Drug Policy

Leading international drug-war expert Sanho Tree, with whom I appeared on a panel a couple of years back at the C.U. Boulder Conference on World Affairs, argues that drug cartels are not in the business of killing people. It’s bad for business. Certainly a drug cartel or a random street gang may fight for control of trafficking corridors, but state-directed drug arrests remove players and thus open valuable real estate over which rival gangs then fight.

Sanho Tree: Not many people's interests are served by this. It's not good for the cartels that are fighting each other, it's not good for the state, it's not good for the people. It's not even good for the drug warriors because this is not success, this is not something we can be proud of. But what you have is something driven by the economics of drug prohibition, and it all descends from that. The traffickers are doing what's in their self-interest to do—their bottom line is to maximize profits.

The economics of drug trafficking is inflating prices and creating need, said Sanho Tree, an expert in drug policy at the Institute for Policy Studies. He said he isn't optimistic about Colombian stability, let alone its ability to offer international narcotics assistance.

"We will never make these problems disappear by making these crops more valuable," he said, "which is what we've been doing for years."

The economics of drug trafficking is inflating prices and creating need, said Sanho Tree, an expert in drug policy at the Institute for Policy Studies. He said he isn't optimistic about Colombian stability, let alone its ability to offer international narcotics assistance.

"We will never make these problems disappear by making these crops more valuable," he said, "which is what we've been doing for years."

Crop eradication, which makes the crops scarce, artificially inflates the price. Coca can grow in many different soils and climates and the lack of government infrastructure in isolated areas means drugs offer a better, faster return to poor farmers.

Why not substitute legal crops?

"These are people who don't have vehicles or roads, no refrigeration to transport things like fruit," Tree said.

"These cables reveal what is actually happening [with the war on drugs] apart from the political line," says Sanho Tree, drug policy project coordinator at the Institute for Policy Studies and a former diplomatic historian. "They give you some interesting and hilarious data sets."

“The lessons of Colombia are being ignored in many ways. You’ll have mainstream analysts saying Colombia is the model to win the drug war. If Colombia is winning then what are the Colombians trafficking?” drug war expert Sanho Tree, a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C., told The Indypendent.

“Basically, our policy is to fracture and to break up the drug organizations, making them smaller, weaker and more manageable,” Tree said. “And it’s folly. Breaking up those big monopolies … created a huge vacuum for smaller operators to fill, and we can’t track smaller operations, much less disrupt them.” 

Tree believes that many of the victims are innocent bystanders not involved in criminal acts, but adds that this is hard to verify, since “more than 95 percent ... of the murders are never solved.”

Indeed, according to Tree, while too many voters still favor “simple solutions ... more and more Mexicans don't believe Calderón's policies will succeed.”

Tree noted that this initiative “places too much emphasis on a military solution.” He compared it to throwing water on an electrical fire and said that the strategy to “break up and fracture the drug trafficking organizations” is “a very naive one.”

Aside from the loss of human life, Tree says the “other victim of this war,” is the idea of a social contract—the idea that a government “can provide minimal conditions of security and predictability so that the people can get on with their lives.” There are now “many Mexicans who don't have hope in the future and too many young men who would rather live as a king for a year than a live as a peasant,” he noted.

Sanho Tree, drug policy expert and fellow at IPS, lends an international perspective to an Institute of the Black World Discussion on the War on Drugs. (He appears at 2:16:55 in video.) Tree discusses how poverty and lack of infrastructure in rural, remote areas in poor countries, combined with high demand for drugs in rich countries, drives up the price and creates an economic incentive to grow drugs for the world's poor. At the same time, the prohibition on drugs provides a "price support" for drug "kingpins," allowing them to raise the cost of drugs to those in rich countries.

"We make these things more valuable than gold," says Tree, "and we wonder why they don't disappear."

Sanho Tree, a drug policy expert at the Institute for Policy Studies, a Washington-based research group, said the vehicles reminded him of the Monitor and the Merrimack, two American warships that fought the first naval battle between ironclad ships during the Civil War.

“This is first-generation technology, like the Monitor and Merrimack,” he said. And because the drug business is so Darwinian, he added, with submarines replacing smuggling boats, and light, quiet aircraft replacing heavy, loud ones, the trucks will quite likely mutate to include “shielding for tires, their Achilles’ heel, blast pads in the flooring, up-armoring, et cetera.”

Bill and Sanho talk about the reasons why the war on drugs has failed to curb abuse while defying empirical evidence about usage. More importantly, Sanho points out, the Drug Warriors fails to grasp why some people use drugs and why most others don't: the lack of means to lead a purposeful life, which Sanho believes would be the greatest deterant to drug abuse.

Sanho Tree is director of the  Drug Policy Project, which works to end the domestic and international “War on Drugs” and replace it with policies that promote public health and safety, as well as economic alternatives to the prohibition drug economy.