The War on Drugs

THE WAR ON DRUGS

On 30 January 1982, to much publicity and acclaim, President Ronald Reagan announced the war on drugs and took the unprecedented step of appointing his vice president, George Bush, as chief coordinator of drug policy. As a former head of the Central Intelligence Agency, Bush seemed both a logical choice and a strong indication of the administration's resolve to extirpate this growing cancer from the body politic. With stirring speeches the vice president announced that the American people had had enough and that his office would coordinate all of the chief law enforcement agencies of the federal government "to stop the storm surge of cocaine" and other drugs "drowning" the citizens of the United States "in a sea of murders, violence, and blood-drenched narcodollars." Targeting the seedbed of narcotics distribution, south Florida, Bush declared that the U.S. Attorney's Office; the Drug Enforcement Agency; the U.S. Customs Service; the Federal Bureau of Investigation; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms; the Internal Revenue Service; the U.S. Border Patrol; and the army, navy, and Coast Guard would pool resources, share information, and coordinate a strategic assault to rid America of the drug plague and the crime, social dislocation, and demoralization that accompanied it. Given this panoply of forces, optimism seemed the order of the day. For six months or so the mass media reported impressive results. President Reagan was photographed standing before tons of seized drugs and weapons proclaiming such successes "a brilliant example of working federalism." During the first year of the war, the U.S. Attorney's Office reported a 64 percent increase in drug prosecutions. In 1983 six tons of cocaine were seized in south Florida; by 1985 such seizures snared twenty-five tons; in 1986, thirty tons. According to the DEA, this represented more cocaine than the Medellín and Cali drug cartels in Colombia had been producing in 1980. Therefore, while these arrests and seizures were touted as successes, they also indicated a growing drug problem and a need to escalate the war on drugs. More people were using cocaine and heroin and other drugs than ever before. Even in south Florida, the primary theater of combat, illicit drugs were as easily available as over-the-counter varieties, and were often sold in the same places—openly, without fear of the law. Something was profoundly wrong, and many drug agents on the streets were highly critical and pointed to an absence of the will to win in Washington and deep corruption from top to bottom.

Legacy of the 1960s

Widespread concern about the pervasive, destructive social effects of such corruption, and recognition that it enabled the narcotics traffic to emerge in the first place, had led to public demands for action. Prior to the late 1960s the problem of drug abuse in the United States had been relatively minor. Opium and cocaine had been problems in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when they had been legal and their addictive effects little understood. The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 had banned them (for example, preventing Coca-Cola from adding its most potent ingredient). Thereafter, numerous laws prohibited the possession and distribution of many substances. Though organized crime had always managed to break such laws, the use of illegal drugs was minuscule by today's standards and confined largely to the margins of society. This changed suddenly in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as the rampant drug use by the young and a "tidal wave" of heroin inundated the United States from southeast Asia. As many studies have shown, and as congressional committees have verified, this was made possible, in part, by military and political alliances between the CIA and warlords it recruited to fight covert anticommunist campaigns in Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, and Burma during the Vietnam War. Congress had granted authority to President Lyndon Johnson to wage limited war in Vietnam—but to do so nowhere else. Thus, to extend the anticommunist crusade into the rest of southeast Asia, the CIA had to make an "end run" around Congress. In order to generate funds to organize covert warfare, the CIA allowed its right-wing partners to sell large quantities of drugs, a good deal of which made its way into the United States, owing to corruption among individual agents, Saigon government officials, and actions taken by the Corsican mafia (the "French Connection") in Marseilles, France, to profit from this glut of heroin. Simultaneously, the Sicilian mafia, facing competition, stepped up its own drug operations, smuggling heroin from anticommunist guerrillas in Afghanistan, who were also backed by the CIA. By the late 1980s heroin had again become popular, and much of this product was generated by the Mujahideen to fund their CIA-supported war against the communist government of Afghanistan. Anticommunist warlords needed money to fund their operations, and the CIA was willing, in the words of Victor Marchetti (a high-ranking CIA operative), "to look the other way" when they grew and sold prodigious quantities of drugs. The problem was that these banner crops needed outlets, and this resulted in organized crime pushing drugs on an unprecedented scale in the streets of America.

Cocaine

By the late 1970s, as the market for heroin seemed to become saturated, new organized crime rings from Latin America began to step up production and distribution of a different, but equally addictive and destructive, drug—cocaine. By the mid 1980s new, more potent methods of ingestion (freebasing) and forms (crack) appeared. As the street price plummeted, more citizens tried the novelty items and quickly became dependent. Cocaine was the "drug of choice" of the 1980s, said Time magazine, with few of the drawbacks of heroin, thus appealing to middle-class consumers. As it turned out, long-term cocaine abuse had its own attendant set of medical horrors, but this was not to be realized until later, when millions of Americans were addicted.

Drugs and Foreign Policy

Simultaneously as the new cocaine cartels were growing in power, the Reagan administration undertook to wage a covert war against the Sandinista government of Nicaragua and to oppose all Marxist and communist influence throughout Latin America. Congress had expressly forbidden the overt overthrow of the Sandinistas and covert operations paid for by public funds. Essentially the same scenario that had emerged in southeast Asia was repeated in Central America. The Iran-Contra hearings showed that the Reagan administration circumvented the will of Congress by violating at least the spirit, if not the letter, of the law. One of the sensitive issues all but ignored by this congressional inquest was that of connections between the sale of illicit drugs and arms purveyed to the Contras. Responding to public pressure, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee set up a special Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations, chaired by Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) to conduct its own hearings into these matters. Its conclusion was clear: at the very least the CIA (and other U.S. agencies) had again looked the other way as the Medellín and Cali drug cartels had provided millions of dollars earned from the sale of drugs to arm the Contras. The Kerry Committee also found numerous other instances of illegal drug activities throughout the region, the most important of which was that of Gen. Manuel Noriega of Panama, who had been known to U.S. drug enforcement since at least 1971 as a drug trafficker, cooperating with the cartel of Medellín. The CIA had also used Noriega to funnel secret arms to the Contras. As evidence uncovered by the Kerry committee showed, Noriega had been on the payroll of the CIA beginning in 1976 (the year George Bush took over as head of the CIA), when he collected $110,000 dollars a year. By 1985 he was collecting $200,000 per year, all in secret cash deposits in the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI—which would figure prominently in new scandals in the early 1990s, including drug-money laundering). Ostensibly Noriega was "our man" in Central America serving in the war against communism. Yet in 1986 when the DEA proposed an undercover plan to unravel the mysteries of a multibillion-dollar drug laundering seam in Panamanian banks, it had to seek CIA approval. The go-ahead was given, but with the proviso that any information that exposed Panamanian government officials would have to be dropped. Nevertheless, the Kerry Committee's revelations could not be ignored. In 1988 the U.S. District Court in Miami issued an indictment against Noriega and a warrant for his arrest. George Bush claimed that his subordinates kept him in the dark about Noriega's drug operations, and he was sufficiently embarrassed by the Kerry Committee's revelations that in 1989 as president, he ordered the invasion of Panama by U.S. troops, ostensibly to safeguard U.S. bases and personnel, but also to remove Noriega from power. Eventually Noriega was tried. His planned defense included calling for secret government documents that his lawyers said would prove that Noriega had done nothing not approved by his Washington contacts. Both the CIA and NSC refused to hand over files on Noriega, saying that to do so would compromise national security. Noriega was duly convicted and imprisoned.

Drugs and Corruption

The dismal revelations brought to light both by the Iran-Contra hearings and the Kerry Committee cast grave doubts upon the war on drugs—both about its efficacy and the competency and integrity of the generals. There is little doubt that CIA alliances with organized crime rings in the late 1940s, intended as anticommunist measures, also opened avenues of opportunity for criminal drug smugglers. Later, political alliances with right-wing regimes in small countries fighting communism also promoted drug trafficking. This history of toleration and/or complicity in the drug trade suggests strongly that corruption in Washington, D.C., should become a main focus of combat in the war on drugs.

Sources:

Alfred McCoy, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (New York: Harper & Row, 1972);

Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991);

Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations, Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1989).