"A lot more drug interdiction is needed on the streets of the United States." Colombia's President Iván Duque made this assertion to the Council on Foreign Relations last week.
In a session moderated by Admiral James Stavridis, the Georgetown-educated Duque told us that the U.S. must focus much more on demand-side consumption of drugs. Sure, Duque is eager to remind us that the U.S. cocaine problem cannot be solely ascribed to the lucrative extraction and processing of coca plants in Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia. He's correct. Supply and demand are obviously inseparable.
U.S. cocaine demand may be down in relative terms from the 1980s and '90s, and the U.S.-Colombia partnership to take down the cartels has been effective, but America's appetite for the white powder, its variants, and other drugs continues. Indeed, Mexican cartels have been very happy to fill any supply-side void left by Colombia. Besides, the U.S. opioid epidemic has long supplanted cocaine as our most egregious drug challenge, one that has been fueled in part by our own pharmaceutical firms.
Duque praised the late-Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" campaign to reduce U.S. demand. Doing so was unfortunate because, as with other "War on Drugs" initiatives, the former First Lady's well-intended efforts were simplistic, vague, failed to address systemic, underlying causation, and exacerbated problems for poor people and people of color. These efforts stressed that drug use was completely an individual moral choice, rarely addressing the collective economic, public health, and societal roots of the problem. They were designed to make politicians look tough while preening in their Potemkin villages, resulting in heinous laws that targeted the little guy and bloated the prison-industrial complex. As with abstinence-based sex education programs, they spread fear and ignorance, did not work, and made matters worse.
Colombia is a good ally. Significant progress has been made there in recent years with, for example, safe travel to Bogotá and even Cali and Medellín both possible and pleasurable. Duque and others here and there will do us a great service, however, if they focus less on rhetoric, symptoms, and superficiality and more on policies that address drug use systemically, systematically, and fairly.
