Cocaine Nation Read online

  COCAINE NATION

  HOW THE WHITE TRADE TOOK OVER THE WORLD

  TOM FEILING

  PEGASUS BOOKS

  NEW YORK

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Preface to the Pegasus Edition

  Author’s Note

  Introduction

  PART ONE

  How Did We Get Here?

  1 From Soft Drink to Hard Drug

  2 Building a Hard Drug Economy

  3 A Rush to Punish

  4 Cutting off the Lizard’s Tail

  PART TWO

  Supply and the Third World

  5 Smugglers

  6 The Mexican Supply Chain

  7 ‘Cocaine is the Atomic Bomb of Latin America’

  8 Globalization

  PART THREE

  Where Do We Go From Here?

  9 The Demand for Cocaine

  10 Legalization

  11 Prospects

  Notes

  Permissions and Acknowledgements

  Acknowledgements

  In the UK, I’d like to thank Julia Vellacott and Becky Swift for their advice when I first started looking for a publisher. Thanks too to my agent Broo Doherty and my editor at Allen Lane, Margaret Bluman, for taking a chance on a first-time writer. Sir Keith Morris, Danny Kushlick and Axel Klein are critics of the current handling of the cocaine trade. They made me aware of the main players in the debate, and I am grateful for the encouragement they gave me when I was in the early stages of researching this book.

  Liam Craig Best of Justice for Colombia and Jenny Pearce of Bradford University advised me on who best to approach in Colombia. In the United States, the experience and analysis of John Walsh at the Washington Office on Latin America, Sanho Tree at the Institute for Policy Studies, and Adam Isaacson at the Center for International Policy were invaluable. In Bogotá, my friends Nick Perkins, Rusty Young and Ricardo Sanchez helped me a great deal with my research. Tiziana Laudato and Angelica Ibarra helped with translations. Journalists and film-makers Françoise Nieto Fong, Ricardo Restrepo, Daniel Coronell, Steve Ambrus, Romeo Langlois, Pascale Mariani and Carlos Lozano all had interesting things to say about the drugs trade in Colombia, and supplied me with plentiful leads. I’d especially like to thank the many people who agreed to meet and discuss the subject with me, especially since many of them will not share my methods or conclusions: Aldo Lale-Demoz, Rodolfo Llinas and Hugo Javier Bustos at the UNODC (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime); Juan Carlos Montero at DIRAN (Colombian Anti-Narcotics Police); Carlos Medina at the Observatorio de Drogas of the Dirección Nacional de Estupefacientes; Nick Eliades in the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) Public Affairs Office; Than Christie in the Narcotics Affairs Section of the US Embassy; Luis ‘Lucho’ Salamanca, Kevin Higgins, Chris Feistl, Colombian Vice-President Francisco Santos, Malcolm Deas of Oxford University and David Hutchinson. My thanks, too, go to Dan Scott-Lea, Yaneth Pachón, David Curtidor, Daniel Maestre, Adelaida Moreno at the farmworkers’ union Fensuagro, Congressman Luis Fernando Almario Rojas, Congressman Wilson Borja, Alberto Rueda, Markus Schultze-Kraft at the International Crisis Group, Ricardo Vargas at Acción Andina, Gustavo Duncan, Luis Eduardo Cellis Mendez at the Fundación Nuevo Arco Iris, and Omar Gutierrez at the Centre for Investigation and Popular Education (CINEP).

  In Jamaica, I’d like to thank Geraldine O’Callaghan and Andy MacLean for letting me stay with them while I was on the island. Marta Shaw, Flip Fraser, Sarah Manley, Lois Grant and Paul Burke gave me plentiful insights and pointed me in the right direction. Thanks also to local law enforcement officers Inspector Michael Simpson, ACP Carl Williams and Carlton Wilson; and to the British police officers working in Jamaica as part of Operation Kingfish: Les Green, Paul Robinson and John McLean. I’m particularly grateful to journalists Anthony Barrett, Glenroy Sinclair and Mark Wignall, and to Bobby Sephestine and Olga Heaven at the prison charity Hibiscus. Lloyd Evans and Gordon Brown helped me to better understand the political situation. I’d also like to thank Barry Chevannes, Horace Levy and Donna Hope at the University of the West Indies at Mona.

  In the United States, I’d like to extend my thanks to Marcela Guerrero for help in finding places to stay in various cities, and to Chris Robinson, David Russell, Carlos Tovar and Neerav Kingsland for putting me up as I travelled from city to city. Bruce Johnson, Doris Randolph, the late Dr John Morgan, Elizabeth Mendez Berry, Kym Clark, Larry Miller, James Peterson, Mark Mauer at the Sentencing Project, Clarence Lusane, Professor Peter Reuter and Steven Robertson at the DEA Public Information Office allowed me to pick their brains. The US chapters owe a great deal to ethnographies of drug users and dealers written by John M. Hagedorn, Rick Curtis, Travis Wendell and Philippe Bourgois. My special thanks to all of them. Alex Sanchez of Homies Unidos, Luis Rodriguez, Jeff Chang, Father Tom Hereford and Bruce George all shed precious light on the cocaine economy. Ethan Nadelmann, Tony Newman, Ed Kirtz, Gabriel Sayegh, Tony Papa and Margaret Dooley-Sammuli at the Drug Policy Alliance were supportive and helpful. Rusty White, Jack Cole, Celerino Castillo III, David Doderidge, and Russ Jones of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition provided an invaluable critique of the war on drugs from the point of view of those who have prosecuted it, as did Judge James Gray, Kurt Schmoke and Eric Sterling. My thanks also to Jon Veit, David Lewis, Julienne Gage, John Maass, Samuel Wilcher and Jacob Sullum at Reason magazine. Tom Horvath of Practical Recovery Services, Susan Burton of the ‘A New Way of Life’ re-entry project, Marqueece Harris Dawson of the Community Coalition, Lou Martinez at The Effort Community Health Center and Kenny Glasgow of the Ordinary People Society work with compulsive drug users. The conversations I had with them improved my understanding of addiction and social deprivation in the United States.

  For help in investigating cross-border smuggling and the drugs trade in Mexico, I’d like to thank Elijah Wald, Jon Forrest Little, David Fry and Leticia Zamarripa at El Paso Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Sam Quiñones, Rafael Nunez, Jaime Hervella, Howard Campbell, Tony Payan, Richard Cockett, John Dickie, Sam Logan, Dudley Althaus and Jorge Chabat. For insights into the street drug culture of Mexico City, Benito Azcano Roldán, Alfonso Hernandez at the Centro de Estudios Tepiteños, Carlos Zamudio, Ricardo Sala and Mister Hunter deserve special mention.

  I’d like to thank friends who helped me out in one way or another in the writing of the book: Lauren Ferreira, Erin Howley, Mike Sadler and Anna Wilkinson, Chris Walker and Jordan Ethe in the United States. In Mexico, that means Elizabeth Clark, Danielle Savage, Ed Peterson and Jonathan Barbieri, who all helped to make breaks from the writing process more enjoyable. Back in London, when I wondered how to turn such a welter of information into a good read, Sharon Kinsella, Slawek Dorosz, Daniel Wilson, Bryony Morrison, Sam Low, Richard Garner and Michael Ryan offered valuable feedback on early drafts. Maribel Lozano and Nelson Diaz helped with translations and kept Colombia on my mind. Finally, I’d especially like to thank four writers whose insights into the drugs issue most inspired me: Harry Levine, Anthony Henman, Alonso Salazar and Francisco Thoumi.

  Unless otherwise indicated, the Colombian interviews were conducted in September 2007, the Jamaican interviews in October 2007, the American interviews in November and December 2007, and the British interviews in May 2008. I would like to thank all the interviewees, particularly those who have chosen to remain anonymous, for investing their time and trust in me.

  Preface to the Pegasus Edition

  I’m very pleased to see Pegasus make this book available to American readers. It was originally published in the United Kingdom in August 2009 as The Candy Machine: How Cocaine Took Over the World. When Penguin Books began looking for an American publisher, it soon became apparent that many American editors thought that
there was little left to say about cocaine. Drugs and the policies that have been devised to prohibit them are hugely problematic and controversial, but for want of a workable alternative, policies that are widely acknowledged to be ineffectual have been allowed to ossify. The paralysing conservatism of press and politicians have become mutually reinforcing. The presidential candidates of 2008 came up with no bright ideas to stop the rot the American cocaine trade has brought to Mexico. They made little mention of America’s overflowing prisons, or the millions of unemployed, near-unemployable young Americans who feed and are fed by the drug economy. The country’s emaciated public schools and its crumbling infrastructure, key parts of the vicious circle driving the drug economy, warranted even less discussion. These issues need to be addressed, which is why a politician’s take on drug policy is perhaps a better gauge of his or her political convictions than any other.

  I started to map out the idea for a book about cocaine in 2006. The crack epidemic had inspired a lot of books about the American drugs trade in the 1990s. There was also a smaller, specialist literature that looked at the anti-drugs policies that the U.S. was pushing on Caribbean and Latin American countries. But no book that I could think of looked at all facets of the story: at the illegal production, distribution and consumption of cocaine around the world, their origins, drivers and consequences. The HBO series The Wire only came to the UK when I was in the last stages of writing this book, but like David Simon and his team, it seemed to me that the story of the war on drugs had been told from the top down for long enough. It was time to talk to those on the receiving end of the influx of drugs, to those charged with enforcing the laws that were devised to deal with that influx and to the thousands of people around the world for whom breaking those laws has become routine.

  Cocaine’s place in the world has changed since the 1990s. Production is controlled by the actors in Colombia’s civil war to a greater degree than ever before. Distribution in the United States is controlled by Mexican cartels. The European market for cocaine has expanded over the past 10 years and West Africa has become a major staging post en route to Europe. Unlike the United States, European countries haven’t had to deal with a crack epidemic and this has affected Europeans’ attitudes to the drug, which are positively lackadaisical when compared to those of most Americans.

  The world-wide ban on hard drugs like cocaine has been orchestrated by Americans to fight very American drug problems. This has antagonised countries with quite different experiences of hard drugs. The peculiarities of the U.S. drug economy is the subject of the first third of the book. One of the most noticeable aspects of the United States’ war on drugs is that the war is deemed to be more important than the drugs. What matters is the struggle—that the struggle has failed to get the results that it was supposed to get is of little consequence to the drug warrior. The courage, steadfastness and unquestioning loyalty needed to fight such a war are what count. Because drug policy has been allowed to become a testing ground for the nation’s moral fibre, it has become very difficult to reduce the government’s role in drug policy to the more humdrum matter of protecting public health (by which I mean physical, measurable health rather than the vagaries of moral health).

  In the course of researching this book, I spoke to more than one law enforcement official who likened the ban on drugs to the ban on murder. Drug use is wrong, they told me. If growing numbers of Americans choose to take illegal drugs, if many drug laws are unenforceable or if those laws have side effects far deadlier than the drugs they purport to prohibit, so be it, they told me. Fortunately, I also met a lot of American police officers, drug sellers and drug users whose testimonies make for a more pragmatic and nuanced appreciation of just what ‘the drug problem’ is and what the solution might be.

  Of course, not all those engaged in enforcing drug laws are animated by a moral calling. There are as many varieties of drug warrior as there are of drug user. I hope this becomes apparent in part two, which looks at cocaine production in Colombia and its distribution through the Caribbean and Mexico to the big markets in the United States and Europe.

  In the United States, Jamaica, Colombia and Mexico, police officers told me that they can’t police their way out of rampant drug use/abuse and that more emphasis needs to be put on reducing the demand for drugs. Workers in the front-line services told me that the demand for drugs cannot be reduced until users and sellers have other jobs to go to. Politicians told me that communities must take responsibility for teaching the evils of drugs. Teachers told me that their pupils don’t listen to anti-drugs education. Students told me that drugs are available everywhere. North American and European politicians say that they can’t stop drugs coming in and that the supply of cocaine from Latin America needs to be tackled. Latin American politicians say that cocaine is the single most profitable business going for many of their people and that the problem can only be solved by tackling the demand for drugs in richer countries.

  There are countless agencies engaged in trying to stop people producing, distributing and consuming cocaine, but they operate without a clear view of the bigger picture, and their myopia has created institutionalised buck-passing on a global scale. The war on drugs may once have resembled a crusade. Today, it looks more like one of the grand old Duke of York’s marching exercises: being only half way up, we are neither up nor down. In private, plenty of police officers, doctors, judges and border guards admit that drug policy isn’t working. In public however, nothing has changed since Richard Nixon launched the war on drugs 40 years ago. Drug users are weak; drug traffickers are evil; we must stay the course; those who suggest legalising drugs are traitors.

  Hoping to break this impasse, in the last third of the book I ask some basic questions. How much harm does cocaine do its users? Why do some people become dependent on cocaine while others don’t? What kind of treatment works best for those who want to quit cocaine? I hope that the answers I found and the conclusions I draw go some way to kick-starting the debate over how best to manage drug use in the future. Given the abject failure of current drug policy, the need for a workable alternative isn’t going to go away anytime soon.

  Author’s Note

  In June 2009, Barack Obama appointed Gil Kerlikowske as drug tsar. Many critics of the war on drugs had hoped that the new president would appoint somebody with a background in public health to head the Office of National Drug Control Policy. But the new drug tsar, like most of his predecessors, is a policeman, albeit a reform-minded one. As Seattle police chief, Kerlikowske worked in a city that ran a needle exchange programme, celebrates an annual ‘Hempfest’ and passed a referendum that made the enforcement of anti-marijuana laws the police department’s lowest priority. Drug policy reformers were cautiously hopeful that Obama’s choice of drug tsar indicated a willingness to overhaul drug policy.

  The initial signs have been good: Kerlikowske has signalled that he will take a less confrontational approach to the nation’s drug users. “We should stop using the metaphor about the war on drugs,” he has said. “People look at it as a war on them, and frankly we’re not at war with the people of this country.”

  It looks like the vilification of drug users that has characterised drug policy since President Nixon first declared war on drugs 40 years ago is to be dropped.

  The change is not one of tone alone. Gil Kerlikowske has also made it clear that the FBI will no longer raid state-approved facilities that distribute marijuana for medical purposes, a tactic that had led to the prosecution of terminally ill Americans on drug possession charges and then-President George W. Bush warning the public against “misplaced compassion.” The Obama White House has said that it will encourage Congress to do more to eliminate the disparity between prison sentences handed down to those found guilty of selling powder and those found to have sold crack cocaine. Unlike the Bush administration, the Democrats have also resolved to stem the flow of American guns and cash that sustains the turf wars between the Mexican cartels.
/>   Finally, it seems the United States has a drug tsar who is prepared to admit that his predecessors’ focus on fighting supplies of cocaine from Colombia has been to the detriment of policies known to be effective in curbing the demand for drugs at home. Kerkilowske said as much when he announced that more money would be spent on treating drug addiction, especially in prisons. “It’s clear that if they go to prison and they have a drug problem and you don’t treat it and they return to the same neighbourhood, you are going to have the same problem. People in neighbourhoods, police officers et cetera, are tired of recycling the problem. Let’s try and fix it.” Funding for substance abuse programmes is due to rise by 4 percent to $3.6 billion a year. Needle exchanges, which the Bush administration banned despite their proven effectiveness in reducing the transmission of blood disease between intravenous drug users, will now be considered an issue for healthcare specialists, not police officers.

  But Kerlikowske has also made it clear that there are limits to how far he is prepared to open up the debate. For a start, nobody should expect the White House to legalize marijuana. “The discussion about legalization is not part of the president’s vocabulary under any circumstances and it’s not a part of mine,” he has said. Yet as we saw in chapter eleven, state-level law-making has become a test-bed for more liberal drug policies that the federal government, fearful of how the electorate might respond, considers to be off the table. Marijuana is now legally available on prescription in thirteen U.S. states. In May 2009, the Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, welcomed a public debate of proposals to legalize and tax the drug. As individual states push further into territory that has long been regarded as politically suicidal, the federal government may in time feel compelled to follow their lead.