“Don’t get stuck on stupid,” advised Army Lt. General Russel Honore, brought in following Hurricane Katrina’s 2005 Louisiana landfall. America has been stuck on stupid in the “war on drugs” for a half century running.
The latest example is obliterating narco-boats. The videos are fascinating, but does this make any difference? Not. One. Bit.
Suppose President Trump orders every narco-boat in the Americas sunk. Would that help? Nope.
Sure, it would disrupt narcotics markets briefly, but then drug flows would resume, and street prices would return to normal.
Venezuela’s President Maduro is Trump’s latest worthy villain. Suppose Trump learned Maduro is hosting his narco buddies at a fancy Caracas hotel. Trump orders a cruise missile strike. The hotel is now rubble. Maduro has an unpleasant meeting with his maker. And America’s narcotics flows? Unaffected.
President Trump is a man of action. Illegal narcotics are a scourge. Trump acts in response, as have his predecessors since Richard Nixon launched the “war.” But Trump’s just shadowboxing, never landing a punch that matters.
The narcotics business is global, flexible, sophisticated, and incredibly profitable. Narco-chemists have infused cocaine into recycled plastic, resealed coconuts, and passion-fruit pulp, in each case to be re-extracted at final destination. You can’t stop that.
Over the years the primary counter strategies sought to restrict supply and so raise the drugs’ street price. But raising the price raises profits to those who succeed. This strategy comes with a built-in doom loop.
Nor does dinging their profits deter the cartels. A kilo of fentanyl might fetch 1,000 times laboratory costs. Determined interdiction might cut that to 900 times costs. Such losses are acceptable costs of doing business. Carry on.
Only one approach can succeed. To win the war on drugs, demand must fall.
The war on drugs has included a demand-side tactic all along: Penalize users with fines and jail. History shows this has little effect other than filling America’s jails, but there’s also something fundamentally wrong here.
Citizens are exercising their personal preference to use these narcotics. It’s stupid, of course, but in America, people have a God-given right to be stupid. Big Apple voters just elected a Marxist as mayor, right?
Restricting freedom might be defensible, if it worked. It doesn’t.
The only winning strategy is to shift personal and societal attitudes. This won’t be easy. So many Americans using or having used illegal narcotics demonstrates substantial societal acceptance. Getting most users and those who might use to “just say no” in Nancy Reagan’s immortal words will likely take years. But, unlike everything else we’ve tried, it will eventually work.
Consider tobacco. Many still smoke, of course. But when Nixon launched the war on drugs, most adults smoked. John Wayne probably smoked a thousand cigarettes in his movies. Go to a restaurant for a side of Marlboros with your T-bone steak. The smoke in bars was thick as London fog.
Tentatively, and then more aggressively, government “nudged” societal attitudes against tobacco. Today, you can enjoy that steak and quaff that pint without the stink. Amen.
Killing narco-terrorists might be defensible if it worked. Jailing citizens for their personal choices might be defensible if it worked. Neither has. Neither will. As the comic strip character Pogo once observed, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
China and Venezuela remain our enemies, but they only use drugs as an instrument in a wider war. We disarm our enemies and cleanse our land of the drug scourge when we admit that the source of the problem is us. Change attitudes. Dramatically reduce demand. Win the heretofore longest never-ending war.
J.D. Foster is the former chief economist at the Office of Management and Budget and former chief economist and senior vice president at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. He now resides in relative freedom in the hills of Idaho.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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