Drug Policy

"Under the PRI there were tacit agreements. You bribe away officials, you don't engage in turf battles, and so on," said Sanho Tree of the Institute for Policy Studies. "This doesn't work in the long run. You have to deal with rule of law and these illegal groups. But that's a long process and [Calderón] didn't have the institutions to do that."

At the root of the issue is the overhaul of earlier approaches to Mexico's drug war.

But when Calderón used Mexico's military to take on the country's powerful and well-armed drug trafficking organizations, he had little sense of what the consequences of a full-on war would be. "Under the PRI there were tacit agreements. You bribe away officials, you don't engage in turf battles, and so on," said Sanho Tree of the Institute for Policy Studies. "This doesn't work in the long run. You have to deal with rule of law and these illegal groups. But that's a long process and [Calderón] didn't have the institutions to do that."

This is supposed to be a law enforcement programme [within the State Department]. What kind of law enforcement gets to play judge, jury and executioner in a matter of minutes? This is summary justice, on injustice in this case. - Sanho Tree, the director of the Drug Policy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies

As Sanho Tree of the Institute for Policy Studies explains: "The drug war has tried in vain to keep cocaine out of people’s noses, but could result instead in scorching the lungs of the earth."

"I think the US strategy of Brownfield and the State Department will be to say that legalization was brought up and rejected by the Latin American leaders," offered Sanho Tree, director of the Drug Policy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies. "They will use dichotomous rhetoric, they will try to maneuver the discussion into either prohibition or heroin in vending machines, but this is about the whole spectrum of regulatory possibilities. That's what we need to be talking about instead of that false dichotomy."

“Si se reprogramara ese dinero para desarrollos alternativos, tratamientos por consumo de drogas, rehabilitación, prevención, se cortarían muchos empleos en la burocracia. Esta es gente poderosa, que va a pelear para que eso no suceda”, advierte Sanho Tree, historiador diplomático y militar, especialista en políticas de drogas, con quien conversamos en su oficina del Institute for Policy Studies, a pocas cuadras de la Casa Blanca, en el centro Washington DC.

Every time a politician clamors to increase law enforcement what we end doing is the kinds of people we typically capture are the kinds of people who are dumb enough to get caught. No offense to any of your listeners who have ever been busted for anything but the slang on the street is the dealer who uses loses.

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."