VIDEO: Drug Seizures Won’t Stop Cartels
In a wide-ranging interview with DW News, Sanho Tree, director of the Drug Policy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, explains why the discovery of a sophisticated 2,000-foot drug tunnel near San Diego — and the $45 million cocaine seizure that came with it — tells us far more about the failures of U.S. drug policy than it does about any victory against the cartels.
On the significance of tunnel seizures, Sanho puts the numbers in stark perspective: “This is a drop in the bucket.” He notes that a single tunnel discovered in Tijuana in 2011 had 40 tons of cannabis on the Mexican side alone waiting to come through. “Once they build these tunnels, they can operate them 24/7 if they wanted to,” he explains. “And by the time they do discover them, we have no idea how many months or years they’ve been in operation.”
The $45 million seizure, he argues, represents only what authorities found on hand. “Most of it has already probably gotten through to the U.S.”
Sanho is equally skeptical of the broader enforcement strategy. “We only seize anywhere from 3 to 10 percent of the drugs coming into the United States,” he says. “I compare it to the way astrophysicists talk about dark matter in the universe. We know it’s there. We can’t see it.”
Meanwhile, decades of escalating law enforcement have produced a perverse Darwinian effect: “The people we typically capture are the people who are either dumb enough, clumsy enough, or poor and vulnerable enough to get caught. Conversely, the people we tend to miss, year after year, decade after decade, are the people who are the most adaptable, the most innovative, the most cunning.”
On the Trump administration’s push for ever-more militarized drug enforcement, Sanho is direct: “You cannot use a military solution to solve what is fundamentally an economic problem.” He argues that prohibition itself is the core issue — functioning as a price support for traffickers. “The drug war is essentially producing a price support for drug traffickers. Think of it that way. It’s a crop subsidy.” The more risk built into the system, he explains, the higher the profit margin for everyone in the smuggling chain.
His prescription is regulation. “You can’t control a substance you deliberately drive underground,” he says, pointing to Switzerland’s decades-long prescription heroin program as a model that works. “We don’t call them alco terrorists the way Donald Trump calls these drug traffickers narco terrorists — because it doesn’t help us understand the phenomenon of drug use and addiction and it doesn’t tell us anything about regulation. It’s just a recipe for more war.”
Watch the full interview below:
