Violence Is at the Heart of US Drug War Policy in the Americas

[eridani]

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/36415-violence-is-at-the-heart-of-us-drug-war-policy-in-the-americas

The funds for international supply control, or the international enforcement of prohibition, total $1.6 billion annually for 2015, 2016, and 2017 (requested). International supply control is by far the most expensive form of prohibition enforcement for the United States government. A 1994 estimate pegs the cost of reducing cocaine consumption in the U.S. by 1 percent at $788 million annually if realized via international supply control, $366 million per year via interdiction, $246 million per year via domestic policing, and $34 million per year via treatment.

If reducing drug use in the United States were the primary political motivation behind these programs, it would be an obvious choice as to which kinds of policies would be put in place. But as we have seen domestically and internationally, there are political implications to prohibition enforcement which cannot be calculated using the metrics of the availability of narcotics and/or their use. “Conventional drug policy has survived for so long despite compelling evidence of abject failure because dysfunctional policy has been good politics,” in the words of Alex Wodak, President of the Australian Drug Law Reform Foundation.

According to the U.S. government, international supply funds are used to “disrupt” and “disband” trafficking organizations, carry out investigations and gather intelligence, carry out monitoring and interdictions, and to enact policy changes and development programs in target nations. In 2017, the international supply funds requested for the drug war are to be doled out as follows: Department of Defense International Counternarcotics Efforts ($567.1 million), Drug Enforcement Agency ($467.9 million), Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs ($382.4 million), and the US Agency for International Development ($131.9 million).

As I detail in my book Drug War Capitalism, the militarization of the enforcement of prohibition has allowed the U.S. government to push policies of social control through violence and militarization in Latin America; but it is host governments who provide the majority of funding for these wars against their own populations. Plan Colombia and the Merida Initiative have had devastating social consequences, spurring violence and terror, spiking murder rates, pushing up disappearances, and increasing forced displacement.

[Judi Lynn]

1. So true. Good comments from readers, at the end of the article. Thank you. n/t