The term “war on drugs” was famously popularized by former US President Richard Nixon in a press conference given on 17 June 1971. On that day, he announced an “all-out global offensive” against “public enemy number one”: drug abuse. An offensive that was to focus on the repression of both the production and the consumption of psychoactive narcotics through ad hoc means and agencies operating both in the US and in various Latin American countries.
In his speech, Nixon promised unlimited funds but provided no timeline and no clear objective that once reached would mean that the war could end. The not-so-surprising result is that the war on drugs never did end: subsequent administrations inherited and reinforced expenditures on the war on drugs, and the term progressively came to encompass any repressive effort by State institutions at stopping the illegal drug trade anywhere in the world.
Fifty years later, we know that the war on drugs was a failure: trade volumes of illegal narcotics are at an all-time high, drug-related violence is persistently high, and the estimated number of illegal drug users remains above 340 million. A failure that the US spent over a trillion dollars on.
I thought about the war on drugs this week while reading about the latest developments in Ecuador, where a 34-year-old President who took office less than 3 months ago and who promised the violent repression of drug trafficking was now forced to declare a state of emergency after a cartel boss escaped prison stirring violence throughout the country.
I thought about the deceptiveness of the term. On one side, the term “war” implies an armed conflict between opposing sides who at least in theory have clear objectives in mind and who each believe there is such a thing as a victory. On the other, the declared enemy is not a country, an army, or a terrorist organization, but a commodity: it is not a “war on drug traffickers,” it is a “war on drugs.”
Not only is it a commodity, but it is an addictive one. That implies high levels of demand, which require adequate levels of supply. In other words, for as long as the demand exists, it does not matter how many Narcos bosses are killed, arrested, or extradited, how many tons of cocaine are seized, or how many drug processing labs are destroyed; someone somewhere will come up with a new setup to produce narcotics that will feed that demand. And when that is discovered and dismantled too, someone else will step up, and so on. As Don Winslow put it in his Cartel trilogy – perhaps the best work of fiction ever produced on the war on drugs in Mexico – “the so-called war on drugs is a revolving door – you take one guy out, someone grabs the empty chair at the end of the table. It will never change, as long as the appetite for drugs is there.”
Perhaps, then, the question is why is the appetite there? The answer, which is difficult to formulate, has deep sociological and anthropological ramifications. Yet, it is close to us: formulating an answer does not regard identifying some obscure drug processing lab in Colombia or the socio-economic context of Narcos operations in Ecuador and Mexico, but it regards examining ourselves, our societies: it is Western consumers from industrialized countries who often fund drug violence worldwide do not even know it.
Of course, that would be the tip of the iceberg, and the socio-economic and political specificities of countries where narcotics are produced are fundamental to understanding the context in which the debate is to be framed. But maybe, collectively reflecting on why the demand for psychoactive narcotics is increasing in our own neighborhoods is not a bad way to start considering the immense problem we are facing at the global level, Ecuador’s situation being just the latest symptom of a global disease that we often ignore.
In the same trilogy, Don Winslow at one point writes that “people don’t run the cartel; the cartel runs people.” In other words, we are all subject to the drug trade whether we know it or not. The question is: can we rebel against it?
Raised in Rome by Bosnian parents, I try to use writing as a tool to decipher the world around me and all its complexities by taking different perspectives into consideration. In Bocconi, I am studying Politics and Policy Analysis.
