming forward only long after they are amenable to less-than-heroic measures only becuase the substances are illegal. Were they legal, was the dread risk of severe financial pemalty and imprisonment removed, we would see them sooner.

And you know it.

Patients wouldn't lie to their doctors, doctors wouldn't close one eye in evaluating them.

[lemura]

habituated reduced willingness to restrain gov't

How come no one has ever put together a master 'tin foil' conspiracy theory centered around the notion that the WOD is merely a tool to corrupt the independent spirit of Americans to enable an eventual enslavement via government control?

In other words, while good citizens have been passionately debating the various pros/cons of the WOD, the smart money has been secretly and patiently working away in the background, chuckling at the rubes who only see the surface level elements, and all the while completely missing the grand strategy. Hmmm, could make a good book.

[Zon]

But, but, but... wasn't a central theme to ending alcohol prohibition because prohibition had created so much abuse and violent crime.

If we return to alcohol prohibition abuse and violent crime will increase. Yet somehow, in delusional people's minds drug prohibition doesn't cause an increase in abuse and violent crime.