Last month Gen. John F. Kelly,
who is in charge of the U.S. Southern Command,
complained that marijuana legalization in Colorado and
Washington has made Latin American officials less eager to join the
war on drugs. Yesterday Kelly
complained that budget cuts have forced him to dial back drug
interdiction in the Caribbean. In both cases, Kelly’s complaints
sound like good news to me.
“Because of asset shortfalls, we’re unable to get after 74
percent of suspected maritime drug smuggling,” Kelly told the
Senate Armed Services Committee. “I simply sit and watch it go by.”
Mother Jones—which last year
warned that “More Cocaine Could Soon Be on Our Streets, Thanks
to the Sequester”—may be sympathetic to Kelly’s plight. But since
trying to stop Americans from snorting arbitrarily proscribed
powders up their noses has absolutely nothing to do with national
defense, it looks to me like giving the Pentagon a bit less money
than it anticipated is forcing some perfectly appropriate and long
overdue prioritization.
Even if you support the war on drugs (which, to be
fair, Mother Jones does only when partisanship
takes precedence over principle), you should not be eager to lavish
more taxpayer money on interdiction, which is a highly inefficient
way of discouraging people from consuming forbidden intoxicants.
“Without assets, certain things will happen,” Kelly told reporters
later in the day. “Much larger amounts of drugs will flow up from
Latin America.” Kelly seems to think interdiction reduces the total
amount of drugs reaching the United States. But that is not how
interdiction works, to the extent that it works at all. Given all
the places where drugs can be produced and all the ways they can be
transported to people who want them, the most that drug warriors
can hope to accomplish is to impose costs on traffickers that are
high enough to raise retail prices, thereby discouraging
consumption.
How has that been going? “With few exceptions and despite
increasing investments in enforcement-based supply reduction
efforts aimed at disrupting global drug supply,” a 2013
study published by BMJ
Open concluded, “illegal drug prices have generally
decreased while drug purity has generally increased since 1990.
These findings suggest that expanding efforts at controlling the
global illegal drug market through law enforcement are
failing.”
The basic problem is that drugs acquire most of their value
after they get to the country where they will be consumed, so
seizing them en route has little impact on the cost to consumers.
If Kelly got the resources he wants and increased the percentage of
“suspected maritime drug smuggling” that triggers a response, there
is little reason to think the upshot would be less drug use. The
economics
of drug prohibition mean there will always be more than enough
smuggling to compensate for whatever fraction drug warriors manage
to intercept.
What is that fraction? Kelly suggested a number:
Kelly said he estimates that authorities seize roughly 20
percent of narcotics in transit to the United States, a statistic
several senators called alarming.“That’s all we get?” Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.), the ranking
member of the committee, asked incredulously.“All we get,” Kelly responded.
Even 20 percent might be an exaggeration. Drug warriors cannot
say what share of the total supply they seize without knowing what
the total supply is, and they can estimate that only by trying to
calculate total consumption and/or production, an exercise that is
fraught with uncertainty when you are dealing with contraband. And
remember: These are the same folks who produce those
impressive-sounding “street
values.”
But the real fallacy here lies in assuming that if drug warriors
seize more, the percentage of the total supply they get will go up.
If traffickers treat seizures as a cost of doing business and
respond by boosting shipments, the percentage seized may stay
exactly the same even as the amount seized rises. And since larger
seizures do not necessarily translate into noticeably higher retail
prices, there is no reason to expect consumption will be reduced,
which is the ultimate goal, although it’s easy to forget that if
you focus on Coast Guard cutters intercepting smugglers in the
Caribbean, as Kelly’s audience did:
[Kelly] said interdiction efforts would be bolstered with more
ships that can transport helicopters. His command has only one Navy
ship and two Coast Guard cutters assigned to counter narcotics
smuggling, he said.Kelly said he has 5 percent of the intelligence surveillance and
reconnaissance equipment that would give his team a thorough handle
on the activities of enterprises smuggling drugs and people to the
United States through Central America and the Caribbean.“I would say 5 percent is jaw-dropping, frankly, in terms of the
threats that you’ve just talked about,” Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.)
said. “I think this is something that we better address as a
committee.
Simple math will show that if Kelly had 20 times as much
equipment, he could intercept 400 percent of the drug supply. That
is the fundamental problem with the war on drugs: not enough
resources.
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