Introduction

Introduction

The war on drugs is waged at its worst in the source zone of production. Major consumer countries - the US in particular - think they are able to tackle drug consumption at home by reducing the supply from the "source zones" such as the Andean region - Colombia, Bolivia and Peru - and Central and South-East Asia - Afghanistan and Burma. The primary goal of the supply reduction strategies is to decrease the amount of drugs entering the major consuming countries and subsequently, because the strategy allegedly leads to higher prices that would lead to lower demand.

Next to traditional law enforcement operations against drug trafficking organizations, US supply reduction strategies focus on:

• crop destruction through aerial eradication - the fumigation of opium poppy and coca bush with herbicides that amount to chemical and biological warfare on drug crops and peasants; and
• aerial interdiction - monitoring, detecting and intercepting drug transports in source and transit zones, including a "shoot-down policy" of drug flights and the installation of military air force bases, so-called Forward Operating Locations (FOL).

This has led to an increased militarization of counter drug operations. In 1989 the government of President George Bush senior gave the Department of Defense (DOD) prime responsibility for monitoring, detecting and intercepting of illicit drugs transports. The United States' National Drug Control Strategy for 1998-2007 delegated to the DOD, particularly the Southern Command (SouthCom), operations related to interrupt illicit drugs transport in "transit zones" and programmes aimed at interrupting the production and shipment of drugs in "source zones".

However, there is an astonishing lack of sound argumentation about supply reduction strategies and the consequences and impact on the illicit market. The general assumption seems to be that eradication and interdiction operations contribute to achieving the aim of supply reduction simply because they are designed to do so. Market responses and counter-measures by criminal groups involved are not taken into account when judging the overall impact. Very basic questions are rarely posed. For example, if price developments are a useful indicator of drug availability, there are no data on the basis of which one could argue that the many seizures of shipments have ever reduced the availability on the consumption markets. They seem, rather, to have contributed to increased production to balance the losses.

The effectiveness of eradication and interdiction operations is often measured in terms of quantities of drugs seized. Already in 1993 the US General Accounting Office (GAO) questioned the impact of supply reduction regarding the availability of illicit drugs on the US market and concluded, "adding military surveillance to the nation's interdiction efforts has not made a difference in our ability to reduce the flow of cocaine to American streets". (1) In another report the GAO made an explicit recommendation to Congress that "in light of the negligible contribution that military surveillance has made to the drug war", DOD's involvement in interdiction "should be significantly reduced". (2)

Those recommendations were ignored. In stead, supply reduction strategies were increased. Nevertheless, a recent report by the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) judging the key measure of success - the price, purity and availability of cocaine in the US - shows that supply reduction has failed utterly. If aerial interdiction and spraying were in fact making the product scarcer, according to the law of supply and demand cocaine would be more expensive on the streets. That has not happened. Citing data from the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), the Washington Office on Latin America has documented declining cocaine prices and steady cocaine purity levels since the mid-1990s. In 1997, the year significant spraying got underway, the average price of a gram of cocaine on US streets was US$ 145. By mid-2003, it had fallen to US$ 106. (3)

In stead, supply reduction efforts in producing countries have created great harms to individuals and to society at large, intensifying internal conflicts, corruption, human rights violations, destruction of livelihoods and environmental degradation.

References

1. GAO, Expanded Military Surveillance Not Justified by Measurable Goals or Results, Statement of Louis J. Rodrigues, Director, Systems Development and Production Issues, National Security and International Affairs Division, GAO/T-NSIAD-94-14, 5 October 1993.
2. GAO, Drug Control - Heavy Investment in Military Surveillance Not Paying Off; US General Accounting Office, GAO/NSIAD-93-220, September 1993.
3. Are We There Yet? Measuring Progress in the U.S. War on Drugs in Latin America [PDF document] WOLA Drug War Monitor, December 2004.