Stopped clocks: the drug war and decriminalization

Much as it goes against my lefty grain, I have to admit that Mary Anasasia O’Grady, the Wall Street Journal columnist who usually manages to write something silly about Latin America (and sometimes seems to make stuff up) was mostly right the other day when she said:

… Mexico’s attempt to question the status quo in drug policy deserves praise. Unlike American drug warriors, Mexico at least acknowledges that it is insane to repeat the same thing over and over again and expect a different outcome.

Because so many Americans like to snort cocaine, that business has flourished over four decades. Most of the traffic once went through the Caribbean, but a crackdown on the sea routes caused suppliers to shift to paths over land through Central America and Mexico. In just two decades Mexican drug capos took over the industry, adding other drugs to their product lines. By paying their employees in kind rather than in cash, they also grew the business at home; lower-level “mules” have to push locally to turn their salary into money. Now Latins have become consumers. In other words, demand and prohibition up north have poisoned the entire region.

…

By decriminalizing consumption, Mexico is admitting that things are not getting better. It says its hope is to concentrate limited resources in going after producers, traffickers and retail distributors. According to the Mexican Embassy in Washington, another goal is to end the corruption that comes from the “free interpretation of what constitutes ‘retail drug-dealing.'” The aim is to reduce police graft while going after big fish, not little ones.

The war on supply is a failure, something any first-year economics student could have predicted. But this plan is unlikely to reverse the situation. It is demand north of the border that is the primary driver of organized-crime terror. And that shows no signs of abating.

Also surprising me, Jorge Casteñeda, another New York establishment figure (in his case, Colombia University New York University [my bad… thanks Esther!]) who has often been wrong about Latin America (and, in Casteñeda’s case, somewhat more damaging to Mexico, having been recruited by a headhunting firm* to serve as Foreign Minister in the Fox Administration) is the only one of the “mainstream talking heads” to get it right — noting that the so-called “decrimininalization” is actually making drug possession a more serious matter than it was previously:

The recently approved new “drug” law in Mexico is in fact not a step toward decriminalization, but rather toward mandatory sentencing. Until last month, possession of small (unspecified) amounts of drugs was not a criminal offense in Mexico; only the sale or purchase was. The new law establishes a minuscule limit on legal possession, meaning that today, almost anyone caught carrying any drug is subject to arrest, prosecution and jail.

If anything, the new law criminalizes drug use much more radically than before, and it is probably for this reason that President Calderón signed it, and that the Obamaadministration has looked the other way.

…

The growth of marijuana, heroin and metaphetamine consumption is flat in all categories (addiction, occasional use, at-least-once-in-a-lifetime use), and while cocaine addiction, for example, did rise from 300 000 victims in 2002 to 450 000 in 2008 (a 50 percent increase, or roughly 6 percent per year), it did so from a tiny baseline, for a tiny percentage (0.4 percent) of Mexico’s population, a much smaller share than for the U.S., Western Europe and practically every country in Latin America.

* This is true.  Although Casteñeda, connected with a small “democratic leftist” party (oddly enough, financed with seed money provided by the Reagan Administration) that had been part of Fox’s election coalition and was given the post to balance the rightist PAN cabinet, Fox outsourced vetting the cabinet to  Robert Half and Associates, which was presented as evidence that the new administration was both business oriented and willing to think outside the political box.