The Drug Wars
Terms:
Realism; human security
The First Opium War
The Second Opium War
Lin Zexu
Coca
Cocaine
Crack cocaine
basuco
The Mexican drug war, 2006-present
Lecture Outline:
Realism versus human security
The Opium Wars
Early Drug Policy
Coca
Cocaine
Drugs in South America
The Mexican Drug War
Legalization
Discussion
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Last spring I taught a course on the Global Drug trade. For some reason, cocaine is the drug which draws the most media attention, whether it be in television series such as Narcos, or in novels. Certainly in the United States people think of Latin America when they think of the drug trade. But of course our current drug trade is heavily shaped by the opioid and heroin epidemic, which has its base in the golden triangle of Asia. Fentanyl receives a great deal of media coverage, and China may be the major supplier of this drug. While all of this may sound abstract, when my class covers the opioid epidemic each year the impact of opioids is all too clear, as my students relate histories of family loss and tragedy. The drugs that cause the most suffering -opioids and meth- seldom feature in television series. …
Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-H1216-0500-002 / CC-BY-SA [CC BY-SA 3.0 de (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.en)], via Wikimedia Commons
At the same time, Hitler himself turned to a quack doctor, who not only injected him with an odd array of hormonal and vitamin supplements, but also with an increasing panoply of hard drugs. The book is based on extensive archival research, which allows Ohler to describe the bewildering array of Hitler’s medications. The book brilliantly captures the toxic atmosphere of Hitler’s entourage, as their leader became increasingly isolated physically and psychologically.
Hitler’s physician, Dr. Theo Morell, was a fascinating figure, who used his ties to Hitler to build a pharmaceutical empire, which was based on organs from the slaughterhouses of conquered territories in the East. At a time when every transport was needed to carry ammunition and wounded soldiers, he finagled trucks and trains to carry organs from the Ukraine to his plant in what is now the Czech Republic. With time, as Hitler’s physical condition declined, his activities drew the attention of not only Hitler’s entourage but also doctors, who believed that Morell was threatening Hitler’s health. The ensuing clash ended in Morell’s victory, based on Hitler’s personal backing. …
Curious to read more about drugs in Mexico? You can also read this post. I also recommend this Propublica piece “How the U.S. Triggered a Massacre in Mexico” by Ginger Thompson, which covers this topic in much greater depth than my initial blog post.
Given the plethora of foreign policies issues that the United States faces, perhaps it’s unsurprising that the drug war in the Philippines does not receive more attention in the U.S. media. Still, there has been some remarkable accounts, perhaps none of which has been as insightful as Clare Baldwin and Andrew R.C. Marchall’s, “Davao Boys: How a secretive police squad racked up kills in Duterte’s drug war.” This detailed piece of investigative journalism examines one particular police unit at the heat of the extra-judicial killings of drug traffickers. I’ve done my own work on military terror in Brazil, and know how difficult it is to obtain such information, even in historical cases. To document killings on this scale while the violence is taking place requires bravery, dedication and skill. Highly recommended.
President Duterte came to power in June 2016 as a populist, with a long history of outrageous statements and extreme positions. Regarding drug users and traffickers, Duterte said that he would “slaughter them all.” Immediately after his inauguration thousands of people were killed by death squads, or were shot by police upon the mere suspicion of doing drugs. The President’s policy was initially popular, but over the last few months people have tired of the unending violence.
In the United States, one could argue that the War on Drugs really dates to 1973, when President Richard Nixon established the Drug Enforcement Agency. This approach conceived as drugs as a security threat to be dealt by strengthening the border, increasing the number of police, and using the U.S. armed forces and allied militaries to target drug traffickers. In 1999, the United States adopted Plan Colombia to fight both the drug cartels and guerrillas in Colombia. The U.S. gave over eight billion dollars to Colombia to expand its armed forces, purchase military equipment, carry out aerial spraying, and fight the cartels. Despite this substantial investment, the supply and price of cocaine in the United States did not decline, even after the death of Pablo Escobar, the leader of the Medellin cartel. The center of drug trafficking, however, did shift to Mexico. …
Ben Grenrock also has a recent article, “Colombia’s New Drug Problem” in Slate, which talks about the growing movement towards drug tourism in Medellin, Colombia. On the one hand, drug violence has plummeted in the city. Colombia, which endured horrific violence in the early 1990s, has recently signed a peace agreement with the FARC guerrillas. Medellin is a beautiful city, which has enjoyed spectacular growth. But tourists have also begun to come to Medellin in large numbers, partly because they view it as a place to experiment with cocaine consumption. Of course, cocaine has always been available in Colombia. But now the scale of drug tourism has increased substantially, which has strengthened the drug gangs that control its distribution in the city. According to Grenrock, many people in Medellin look with disdain on these tourists. In the case of Medellin, cocaine is illegal, but readily accessible because there is little effective enforcement. As both articles describe, a commodity chain links drug consumers to real environmental and social problems.
Shawn Smallman, 2017
According to Colombians who were interviewed in the video, criminals can ask someone to smell the powder, and the drug is so potent that it will take effect when they sniff. The video contains a series of interviews, including a taxi driver who seems to know all too much about the drug, and some people who were victimized using it. Still, the stories were so extraordinary that I couldn’t help but wonder, could this possibly be true? Can victims truly lose their will, so that they will assist a robber to burglarize their home? Or is this partly folklore? Vice’s reporter Ryan Duffy did not appear to be someone with a deep knowledge of Colombia. Nonetheless, the interviews with authorities, including the police and a doctor, were very convincing. Nonetheless, I wondered how to judge where reality ended and folklore began. After all, this drug is used in Western medicine to treat some conditions such as motion sickness? Wouldn’t this effect be familiar from this usage? Or are there differences between scopolamine and the the drug variant used …
I’ve been teaching a course on the Global Drug Trade this year, and my class recently covered the opioid crisis, including the emerging drugs of fentanyl and carfentanyl. If you haven’t heard of these drugs before, you might want to read German Lopez’s Vox article “How an elephant tranquilizer became the latest deadly drug in the opioid epidemic.” While the epidemic exists in the United States, these drugs are causing havoc in British Columbia, Canada. What is distinct about these drugs is that they are not only dangerous to the user, but also first responders. The crisis has been so serious that it has caused people to rethink how we deal with illegal drugs in a profound manner.
In my class there was a great deal of discussion of whether the broader opioid epidemic is being covered differently in the media because many people using these drugs are middle class, white and older. They are also distinct, my students noted, in that most people who become addicted do so because they received a prescription for the drugs legally. There is no question but that major corporations have pushed these drugs, as this wonderful John Oliver piece describes. The epidemic has deepened, because when people have difficulty accessing legal opioids they have turned to heroin. …
