The Drug War Is Corrupt And Criminogenic, Part 3

Let me count the ways

Jaime Malamud-Goti, former Solicitor General of Argentina, recounting a story from his travels in Bolivia in the late 1980s:

…the driver…turns around to you and explains that the very next day high officials from the United States, perhaps even senators, will visit the barracks. The commander of the Leopardos [a US-trained Bolivian special army detachment. ed.], the antidrug police, is planning to honor his guests with one of his favorite demonstrations, burning coca paste. With an air of confidentiality, the driver goes on to explain that several times a year [a Bolivian prison warden] brings in his men to build a pile of mud with firewood under it. An hour later, when the prisoners have left, two Leopardos will cover the mud with a thin layer of gray mush, coca paste…two days later you read in a Cochabamba news paper that U.S. officials burned a large amount of cocaine after eating lunch at the UMOPAR headquarters in Chimore. There is a photograph in the La Paz newspaper Ultima Hora showing Congressmen Bob Wise and La McCandless setting fire to “1,633 kilos of cocaine sulphate. You know it is mostly mud, but for unskilled witnesses, the smell of the burning mud seems like coca because it has been “seasoned” for special guests. You have been introduced to the war on drugs in Bolivia…

In some ways, things haven’t changed that much. From Last Call: The Rise And Fall of Prohibition, by Daniel Okrent: “Almost from the beginning, Prohibition was a practical failure. But even sporadic effort produced good visuals.”