December 28, 2007
When in comes to drugs, WOW!, we just don't get it
Cocaine is back in the news, stirred by more anti-US rebellion in South America. That’s good, but what we really need is a radical new re-think on drugs.
A recent piece in The Independent (May 27, 2007) tells us that the US is losing its war on cocaine, and why: “America has spent billions battling the drug industry in Bolivia, Colombia and Peru. And the result? Production as high as ever, street prices at a low, and the governments of the region in open revolt.”
The report, filed by Hugh O’Shaughnessy from La Paz, Bolivia, offers new and interesting information on America’s longstanding drug war in South America. The bad news is that it ends with the same old, dusty conclusion, that America is losing the war on drugs, and that therapy is better than prison bars.
Some of the info:
• “The immensely costly “war on drugs” in Latin America is slowly collapsing like a Zeppelin with a puncture. The long-forecast failure for strategies which involve police and military in forcibly suppressing narcotics - first decreed by President Richard Nixon decades ago - is now pitifully evident in Bolivia, one of the poorest countries of the Western hemisphere.”
• “The estimated $25bn (£13bn) that Washington has spent trying to control narcotics over the past 15 years in Latin America seems to have been wasted.”
• “In 2005, according to UN guesses - and, amid merciless political spinning of what few facts there are - Colombia, Peru and Bolivia, the main producers of cocaine, had the capacity to produce 910 metric tons a year. As more productive strains of coca bushes appear, production has been increasing. Unsurprisingly, the price of cocaine on US streets has tumbled, according to the White House drug tzar John Walters, to $135 (£70) a gram, a fraction of the $600 a gram it was fetching in 1981. The purity of cocaine has gone from 60 per cent in mid-2003 to more than 70 per cent last October. Like the conflict in Iraq, the US’s other great war is now being visibly lost.”
The conclusion: “In Britain, as in Latin America, drugs clearly can’t be controlled by armies and police forces.”
This is interesting stuff, to be sure, and there’s lots more of it in the article. But what to do with it? My view is that we need to take it in hand and move on. We need to start asking some new questions. Here are a few:
Q1: Why is losing the war on drugs a status quo that America can live with?
Answer: Because winning’s got nothing to do with it. As with the war on terror, this is a war without end, severing many functions, some ideological and some financial, and some both. As noted in a recent review of my book, “This is a conflict that, as Chomsky and others have pointed out, many people have an interest in fighting, but very few have an interest in winning.”
Q2: What drugs, what users?
Answer: cocaine and heroin and other despised drugs (e.g., marijuana) are derivatives of natural substances (plants!), that are non-toxic. This is very much unlike other drugs, like Prozac, Xanax, and the barbiturates, made by the drug industry. The latter “medicines” tend to carve big channels in one’s brain-biochemical streams, holding the habitual user in a stranglehold of withdrawal.
In other words, we need to break down the barriers that reinforce the myths of differential prohibition, that there are the good drugs (called medicines) from the pharmacy, and bad drugs, called drugs – sold on the street. As I discussed in an op-ed piece a few months back in the International Herald Tribune, British researchers have argued that many of the most dangerous drugs in society are legal, and more toxic than many illegal drugs, including marijuana and Ecstasy. So when we talk about drugs, let us consider who the end user is and ask another question:
Q3: Are some people bad because they use certain drugs, or have some drugs become bad because of who now uses them?
Answer: the history of drugs tells us that the reputations of mind-altering substances is strongly driven by the users. As users change, so do the myths regarding the drugs they use. And this raises another question:
Q4: Have the myths that permeate the use of illegal substances in America, exported around the world, now have more effect on the harmful outcomes of this use than the pharmacology of the drugs themselves?
Answer: this sounds like a crazy idea, but it’s certainly true in some cases. It’s a long story, and certainly recommend my book as one available account to read.
So… enough questions for now. Here’s a story on cocaine from my book you might enjoy:
From The Cult of Pharmacology
On February 29, 1996, retired Army general Barry McCaffrey was sworn in as President Clinton’s new director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy. He would stay at the post longer than any of his predecessors, stepping down in January 2001 after five years of service. McCaffrey, a 29-year Army veteran when appointed as director, had received two Distinguished Service Crosses, a Bronze Star, and three Purple Hearts during his earlier military career. He had served as a combat soldier in Vietnam, as well as the commander of the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division during Desert Storm. McCaffrey was an obvious choice to be the nation’s fourth drug czar, having also served as the Commander-in-Chief of the US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) from February 1994 to February 1996. This made him responsible for overseeing counter-drug operations in Central and South American countries, familiarizing him with the drug trade in Central and South America.
As drug czar, McCaffrey made some of his own appointments, including the choice of Colonel James Hiett as head of the US Army’s expanding anti-drug control operations in Columbia. Like McCaffrey, Hiett had served a tour of duty in SOUTHCOM. It was in the summer of 1998, after Hiett’s SOUTHCOM assignment and while stationed at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina, that the Colonel was awarded the coveted anti-drug position. The appointment sent him southward again, this time to the US Embassy in Bogotá. Hiett’s promotion to the embassy made him the top military official in charge of “counternarcotics” operations in Columbia. Commanding a unit of 200 Army troops, the Colonel’s top responsibility was to train and assist the Colombian Army in mobilizing operations against the indigenous cocaine trade, as well as the growing heroin trade. Between eighty and ninety percent of the cocaine consumed in the US at the time was either produced and/or distributed in Columbia, as well as some 60 percent of the heroin.
Colonel Hiett remained at his post in Bogotá for only one year however before being returned stateside, this time to sit idle at a desk at Ft. Monroe, Virginia. Why the sudden career-halting reassignment? The reason was neither his performance as a military officer – Hiett’s twenty-four year record was spotless – nor his behavior off duty. The reason was his wife. As Mike Wallace would later remark in an episode of 60 Minutes, “In Colombia, the wife of America’s top military drug-fighter was herself a drug smuggler.”
It was a few years before the Colonel’s assignment to Columbia, when the Hietts were still at Ft. Bragg, that both he and the US Army first became aware of Laurie Anne Hiett’s drug problem. The problem involved the same white powdery substance that had for more than twenty years financed, via the demand of American illegal drug market, a brutal civil war in Columbia, and the same substance that had brought Colonel Hiett to Columbia: cocaine.
James Hiett met the 12-year younger Laurie when serving in the Canal Zone in Panama. Living with her mother, a Panamanian, and her father, an American engineer, Laurie was employed at SOUTHCOM as a secretary. During the time when Jim and Laurie met – and then married a year or so later, in 1989 – Laurie says she had recreated with cocaine but not to excess. It was the cloistered life of an Army wife that brought her drug habits to the fore, she later admitted, blurring out most everything else. Not unlike the domestic housewives of the ‘60s and ‘70s, who took the edge off their staid lives with daily doses of barbiturates (Seconal) or benzodiazepines (Valium), Laurie Hiett developed her own domestic drug habit, albeit a more perilous one for her husband, the Army, and America’s drug war.
Laurie Hiett first received treatment for a cocaine problem in the mid-1990s at the Army hospital in Ft. Bragg, followed by a brief stay in a private drug rehab center. Of all this her husband was fully aware, as was the Army and drug czar McCaffrey when Colonel Hiett was appointed to the Bogotá position. What the Colonel also knew was that his wife had strayed back into her drug lifestyle well before their departure to Columbia. Drug treatment had kept her clean for only a few months. She was teaching Spanish in a local high school, where fellow teachers later reported knowing of her drug habits. According to one drug-using friend, these habits sometimes included lunches that began with marijuana and rum-and-Cokes and ended with amphetamines or cocaine. When Laurie told a friend about her husband’s promotion, and that she would be moving to Bogotá, the friend’s first thought was, “Oh wow, that’s where cocaine comes from. This ain’t gonna be good.”
By age 36, Laurie was a compulsive drug user. In one instance, which took place only four months before the Colonel’s Columbia promotion, she snorted a line of cocaine in front of him. His response was to walk out of the room in silence. The Colonel was in denial of his wife’s habit, enforcing a familiar military policy of do not ask, do not tell. So was the Army. It was not long after the Hietts were transplanted to Bogotá that drug czar McCaffrey reported to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations that the members of a new Columbian antidrug battalion… “have been carefully selected, fully vetted, and are being trained and equipped with U.S. support.” What he failed to mention was that this was not exactly true for the chief US military officer advising the battalion, Colonel Hiett.
Not long after the Colonel’s arrival in Columbia did the actions of his wife appear to confirm the stereotype that drug availability leads inevitably to drug problems. In fact, Laurie’s lifestyle in Columbia was in fact anything but the norm. Attracted to the diplomatic life when viewed from afar, she was in reality a rather unsuitable candidate for the straight-and-narrow world inhabited by the spouses of diplomats. Others described the Colonel’s wife at the time as a young, giggly, out-of-control party girl. Like the teachers at the school where she taught in Fayetteville, embassy officials, diplomats, spouses of diplomats, and business associates had little trouble remembering her comportment at the time, and few were surprised by the international scandal that followed.
Trying to live a life in Bogotá, with her leopard skin blouses, miniskirts, and casual references to cocaine, Laurie quickly found herself excluded from the diplomatic soirees attended by her husband, and purged from the daily social functions of the wives’ club. Shunned from the diplomatic social scene, she turned to her friendly Columbian driver Jorge Ayala. Obliging her, he took her away from the high-security embassy compound, across its encircling moat, and into the Bogotá night.
Laurie Hiett’s forays into Bogotá’s nightclub scene included visits to the infamous La Zona Rosa, a district filled with casinos, clubs, and cocaine. It was there that she first asked her driver whether he could score some cocaine for her. When he returned with a one-pound brick of high-grade cocaine, Laurie was amazed. Expecting to pay her usual $100 for a single gram, she ended up paying only $1,000, for 500 grams – a mere $2 a gram. Reflecting on the cocaine binge that followed, which began only minutes later with her snorting a few lines in the embassy bathroom, she remembers thinking… “‘Oh my God, I’m so wired’... It was this beautiful thing, you know?”
Beyond La Zona Rosa, and with cocaine back in her life in a big way, the Colonel’s wife also began venturing into other high-risk environs. She is said to have even occasioned an underground nightclub district where a US DEA agent was shot a year earlier. While her husband was off waging America’s drug war in the Andean mountains, which was most of the time, Laurie also indulged in weekend drug binges at her favorite Andean resort – a drug haven that could only be accessed via a mountain road known for its frequency of guerrilla kidnappings. The Colonel’s wife had unwittingly stumbled into a world that placed essentially no financial limits on cocaine consumption, a situation that, in the case of the Hiett’s, would end badly for everyone.
Laurie Hiett’s coke habit was an embarrassment, but one that like the other nefarious ongoing said to occur regularly in the US embassy in Bogotá, might have been kept short of a public scandal. When Laurie the habitual drug user became Laurie the drug trafficker, however, the stage was set for a personal tragedy – the Hietts had two young boys – as well as what could have easily become a public relations disaster for America’s international drug war. As it turned out, most Americans would not hear the news until months after it was initially reported in the New York City weekly, the Village Voice , and well after the multi-billion dollar militarization of America’s drug war in Columbia, known as “Plan Columbia,” had been “debated” and approved on Capital Hill.
The three-month investigation into Laurie Hiett’s drug trafficking began on May 24, 1999, when a drug dog showed interest in a parcel sent to Miami from the American embassy via diplomatic post. Noticing the dog’s interest in the package, a US-Customs agent decided to go against customary procedure for embassy parcels and open it. What was first believed be a shipment of pure cocaine – and what was declared on the package to be coffee, candy, and a t-shirt – actually turned out to be almost three pounds of high-grade heroin. Conspiring with her driver and his friend in New York, Laurie had put her faith in the rule that Customs agents do not inspect diplomatic mail. What she and her colleagues failed to appreciate was that Custom’s drug dogs in Miami sometimes do.
As covered by Gabriella Gamini in the London Times, the discovery of the Colonel’s wife’s drug shipment came just days after Laurie’s husband, the Colonel, was nominated for a post that would involve him even deeper into the Andean drug war. The assignment, had it not been revoked, would have placed him in charge of US troops stationed at two new anti-drug bases located in Columbia’s southern jungles. One was established in the area of Tres Esquinas, an air base for counter-drug operations in the center of the coca-growing region; the other was set up in the area of Tolemaida. The Colonel could not keep cocaine out of his own home, but apparently the Army still thought he could keep it out of America.
After the May discovery by Custom’s officers of what was later found out to be Laurie Hiett’s seventh shipment of drugs to New York, an undercover agent delivered the intercepted package to its Queens address, followed by an arrest of one of Laurie’s partners, and soon thereafter her friend and driver in Bogotá. The Army Criminal Investigation Division (CID) then showed up to question the Colonel’s wife (albeit only after the Colonel was given advanced warning that his property would be searched). This led two months later to her voluntary arrest in Brooklyn, where the case was eventually heard in US federal court.
As court records later showed, Laurie Hiett made two trips to New York during her brief tenure as a drug trafficker, bringing a sum of about $40,000 in cash back to Columbia. This money she admitted giving to her husband. And in a move more surprising than anything Laurie herself did, the Colonel accepted the drug money, no questions asked. He then set out to launder it, or “dissipated” it, to use his word, which he did by paying off Laurie’s exorbitant shopping bills, and by placing small amounts of cash in various bank accounts. At one point during the ongoing investigation he met her in Florida with $11,000 of the cash still in hand.
A year after the initial discovery by Customs agents, Laurie Hiett pleaded guilty in US federal court to distributing cocaine. She received a five-year sentence, meaning she would be out in three. The sentence by federal judge Edward Korman was two years shy of what was actually required by federal sentencing guidelines, and while a punishing sentence in real terms, it is a much shorter sentence than typically received for a first-offense felony charge of this sort – the unsympathetic trafficker can receive 10 to 15 years imprisonment for such a first offense. In fact, the same federal judge handed down a longer sentence to the middleman in Laurie’s drug-dealing scheme, that is, her driver’s friend in New York.
The Colonel, meanwhile, had his hopes of light punishment – forced retirement from the Army, rather than felony charges of laundering drug money – dashed, if only somewhat. The Army CID initially cleared the Colonel of any wrongdoing. But pressure eventually mounted, and in the same courtroom in which his wife was sentenced to five years, the Colonel received a sentence of five months.
The Hiett affair was a bizarre scandal that threatened the American drug war, but it was not a surprising affair. Laurie Hiett was a party girl who liked shopping and taking drugs that she viewed as benign, someone who exploited an unlikely situation that was hardly of her own making. Her husband found himself in an absurd situation, meanwhile, but one that he could compartmentalize in much the same way as could the rest of America: when those involved in using and selling drugs are close to us, or have ties to the powers that be, they are treated in an understanding way; when they have no such status or access to power and privilege, like Laurie’s middleman in New York, they are made “examples of,” punished in the most draconian fashion. That the wife of America’s top military drug-fighter in Columbia could be a drug trafficker did not prove to America that its drug war was a hopeless debacle, or suggest that perhaps Columbia’s drug problems hail from America’s drug demand. Rather, these events, viewed through the prism of drugs as inherently good or evil, proved just the opposite: cocaine is so corrupting that it must be fought with even greater fury.