Losing The War on Drugs, One Field at Time

Abstract

I 1988, a foreign correspondent published an article in the New York Times describing the latest campaign in the decades-old “War on Drugs.” Instead of being fought on the streets of America, however, the front was in the jungles of Peru. Among the thousands of bright green coca fields covering the Upper Huallaga Valley, a tiny plot brown with dead plants represented the United States’ latest hope of winning the war against cocaine. A new herbicide tested at the site by American and Peruvian scientists had finally proved effective against the hardy coca plant, and with experiments with aerial application in progress, the United States Government was planning the first program of large-scale eradication. Craig Chretien, head of the United States Drug Enforcement Administration’s operation in Peru, declared that ‘’This is the only way we’re going to get a handle on the cocaine problem.” Such was the tough rhetoric coming from America’s foreign policy leaders during the Reagan era, when such terms as “The Evil Empire” were popularized, and politicians relished policies of “getting tough on crime” at home and abroad. Today, America is losing, and indeed may have already lost, the war on drugs. Many of the policies designed to stem the flow of narcotics from the third world to America’s city streets in the 1980s turned out to be counterproductive. In case after case, government-led eradication of illicit crops, such as poppy or coca, have led to unintended economic and behavioral consequences. By attacking the supply of illicit drugs, the prices of these goods shot up on the international market and increased revenues. Perhaps as importantly, eradication programs cost governments the support of the local populations whose livelihoods depended on the illicit economy. This is the subject of “Shooting Up, Counterinsurgency and the War on Drugs,” (Brookings Institution Press, 2010), in which Brookings Senor Fellow Vanda Felbab-Brown argues that conventional strategies surrounding the