Our Right to Poison: Lessons from the Failed War on Drugs
By Jochen-Martin Gutsch and Juan Moreno
Scott Dalton/ Agentur Focus/ DER SPIEGEL
ANZEIGE
Three guards are standing next to him. He is the only prisoner in the
giant building. The watchtower, the security door systems, the
surveillance cameras -- it's all for him. The warden of the Cómbita
maximum-security prison, a three-hour drive northeast of the Colombian
capital Bogotá, has given Popeye one hour to tell his story.
The experience is like opening a door into hell.
Popeye was the right-hand man of Pablo Escobar, head of Colombia's
Medellín cartel. Until his death in 1993, Escobar was the most powerful
drug lord in the world. He industrialized cocaine production, controlled
80 percent of the global cocaine trade and became one of the richest
people on the planet. The cartel ordered the killings of 30 judges,
about 450 police officers and many more civilians. As Escobar's head of
security, Popeye was an expert at kidnapping, torture and murder.
Velásquez acquired the nickname Popeye while working as a cabin boy
in the Colombian navy. He kidnapped Andrés Pastrana, the then-candidate
for mayor of Bogotá and later president. He obtained the weapon that was
used to fatally shoot Colombian presidential candidate Luis Carlos
Galán in 1989. He was involved in a bombing attack that was intended to
kill former Colombian President César Gaviria. Popeye, acting on the
orders of Escobar, El Patrón, even had his beauty-queen girlfriend Wendy
murdered.
"I've killed about 250 people, and I cut many of them into pieces.
But I don't know exactly how many," Popeye says. "Only psychopaths count
their kills."
Popeye is a pale, 50-year-old man with a shrill voice -- a psychopath who doesn't count his kills.
The longer Popeye talks -- about his murders, the drug war and the
havoc he and Escobar wreaked and that is currently being repeated in
Mexico -- the less important my prepared questions about this war
become. I realize that I might as well throw away my notepad, because it
all boils down to one question: How can we stop people like you,
Popeye?
He pauses for a moment before saying: "People like me can't be
stopped. It's a war. They lose men, and we lose men. They lose their
scruples, and we never had any. In the end, you'll even blow up an
aircraft because you believe the Colombian president is on board. I
don't know what you have to do. Maybe sell cocaine in pharmacies. I've
been in prison for 20 years, but you will never win this war when there
is so much money to me made. Never."
I'm sitting face to face with a killer: Popeye, an evil product of hell. And I'm afraid that the killer could be right.
The drug war is the longest war in recent history, underway for more
than 40 years. It is a never-ending struggle against a $500 billion
(€378 billion) industry.
A Global War on Drugs
On July 17, 1971, then-US President Richard Nixon announced:
"America's public enemy No. 1 is drug abuse." A new archenemy had been
born: drugs. It was the opening salvo in the "war on drugs."
To this day, the war on drugs is being waged against anyone who comes
into contact with cocaine, marijuana or other illegal drugs. It is
being fought against coca farmers in Colombia, poppy growers in
Afghanistan and drug mules who smuggle drugs by the kilogram (2.2
pounds), sometimes concealed in their stomachs. It is being fought
against crystal meth labs in Eastern Europe, kids addicted to crack
cocaine in Los Angeles and people who are caught with a gram of
marijuana in their pockets, just as it is being fought against the drug
cartels in Mexico and killers like Popeye. There is almost no place on
earth today where the war is not being waged. Indeed, the war on drugs
is as global as McDonald's.
In 2010, about 200 million people took illegal drugs. The numbers
have remained relatively constant for years, as has the estimated annual
volume of drugs produced worldwide: 40,000 tons of marijuana, 800 tons
of cocaine and 500 tons of heroin. What has increased, however, is the
cost of this endless war.
In the early 1970s, the Nixon administration pumped about $100
million into drug control. Today, under President Barack Obama, that
figure is $15 billion -- more than 30 times as much when adjusted for
inflation. There is even a rough estimate of the direct and indirect
costs of the 40-plus years of the drug war: $1 trillion in the United
States alone.
In Mexico, some 60,000 people have died in the drug war in the last
six years. US prisons are full of marijuana smokers, the Taliban in
Afghanistan still use drug money to pay for their weapons, and experts
say China is the drug country of the future.
Is Legalization the Answer?
One of the best ways to understand why, after more than 40 years,
this is still an unwinnable war is to track one of the invincible
enemies.
Take cocaine, for example. The story begins with a coca farmer in the
Colombian jungle, then leads to smugglers on the Caribbean island of
Aruba, past soldiers and drug cops, across the Atlantic to Europe in a
ship's hold, then to Berlin, where the drugs end up in the brains of
those whose demand is constantly refueling the business: we, the
consumers.
It's also helpful to examine an idea that could change the world, an
idea being contemplated by presidents, turned over in the minds of
influential politicians and studied in a New York office. The idea is
the regulated legalization of drugs.After decades of the war on drugs, the desire for an alternative is greater than ever. The eternal front in the war is crumbling.
When about 30 national leaders met in Cartagena, Colombia, in April 2012 for the Summit of the Americas, there was only big, behind-the-scenes topic: a new drug policy. Suddenly Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos was saying: "If the world decides to legalize (drugs) and thinks that that is how we reduce violence and crime, I could go along with that."
General Otto Pérez Molina, president of Guatemala, wrote: "Consumption and production should be legalized but within certain limits and conditions."
Uruguayan President José Mujica said: "What scares me is drug trafficking, not drugs".
Vicente Fox, the president of Mexico from 2000 to 2006, wanted to wage the "mother of all wars" against organized crime, sending the Mexican army into the drug war. Today, Fox says that the war was a "total failure."
The possession of small amounts of marijuana is no longer a crime in Portugal. After studying drug policy in Great Britain, an independent commission concluded that a policy of stiff penalties is just as costly as it is ineffective. Although the report does not advocate the legalization of drugs, it does call for a rethinking of drug policy. Too rarely "do lawmakers admit (that) not all drug use creates problems," the report's authors write. They argue that the possession of smaller amounts should no longer be a punishable offense and that cannabis cultivation by ordinary consumers should be decriminalized and perhaps even legalized.
Drug Anxiety in Germany
A new way of thinking is beginning to take root: If a war can't be
won, and if the enemy has remained invincible for 40 years, why not take
the peaceful approach?
German officials take a decidedly cool stance toward these
developments. No top politician with a major German party is about to
call for a new drug policy or even the legalization of marijuana. Drugs
are not a winning issue, because it's too easy to get burned.
Martin Lindner, the deputy head of the pro-business Free Democrats in
the Bundestag, Germany's parliament, recently triggered a scandal when
he lit up a joint on a talk show. The headline of a recent cover story in the Berliner Kurier daily newspaper read: "Has Martin Lindner gone off the deep end?"
This period shaped German drug policy, and it also affected how Germans feel about drugs: anxious, for the most part.
For many people, legalization sounds like an invitation to more drug
use and addiction as well as a capitulating country that no longer
performs its protective function
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