Yeah, this. Legalize cocaine. Won’t end all problems but will ameliorate many of them and worsen only a few.
Why should the people of Colombia stop growing coca? Why should the people of the USA (and indeed the rest of the civilized, drug taking world) stop using cocaine?
If Colombia bought up all the cocaine being produced, wouldn’t that drive up the price of cocaine on the black market, causing Colombia to raise the price it pays for the paste? Wouldn’t it very quickly be impossible for Colombia to be able to afford to keep buying the cocaine paste?
There already are US foreign aid projects to help communities impacted by coca eradication. I wrote a proposal for one in Peru this year, mostly they focus on conducting market research to help communities develop realistic economic development plans for life after coca eradication operations. These programs are labor intensive and require detailed work specific to each community. You also have to figure out how to reintegrate the former narco traffickers and their enforcers, or else you have roving bands of armed men with no source of income. The intervention in an indigenous community, for example, will look very different than an intervention in a more urban community with access to education opportunities and transit hubs.
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It’s not the vast majority. In some fairly recent years Colombia wasn’t even No. 1, Peru was. And depending whether you count area of coca leaf production (which is more relevant to how many farmers) or processed cocaine production Colombia hasn’t as clearly regained the No .1 slot.
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And Colombia has recently regained the No. 1 slot in the face of a big reduction in eradication efforts there.
This isn’t to nitpick, it’s a big problem with the whole premise. Colombia isn’t the only place you can grow it, though it’s best grown there or the other Andean countries. If you subsidize some farmers not to grow it, or to grow it for govts to buy and burn, the unfilled end-user demand will just result in other farmers somewhere else (elsewhere in Colombia, elsewhere in the region, some other more or less equivalent drug produced somewhere else in the world) growing it for sale into the illegal pipeline.
There’s a natural tendency for some people to strictly prefer ‘carrot’ to ‘stick’ solutions, seems more sophisticated and nice. But you probably need both, as well as first of all lowering expectations of what you can really achieve. Separately you can debate whether there should be any effort whatsoever to interfere with the production and sale of recreational drugs of any kind. But there tends to be a lot of arguing over straw men. Just because you can’t totally eradicate something doesn’t mean it’s a waste to spend anything to keep it under control. Or it might be a waste, depends on the details. ‘Here’s the solution’ implies a mindset of unrealistic expectations IMO.
This IS a nitpick - Cocaine isn’t grown, its manufactured. Coca is grown. It wouldn’t be The Dope without some hairsplitting.
Thanks for all of the great responses, guys. I haven’t been posting much because I don’t have much to disagree with your points on. This might help Colombia, but it won’t stop the cartels nor will it stop the flow of drugs into the United States. I still think it would be an integral part of a multi-pronged attack on the cartels – attack their supply, attack their demand (by ending the War on Drugs, sticking non-violent drug offenders in rehab instead of prison, and helping them rebuild their lives once they’re clean with government programs) and attack them directly all at once. Unfortunately, that’s not a solution that US politicians of either party are truly looking for. They’d rather be seen as “tough on crime”.
I don’t know how old the OP is or how much cartel violence he has heard about. They. Do. Not. Fuck. Around. Anyone who sold to the government and grew banana plants would have his wife raped by the entire local cartel in the public square and hung upside down and split with a machete. Their kids would be tied to the banana trees and set afire. The farmer would get curb stomped and given a Colombian necktie. And they know it.
Dennis
I’ve read a lot about cartel violence, but I’ve also read, in the time since I posted this OP, that this IS being tried in Colombia, though on a smaller scale than I’d like (and the program is in danger – the new right-wing leadership of Colombia has stated their intent to end the program). While I don’t doubt that the cartels are exactly evil and depraved enough to do this, it doesn’t seem like they actually are, at least not in Colombia.
Where the cartels are most brutal seems to be Mexico, where people die at a truly astounding rate. Maybe we should pay more attention to what’s happening a few miles south of our border before we worry so much about the Middle East.
Because those of us in the US are unwilling to directly address the issue and admit the war on drugs was a failure but still demand through threats or incentives that other countries solve our internal problems what would they do?
We chose to destabilize the region for years in an active fight against Communism and also directly funded pursuits of the impossible. Of course these countries will try anything to help reduce the pain they feel due to this trade. Often it has resulted in extreme acts of inhumanity.
You’re absolutely right, what’s going on in Central and South America is definitely a problem that the US contributed heavily to. It would be nice to see our government do something to address the issue, especially since many of our own problems are closely linked to these issues (drugs, immigration, human trafficking…) but of course, our politicians would never do that. Or worse, they would do something, and make a bad situation worse. See also: the Middle East.
The American populace has been ignoring it. The governments of Mexico and the US have not been. The Merida Initiative was begun in 2006 as a bilateral attempt to address the problem. That initiative is ongoing.
A Congression Research Service paper from last summer looks at the program
U.S. - Mexican Security Cooperation: The Mérida Initiative and Beyond
Let me qualify that then by saying that the US government effectively ignores the problem. According your link, they spent less then 2 billion dollars on the program, in total, since 2007 when it was started. Meanwhile, according to the link below, the cartels at the time got upwards of 20 billion dollars from the United States EACH YEAR.
Meanwhile, we spend over twice that each year on fighting the War on Drugs here at home, by filling up our prisons with non-violent drug offenders, letting them mix with the people who are most likely to turn them from non violent criminals into violent ones. How much could the Merida Initiative accomplish with a budget like that?