THE HUMAN PARTY

drug policy and violence in mexico

Two prevailing narratives have emerged in American discourse about Mexico’s plague of drug violence. On the one hand, we have the more conservative line, which lauds President Calderón’s hard-line anti-drug crusade while blaming Mexico’s plight entirely on Mexicans – on their “record of corrupt, weak and incompetent governance,” or on their “ineffective criminal justice system." Then we have the more liberal version of the story, which similarly infantilizes Mexicans while generously conceding that the demand for drugs in the United States, along with weapons sales in border states, are at least partly responsible for the country’s horrific drug violence.

Unfortunately, both of these account archetypes entirely miss the point. Commentators in the United States are almost uniformly unable or unwilling to discern the true underlying cause of Mexico’s drug-related violence, and instead settle for highlighting secondary symptoms. For example, the demand for drugs is emphatically not the issue; humankind’s desire to alter our consciousness has been a constant for virtually the totality of recorded history. The problem, rather, is their relegation to the criminal black market, one of the lessons that alcohol prohibition should have taught us.

The root cause of Mexico’s woes is an ill-conceived, racist prohibition which slowly metastasized into the U.S.-led “war on drugs,” a global war against a spectral enemy waged with no hope of victory. Much has been written about the damaging domestic effects of this so-called “war on drugs” – how the U.S. now has by far the highest incarceration rate in the world, how an incredibly disproportionate number of those imprisoned are minorities, how the focus on law enforcement hamstrings more effective harm-reduction strategies, etc. These critiques are valid and important, but will be left to the side for the purposes of this article. Here, we shall explore less traveled terrain: the history of prohibition and its effects on our southern neighbor, and the ways in which U.S. drug policy is directly responsible for the current crisis in Mexico.

“Loco Weed”

Today, marijuana accounts for more than 60% of Mexican cartels’ profits, bringing them tens of billions of dollars a year in black market profits. Because it’s been outlawed for most people’s entire lives, it is easy to forget that the plant has been illegal for less than less than 100 years (out of at least 10,000 years of human use). The story of marijuana prohibition is quite illuminating, and is emblematic of the racism of drug prohibition in general.

In the American colonies, growing the marijuana plant was generally encouraged and sometimes even mandated.George Washington and Thomas Jefferson both ordered the cultivation of marijuana on their plantations because hemp fiber was so valuable at the time. Hemp is one of the most versatile crops in the world, and was used to make everything from sails and rope to paper. Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence on hemp paper, and Benjamin Franklin used hemp string for his famous kite experiment. However, the plant was mostly popular for its industrial applications: tobacco remained the dominant plant for recreational use. It was only in the early 20^th century that Mexican immigrant farm workers in the South and West helped to popularize the smoking of marijuana in the U.S.

Marijuana was first outlawed in the United States at the state level. Almost all of the states that first passed anti-cannabis laws had significant Mexican-American populations, and it can be credibly argued that these state laws were designed specifically to target these migrants. California, ironically enough, was the first to pass a law against what its bill’s language called “loco weed.” When Montana first outlawed marijuana, a legislator there was quoted as saying “When some beet field peon takes a few traces of this stuff… he thinks he has just been elected president of Mexico, so he starts out to execute all his political enemies.” A Texas senator, on the floor of the Senate, testified that “All Mexicans are crazy, and this stuff [marijuana] is what makes them crazy.”

In the 1930s, marijuana prohibition went federal. A man named Harry J. Anslinger was chosen as the head of the Treasury Department’s new Federal Bureau of Narcotics; previously, he had been the Assistant Prohibition Commissioner in the Bureau of Prohibition. Anslinger was a rabid racist, and in addition to claiming that marijuana made people insane and homicidal with one toke (though paradoxically it somehow also promoted “pacifism and Communism”), he stated outright that “the primary reason to outlaw marijuana is its effect on the degenerate races,” by which he meant that “reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men.” Such statements were sadly typical of the atmosphere surrounding drug prohibition at the time – cocaine was originally outlawed on similar grounds after newspaper headlines like "Negro Cocaine Fiends" caused a national panic about blacks raping white women while hyped up on cocaine.

Anslinger received support in his racist propagandizing from the likes of media mogul William Randolf Hearst, who made a fortune from sensationalizing the news. Hearst, who was the basis for Orson Welles’ role as Charles Kane of “Citizen Kane,” is widely known as one of the fathers of yellow journalism. A sample from one of his papers:

“Was it marijuana, the new Mexican drug, that nerved the murderous arm of Clara Phillips when she hammered out her victim’s life in Los Angeles?… three-fourths of the crimes of violence in this country today are committed by dope slaves — that is a matter of cold record.”

And so, solely on the basis of outright lies and racist fear-mongering, with no scientific evidence or rational argumentation of any sort, Anslinger convinced Congress to pass the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937. Although the U.S. pressured Mexico into prohibiting the trafficking of marijuana and other drugs, Mexico quickly became the dominant supplier of the now-illegal plant. Over the 1920s and 1930s, the criminalization of marijuana, as well as opium and cocaine, which Mexico was compelled to adopt or face sanctions, “resulted in the creation of very lucrative black markets.” Mexico’s drug trafficking has now been taking place for nearly a century, its steady growth spurred by the inflated profits prohibition continues to provide.

The Drums of War 

From its racist origins, drug prohibition quickly escalated to become the “war on drugs,” a tool for criminalizing not just minorities like blacks and Hispanics, but social deviants and political dissidents as well. In Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure (1997), former Wall Street Journal reporter Dan Baum explains how Richard Nixon and his advisers devised the drug war to respond to an artificially created panic as a way to maintain and promote their vision of social order. Nixon and his appointees and advisers were greatly disturbed by the anti-war and civil rights movements of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. They were not alone; many middle-class white Americans, particularly the conservative religious ones, were increasingly fearful about the cultural ‘decline’ of the United States. “Newsweek identified the targets of that middle-class resentment this way: ‘The incendiary black militant and the welfare mother, the hedonistic hippie and the campus revolutionary.’ Nixon couldn’t make it illegal to be any of these things, but he could crack down hard on the illegal drug identified with the counterculture,” namely, marijuana.

He was helped in this by the fact that the media happily conflated heroin and marijuana use, treating them as one phenomenon and thereby “making the country’s ‘drug problem’ appear infinitely more threatening than it was.” The fact was, when Nixon took office, “drugs were so tiny a public health problem that they were statistically insignificant: far more Americans choked to death or died falling down stairs as died from illegal drugs.” But President Nixon and his cronies succeeded in convincing Americans that drugs were a terrible threat to the nation, claiming that they were “decimating a generation of Americans” and declaring them “public enemy number one”; by 1971, 23% of Americans believed drugs to be the country’s biggest problem, up from 3% in 1969, though there was no notable change in drug use in that interim.

It was not the case that Nixon believed marijuana itself really was a threat to the nation. In fact, he had created a commission to study the dangers of marijuana, cherry-picking the entire staff to consist of drug hawks and conservative doctors who he assumed would reinforce his fear-mongering assertions. However, Nixon said that “even if the commission does recommend that it be legalized, I will not follow that recommendation.” In fact, that is exactly what happened; the National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse’s report recommended that marijuana be legalized, concluding that “Health effects are minimal. The ‘gateway drug’ theory has no basis. If anything, smoking marijuana inhibits criminal behavior.”

So Nixon knew the facts. Yet he continued to escalate the drug war. Why? As his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, wrote in his diary, Nixon “emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to do so.” He also wrote that Nixon often commented that “all the Jews seem to be the ones that are for liberalizing the regulations on marijuana.” His commission’s report found that marijuana was seen as a problem in the public mind not because of its pharmacological properties, but because “many see the drug as fostering a counter-culture which conflicts with basic moral precepts as well as with the operating functions of our society….rejection of the established value system is viewed with alarm. Marijuana becomes more than a drug; it becomes a symbol of the rejection of cherished values.”

In an interview in 1972, the White House drug enforcer Myles Ambrose was asked what he thought of a survey reporting a trend among youth away from marijuana and back to using alcohol. He chuckled and said, “It recalls a happier time in which those of us who had the good fortune of going to college indulged in booze on more than one occasion, as I recall.” In response to this comment, Baum points out that in 1972, “55,000 Americans died in highway accidents, most of them believed to be alcohol-related. Another 33,000 died from alcohol poisoning or cirrhosis of the liver. No death from marijuana has ever been reported.”

Nonetheless, the war metaphor took hold, and with it, a Manichean outlook on all illegal drug use. Because of their privileged position in white American culture, alcohol and tobacco were spared, while all non-sanctioned drugs (and their users) became the “enemy.” As is often the case in war, the fight entered a pattern of relentless (and bipartisan) escalation - adjusted for inflation, the budget for the war on drugs today is 31 times what it was under Nixon. The institution of the war model made it next to impossible to publicly question the fatally flawed logic of drug prohibition. Over the last 40 years, the “war on drugs” has grown far beyond its strategic origins to become a self-supporting ideological entity, a “prohibition-industrial complex” whose false dichotomies many otherwise rational people now accept without reflection. As a public policy, it has been a colossal failure, but in securing funding for itself, it has been a spectacular success.

“Narcos, No’s, and NAFTA”

In a recent op-ed piece, globalization guru Thomas Friedman (who Slavoj Zizek calls the “court philosopher” of neoliberalism) opined that Mexicans roughly fall into three camps – the narcos, the no’s, and the “Naftas.” He tells us at the outset of the article that we should “root for the Naftas,” Mexico’s “meritocratic” middle class, rather than the No’s, those “opposing any reform that would involve privatizing state-owned companies, like Pemex, opening the oil or electricity sectors to foreign investors or domestic competition, or bringing best-practices and accountability to Mexican schools, where union control has kept Mexico’s public education among the worst in the world.”

There are too many problems with Mr. Friedman’s analysis to cover here – for example, Mr. Friedman forgets to discuss the fourth “N” group, what he might deem the “Nonentities,” or the roughly 50% of Mexicans who live below the poverty line. But one particularly interesting connection, which was curiously omitted from the article, is the link between the Narcos and the Naftas. Phil Jordan, former DEA official and expert on Mexican drug organizations, explains why Bill Clinton forbade discussion of how NAFTA would affect the drug trade: "We were prohibited from discussing the effects of NAFTA as it related to narcotics trafficking [by the Clinton administration]… for the godfathers of the drug trade in Colombia and Mexico, this was a deal made in narco heaven."

NAFTA put many Mexican farmers out of business, thereby turning many to drug cultivation. It had a similar effect in other sectors as well, with the burgeoning black-market drug industry buoying parts of the Mexican economy hurt by “free trade.” As Charles Bowden points out, “the drug industry is an essential prop under a faltering Mexican economy and has been so for more than 20 years.” Bowden argues that “the effects wrought by NAFTA launched one of the largest human migrations in the world as poor Mexicans fled collapsing industry and agriculture. Border Patrol statistics show that the number of Mexicans entering the U.S. illegally skyrocketed within two years of the passage of NAFTA.” But many of those who did not flee to the U.S. got into the drug trade – small wonder, when workers in American-owned Mexican factories today make $40 a week, and when those factories have a turnover rate of 100 to 200 percent annually, and when the Mexican drug trade pulls in between 30 - 50 billion dollars a year and is always hiring. 

While the disruption of local economies certainly played a part in strengthening the cartels’ grip, perhaps the biggest effect NAFTA had was in trafficking. Author Ryan Grim, one of the foremost authorities on the history of drug prohibition, notes that “with NAFTA in effect, 1994 saw the biggest jump in commercial-vehicle smuggling on record--a 25 percent increase.” The opening of the border for commercial goods, combined with crackdowns on drug-smuggling routes in the Caribbean and on U.S. methamphetamine production, helped to expand Mexico’s role in the trafficking of coke and meth. Meanwhile, although Clinton followed the precedent of increasing funding for the drug war, there was no real impact on the availability of drugs in the U.S. – simply another power shift on the supplier side, one which would soon prove deadly for tens of thousands of Mexicans.

A Doomed Double-Down 

The U.S. bears the bulk of the responsibility for Mexico’s current situation. We've just seen how US policy helped to greatly expand Mexico’s role in the trafficking of cocaine and methamphetamine and thereby increased the cartels’ power. U.S. lawmakers’ refusal to ban the sale of assault weapons has certainly helped the cartels as well. But most vitally, Mexico does not have the ability to end the drug war on its own - as the chief manufacturer and ‘pusher’ of drug prohibition, the U.S. has largely set the agenda on world drug policy in the last century, and this is particularly true of Mexico. As our southern neighbor, it would be almost unthinkable for Mexico to fully legalize drugs – with such an action being tantamount to a declaration of war against the U.S.

Incidentally, my fellow COHA research associate Mr. Valencia considers this a “token dosage of funds.” He is not alone - commentators liberal and conservative express similar views, including writers for the usually clear-eyed TomDispatch. Given that the U.S. already squanders between 25 and 45 billion dollars every year on the drug war once lost tax revenue is factored in, one wonders how much more money we will have to pour down the endless hole of prohibition to satisfy their demands. 

And what have been the results of this joint U.S.-Mexico initiative? The gruesome, all-pervasive violence is what receives the bulk of media attention, and with good reason (though here in the U.S., it’s usually discussed in the context of anxiety that this violence might “spill over” onto our own soil). Cuidad Juárez, which already has been plagued with drug violence, has become the most violent city in the world, with a murder rate more almost quadruple Baghdad’s, and in Mexico as a whole, there have been between 18,000 and 23,000 drug war deaths over a three-year period. This figure is several times more than the total of American casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq combined. President Calderón’s decision to escalate the drug war was somewhat understandable, in the face of the huge corrupting influence that drug money has had in Mexico. Yet Calderón’s miscalculation has had terrible consequences, and for these, he should not be entirely absolved.

Other results of Calderón’s crusade are less publicized. The increasing militarization of the fight has led not only to an escalation of violence and intimidation on the part of the cartels, but also to an increase in human rights violations by the Mexican military -  as Mexican human rights organizations testified to their Congress in 2008, “the number of complaints for human rights violations committed by members of the armed forces registered by the National Human Rights Commission has increased six-fold during the last two years [since the inception of Calderón’s anti-drug campaign].” 

Furthermore, it seems that not all of the training, funding, and supplying that the United States is doing in Mexico goes toward fighting cartels – it also goes toward fighting political dissidents and unions. As blogger and journalist Kristin Bricker recently reported, “the Mexican government is taking advantage of increased resources for its military and federal police to crack down on dissidents. The military, for example, has repeatedly used the pretext of ‘looking for marijuana’ to raid Zapatista strongholds in Chiapas, even though it has never found any drugs in rebel territory. Reports of torture by the military continue to surface. Parallels with the School of the Americas begin to come to mind, particularly considering that many individuals from the last group of U.S.-trained Mexican paramilitaries, Los Zetas, switched sides in mass and now constitute major players in the Gulf Cartel.

The drug war also has taken a heavy toll on Mexico’s economy. In addition to affecting the always-skittish investment community, the drug violence has cut into tourism, which is the third-largest (legitimate) industry in Mexico. As the violence spreads from places like Juárez to upscale areas like Cuernavaca, and the U.S. and other countries continue to issue increasingly severe travel warnings it seems that the situation of unrestricted turmoil is not likely to improve any time soon. Andres Remis, club owner and president of the Cuernevacan Nightclubs and Bars Association, put it this way: “This is a city that depends on tourism and what violence has done is collapse our economy…[t]he only thing that we can do is to wait for one of the groups to win or for the army to win.”

¡Ya basta!

Although Calderón and the Obama administration both stubbornly refuse to rethink their fundamentally flawed approach to drug policy and its attendant violence (even to Calderón’s political detriment), other leaders have been more courageous. In 2008, the ousted president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, called for decriminalization in order to free countries of the great financial burdens of prohibition. In 2009, the former presidents of Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil also called for a new approach, involving the decriminalization of “soft” drugs like cannabis and a greater focus on education and treatment. Latin America, long entangled in the counter-narcotic nightmare of the North, knows that a change of course is desperately needed.

Decriminalization of personal possession is certainly a step in the right direction, as it reduces the incarceration of nonviolent drug users and instead treats drug more like a public health issue. However, decriminalization would not do much to enervate the cartels, or solve the underlying issues driving drug violence (which should really be renamed “prohibition violence,” since the drugs themselves really have nothing to do with it). So long as users are forced to go to black market sources, the violence of the black market (and other attendant problems like disease transmission and accidental overdose due to steep fluctuations in purity) will remain. As Harvard economist Jeffery Miron explains, “Violence was common in the alcohol industry when it was banned during Prohibition, but not before or after. Violence is the norm in illicit gambling markets but not in legal ones. Violence is routine when prostitution is banned but not when it's permitted. Violence results from policies that create black markets, not from the characteristics of the good or activity in question.” As strangely taboo as it may be to say despite the drug war’s flagrant failure, full legalization of all drugs is the sole sane policy.

Some aspects of this will be harder for people to accept than others. Legalizing marijuana should be entirely uncontroversial – qualitatively far safer, both individually and for society, than drugs like tobacco and alcohol, legalizing marijuana would immediately reduce the cartels’ profits by more than half (in addition to solving a whole host of other problems and saving us an enormous amount of money). There is simply no rational argument whatsoever against the legalization of marijuana – none. Luckily, the U.S. is finally coming around on this point, as recent public opinion polls and a new ballot initiative in California to legalize cannabis evince.

However, many people who support legalizing marijuana still have a hard time with the concept of legalizing drugs like methamphetamine and heroin, which are often highly addictive and physically damaging (much like tobacco and alcohol). However, the damage done by prohibition – in Mexico, in the United States, and around the world – is orders of magnitude worse. Using illegal drugs like marijuana and cocaine didn’t destroy the lives of Presidents Clinton, Bush II, and Obama, but if they’d been arrested as they should have been, the laws on the books would have kept them from getting anywhere close to the White House (or even being able to vote, in many states). Their unblinking support for the drug war in the face of this fact is the absolute height of hypocrisy.

Furthermore, there is no evidence at all that legalization would encourage use of hard drugs – and plenty of evidence that it would help with treatment. Countries that have decriminalized some or all drugs, like Portugal and the Netherlands, have actually seen drug use (particularly of hard drugs) go down, and instituting basic common-sense health programs like needle exchanges greatly cut down on the harms associated with those drugs, without encouraging their use in any way (say scientific studies, though many conservatives still claim otherwise). Think of it this way. If heroin were legal, would you run out to the store and start shooting up (particularly if we had an effective, factually-based educational campaign explaining its dangers)?

People may disapprove of drug use as immoral (although if they smoke cigarettes or drink alcohol, they should be prepared to acknowledge their hypocrisy), but the simple fact is this – although Mr. Valencia and his ilk believe that “it is a long and treacherous road ahead to end the war on drugs,” the plain truth is that no victory is possible. It is frankly unclear what such a victory would even mean, and even if it were a coherent concept and somehow both possible and incontrovertibly desirable, such a victory would be a pyrrhic one, coming at far too high a human, social, and financial cost.

Mr. Valencia and other like-minded commentators are correct to emphasize the senseless tragedy of the violence happening in Mexico, but they reach precisely the wrong conclusions about what to do about it. Einstein once defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. More money and more militarization will only reap more of what they sow, as the entire history of the drug war has shown. Enough already.