The Stimulus of Prohibition: A Critical History of the Global Narcotics Trade

The current war on drugs being waged by the United States and United Nations rests upon a fundamental misunderstanding of the global nar­cotics traffic. In 1998, for example, the White House issued a National Drug Con­trol Strategy, proclaiming a 10-year program “to reduce illegal drug use and avail­ability 50 percent by the year 2007,” thereby achieving “the lowest recorded drug-use rate in American history.” To this end, the U.S. program plans to reduce foreign drug cultivation, shipments from source countries like Colombia, and smuggling in key transit zones. Although this strategy promises a balanced attack on both supply and demand, its ultimate success hinges upon the complete eradi­cation of the international supply of illicit drugs. “Eliminating the cultivation of il­licit coca and opium,” the document says in a revealing passage, “is the best ap­proach to combating cocaine and heroin availability in the U.S.” (U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy 1998: 1, 23, 28). Similarly, in 1997 the new head of the United Nations Drug Control Program, Dr. Pino Arlacchi, announced a 10-year program to eradicate all illicit opium and coca cultivation, starting in Afghanistan. Three years later, in the United Nation’s World Drug Report 2000, he defended prohibition’s feasibility by citing China as a case where “comprehensive narcotics control strategies . . . succeeded in eradicat­ing opium between 1949 and 1954”— ignoring the communist coercion that al­lowed such success. Arlacchi also called for an “end to the psychology of despair” that questions drug prohibition, and insisted that this policy can indeed produce “the eradication of coca and opium poppy production.” Turning the page, however, the reader will find a chart showing a sharp rise in world opium production from 500 tons in 1981 to 6,000 tons in 2000— a juxtaposition that seems to challenge Ar-lacchi’s faith in prohibition (Bonner 1997; Wren 1998a, 1998b; United Nations 2000d, 1–2, 24). Examined closely, the United States and United Nations are pur­suing a drug control strategy whose success requires not just the reduction but also the total eradication of illicit narcotics cultivation from the face of the globe. Like the White House, the United Nations Drug Control Program (UNDCP) re­mains deeply, almost theologically committed to the untested proposition that the prohibition of cultivation is an effective response to the problem of illicit drugs.