Cocaina: A Book on Those Who Make It (31 page)

He shoves his hand between two buttons on his shirt as he takes in the view. Bogotá’s chaotic mixture of skyscrapers, cranes, highways, and low buildings sparkle in the light, and in the distance the mountains in the south provide a visual border to what everyone knows is guerrilla territory. Still. Rangel is aware that many intellectuals in Colombia support his views on this topic, but also that he is heavily criticised in one respect. Some of the books he has published tend to convey the notion that Colombia just has one problem — narcotics. That legalisation would not only eliminate a great deal of the world’s organised crime, but also lead to peace in Colombia. Yet in that respect he is not supported by many academics.

‘Peace may be too much to expect,’ he says. ‘But violence and misery would never have reached such levels here had it not been for drug trafficking. In the early 1980s the FARC had 900 soldiers, but because of the drug industry that figure grew to 18,000. I believe the number could have been stopped at around 4000 had it not been for cocaine. We would have just a fifth of the guerrilla problem we have today, a problem which is a gigantic scourge. In terms of the paramilitary groups it’s all more complicated, since they were set up almost exclusively with drug money. Add to that the war between the two, which created unprecedented violence and so many internal refugees. And that’s just the armed conflict. To that should also be added all the other types of crimes generated by drugs. My response is that a Colombia without the drug industry would be an entirely different country. A completely different nation.’

IN A CORTÈGE
of cars with tinted windows, Juan Manuel Galán, son of Colombia’s own Kennedy clan, watches the buildings roll by while he wonders what his assassinated father would have said about his son’s present stance on drugs. ‘I can’t speak for him, but if he’d seen the historical balance sheet I think he’d have been all for a change of focus. The battle has to be fought with the weapon that will do the most damage to the mafia — we have to get at their money. My stance is all about focus. We’ll fight them more, not less.’

Juan Manuel Galán was introduced to the Colombian people on 18 August 1989 when, at 17, in a moment of passion just a few hours after the assassination of his father, he grabbed the microphone during the live television broadcast and pleaded to his father’s successor, soon-to-be-president César Gaviria, ‘Please, save Colombia!’ The nation was in shock yet again, though Colombians were becoming increasingly accustomed to these unwelcome surprises. Once more, a left presidential candidate heading to a certain victory had ended up in a pool of blood as he was about to cross the finish line. Many leftists drew their own conclusions; some joined the guerrillas, others abandoned politics, and thousands went into exile.

The country now knew that whoever dared to organise a political project (whether a political party or a strong trade union, or something else entirely) would sooner or later get murdered. The dead bodies were counted in their thousands and all hope for a better future seemed lost; but when the pimply teenager, who, a few hours after his father’s brutal death, had enough insight to call for reconciliation, the entire nation took him into their hearts. He symbolised a ray of hope. Some thought that perhaps — perhaps — there might just be some sort of peace in store for the future after all. Many years down the road. With a new generation in power. In different times.

Since that day Juan Manuel Galán, his brothers, and his mother have been to Colombia what the Kennedys were to the United States after John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. Today, the family is a symbol of a liberal, enlightened, and progressive political tradition. In Congress Juan Manuel — he is a senator and all his brothers are politicians — continues to fuel their father’s furious battle against the nation’s violent landowning elite, and whenever a Galán takes the floor, he does so with a very special moral weight. All Colombians know it was Luis Carlos Galán’s vehement struggle against cocaine that led Escobar to assassinate him, as part of an alliance with Galán’s political adversaries. This is exactly why so many people became disillusioned when Juan Manuel, the son of the biggest opponent of drugs, came out as yet another Latin American politician in favour of legalisation.

‘I changed my mind when I began studying the issue more scientifically,’ he says. ‘And the first thing you have to admit is that there are no simple answers. There’s no magic wand you can simply wave. But it’s important to come up with an alternative to prohibition. Of all the 40 billion dollars spent on fighting drugs each year, 38 billion go to repressive measures, to hunt down and punish those who live on this business. The mere thought about the sort of good that money could do for prevention and treatment instead is very appealing.’

Juan Manuel Galán is one of those — Noam Chomsky being another — who think that there is no actual war being fought against narcotics, but that the war on drugs has increasingly become a rhetorical tool to serve other purposes: territorial control, defence of religious values, the war on terror, and the undermining of socialism. If it were really about drugs, Galán says, there is plenty of evidence to show what really gets results, and almost all of it has to do with prevention, rehabilitation, and reducing poverty.

Critics such as Galán and Chomsky base their conclusions on a vast number of studies, but on one major investigation in particular: ‘Controlling Cocaine’, carried out by the RAND Corporation in 1994, in which four methods to curb drug use in the United States were analysed. The most effective measure, by a significant margin, was prevention and treatment, followed by the much more costly policing, and third, the even more exorbitant implementation of stricter border security. Most demanding in terms of resources but least effective were operations carried out in other countries, such as herbicide spraying in Colombia. Nevertheless, the United States continues to channel its resources in opposition to these results: the majority of funds go to the latter options, the least to the former.

The fact that most of this continues — even under Obama — may, according to Chomsky, be because the actual goals of the war on drugs differ from those expressed publicly. When this is taken into account, the argument goes, the fact that these methods repeatedly fail to achieve their purported objectives does not matter, since they succeed in the way they were actually intended. So why, if Chomsky is correct, is the resistance to the war on drugs not more evident among those governments, many of them socialist, that do not exactly share the same concerns as Washington?

One response relates to economic power. In 1986 the US Congress passed a resolution on ‘decertification’, which means that Washington can punish nations that fail to comply with the White House’s stance on drugs by raising tariffs on agricultural products, putting a stop to air traffic to the country, or voting against loans and aid to the neglectful nation in question in the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. When Colombia was decertified in 1996, the country fell into a deep recession and took a decade to recover, and in 2009 Bolivia was punished by drastic increases in tariffs on Bolivian goods aimed for the US market — a measure estimated to have resulted in the loss of 25,000 jobs. When in 2001 the Jamaican government appointed a commission to study the possibility of decriminalising cannabis, it concluded that arresting thousands of citizens for using it was causing more harm than that caused by marijuana addiction itself, but the US Embassy in Kingston made it clear that the White House would not tolerate such legislation — and, following the threat of decertification, the recommendations from the study were scrapped entirely. The paradoxical consequence resulting from this North/South dynamic is that the US government has more power over poor, developing nations than over its own states, many of which have already effectively legalised cannabis.

Juan Manuel Galán runs his fingers through his shiny hair. He is still a young man, maintains a low-key image, and is anxious for his words to resonate. He has absolutely no sympathy for the FARC and is indifferent as to whether they are called guerrillas or terrorists, but does agree with the analysis that the war on drugs is driven by neo-colonial principles and is irrational in terms of its goals. ‘Prohibition has just turned 100 years old. I think that’s old enough. But if there isn’t a change in the UN conventions that regulate this issue internationally, nothing can be done. It’s a straitjacket preventing us from developing alternatives. The worst thing that can happen is that we legalise without having prepared ourselves with regard to care and prevention. Such a drastic step requires very developed treatment infrastructures, good state control over the substances, and serious prevention. On a global scale. I would like to see a UN convention on prevention and treatment. That would be a paradigm shift.’

In the new global legalisation movement it’s possible — as touched upon earlier — to single out a few different perspectives: pragmatists, liberals, and what one could perhaps be called supporters of the normalisation theory. The first is the broadest category, gathering all sorts of people of various political persuasions together around the utilitarian belief that bans do more harm than good, while the second category consists of classic liberals and libertarian leftists, who claim that what individuals do with their own bodies should be a matter of personal choice. The third school of thought, often a combination of the first two, has been strengthened by the younger generation, who grew up exposed to a broader variety of drugs and have now entered into the debate with their own intellectual spokespeople. This category gained a new representative in 2009 with the publication of Tom Feiling’s book
The Candy Machine: how cocaine took over the world
.

One overarching thesis is that cocaine, like many other drugs, is something of a hedonistic reality in postmodern societies and is now undergoing the same normalisation process as abortion, homosexuality, and atheism; that the laws dramatising the phenomenon at present will gradually be abandoned. Scandinavia is an odd fish in the global debate on drugs, with its secular political tradition but harsh drug laws, but in other parts of the world there is a strong connection between absolutist ideas on drugs and religion, and the critics believe that with increasing secularisation, the spread of democracy, the victory of the market economy, better education, and not the least the free flow of information, the legislative idiosyncrasies will eventually be pared down — similar to how many countries’ anti-abortion legislation has become outdated due to the global evolution of science, ethics, human rights, and availability of services.

Another tenet of the normalisation thesis is that the dangers associated with the majority of drugs — cocaine and marijuana in particular — are grossly exaggerated, and that far too often throughout the 20th century these dangers were analysed in terms of apocalyptic scenarios, instead of within their social and economic context. It’s true that cocaine, unlike marijuana, can generate rapid addiction, but Tom Feiling refers to a wide range of research that arrives at one and the same conclusion: the absolute majority of those who use these drugs only do so for a short period of time and do not become abusers. The most common curve for those who use cocaine is the same as that for cannabis or alcohol: users engage intensively for a period, usually between three and six years, when they are relatively young, and as they get older, gain more life experience, and embrace a more mature lifestyle, they quit or reduce their use on their own initiative. However, the fact that more people use drugs responsibly than not does not mean that class, poverty, and psychology do not play major roles in the development of problematic drug behaviour; on the contrary. And, as with alcohol addiction, these are often the determining factors, not the drugs themselves. Feiling believes that these arguments will soon be more widely accepted, not least because the schoolteachers who will teach pupils about alcohol and narcotics in the future will often have had their own experiences with drugs:

Hysterical claims about drug use have abounded since the Industrial Revolution, but a more sober assessment now seems possible. Most people don’t like most drugs. Most of those who try cocaine do not go on to use it heavily. They don’t even go on to use cannabis heavily.

Another commonly held belief in relation to normalisation has to do with the psychological relationship between total abstinence and abuse. Various studies show that young people who do a lot drugs often develop low self-esteem, become stressed, and have difficulty forging genuine relationships, but less publicised results from similar studies show that young people who completely
abstain
from all forms of drugs are also often emotionally inhibited or socially incompetent. As Feiling argues, what applies to young people also seems to apply to adults: pleasure and satisfaction are associated with moderate use of drugs, and frustration and anxiety are associated with both abuse and total abstinence.

Another idea in a similar vein is that the terror of increasing drug use is based primarily on religious or nationalistic apocalyptic paranoia, a kind of fear on the part of the authorities of the increasingly malleable nature of human beings and the endless relativism of modern man. When Mike Jay’s
Emperors of Dreams: drugs in the nineteenth century
was published in 2000, one of its themes was that religion, more than reason, has guided legislators’ efforts throughout the last two centuries to control the human quest for intoxication. Prohibitions against alcohol and other drugs have rarely been based on rational considerations, but have usually been coloured by moralistic crusades, or by the fear of cultural or ideological invasions from foreigners.

For the advocates of evolutionary normalisation, Mike Jay’s comparisons with travelling — tripping, escape from the everyday, transcending — serve well as both a general analogy and a useful hint about the future: