Drugs And Foreign Policy

A Critical Review

Raphael F. Perl

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429723308
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Controlling illegal trafficking in narcotics is a complex challenge. Dilemmas for policymakers abound. Despite new measures adopted by the international community that have led to tactical victories, the flow of illicit drugs into the United States continues largely unabated, and worldwide production of opium, marijuana, and coca continues to grow dramatically. In this timely work, specialists from government, academia, and the private sector debate recent U.S. foreign drug policy—its origins, its elements, its implementation, and its prospects for success. Serious conflicts between U.S. international narcotics policy and U.S. foreign policy contribute to the dilemmas inherent in curbing global drug trafficking: Interdicting drugs interrupts the free flow of goods, people, and wealth across international borders. International political and economic instabilities, especially political breakups and ethnic strife in former police states, complicate U.S. foreign drug policy. Because U.S. antidrug goals can bring political disruption and economic loss to countries where narcotics production is economically and socially entrenched, the United States must cooperate with an international antinarcotics coalition of producer, transit, and consumer nations, operating within the context of their perspectives and priorities while trying to achieve competing U.S. foreign policy goals.

1
The Global Drug Phenomenon: Lessons from History and Future Challenges

David F. Musto

Global efforts to curb illegal traffic in dangerous drugs are front-page news and televised features in most lands. Nations patrol their borders with ships and inspect visitors who are suspected of carrying contraband. The United States spends billions of dollars annually in an attempt to interdict opium and opiates from Asia and cocaine and marijuana from South and Latin America. Agreements between nations and overall supervision of control treaties by the United Nations are the subject of daily comment in newspapers. The crusade includes the efforts of thousands of government officials across the world.

The energy and money devoted for much of this century to combatting drug trafficking is impressive. Yet, from the Shanghai Opium Commission of 1909 to the Vienna Anti-Drug Trafficking Convention of 1988 those most concerned about drugs have complained about frustration in achieving international consensus against drug use. Americans have been particularly dismayed by the slow pace of other nations attaining the strict regulation and policing promoted by the United States. American attitudinal change, though, has not been particularly swift: both in the 1880s and the 1960s it has required decades to move from a broad toleration of drugs to later intolerant stands which are then firmly recommended to the rest of the world.

In 1906 the United States did set in motion the global anti-narcotic movement. In that year the United States extended invitations to a meeting in Shanghai that would consider ways to help China in its campaign against opium. Never before had the major powers been convened to consider the question of narcotics traffic. The United States was acting in a brief window of diplomatic opportunity between the end of the Russo-Japanese War in 1905 and the explosion of August 1914. During those few years, nothing totally obstructed discussion or even cooperation between major nations which had recently been at war and would soon, sadly, be caught up in the First World War. In addition, China and Britain had adopted new and energetic anti-narcotic policies that prepared the way for the American initiative. Finally, the push of American domestic antagonism toward opiates and cocaine, and the pull of needing a solution to the smuggling of opium into the newly acquired Philippines, created the impetus for convening the International Opium Commission at Shanghai.

The circumstances of an institution's creation can stamp the character of its actions far into the future and this is certainly the case with the international crusade against dangerous drugs. The multiple motivations of the United States for inviting other powers to convene in Shanghai—and of the nations that accepted—can be found again with variations and shifting emphases over a history of drug policy extending more than eight decades. Motivations ranged from furthering economic interests, to defacing the image of rivals, to promoting other national goals such as national security. Nations do, of course, wish to control drug use and curb domestic drug abuse for moral, public health and law enforcement reasons, but the simple desire to stop the flow of drugs has rarely stood alone as a motivating force, while the declaration of an unequivocal anti-drug stance has often screened contradictory actions.

Examining the context of the Shanghai Commission and focussing narrowly on the United States, we can see that the elements of American action were quite complex. The U.S. government decided in 1905 that opium use—which had been sanctioned in the Philippines by a Spanish opium monopoly prior to 1898—must stop except for strictly medicinal purposes. This chiefly meant an end to legal purchase of smoking opium. Yet to stop smuggling the United States had merely one ship assigned to patrol the enormous Philippine archipelago. International control of opium would be needed to solve this smuggling problem.

In 1906 the Chinese Empire instituted its own attack on opium smoking and other forms of consumption. The stern methods indicated an extremely dedicated onslaught. Also in 1906 the British Liberal Party gained control of Parliament. The Liberal Party had long opposed India's export of opium to China. Steps were taken by the British government to effect an end of the opium trade, but only with the assurance that China would not make up for the loss of Indian opium by increasing its own production.

Meanwhile, the United States was experiencing a growing domestic fear of drugs. The passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906 was just one expression of a new consciousness of drug dangers. Opiates and cocaine had their origin in other countries and therefore international control would greatly relieve America's own problem.

Other complicating factors were the desire of the United States to participate in large construction schemes, especially railway construction, in China; and the anger of Christian missionaries in China over the Western nations' complicity in opium trade.

Then, still in 1905, as a result of American mistreatment of Chinese nationals in the United States, merchants and consumers in China began a voluntary boycott of American goods. This alarmed American manufacturers and government and military action was threatened by the U.S. government.

When the United States convened the Shanghai Commission in February, 1909 to help China with its opium problem, all these concerns were present in one way or another. In addition, the United States embarrassed the nation's major trading rival in the area, Britain, by siding with China in an effort to end the Indo-Chinese opium trade.

Other nations were not unaware of Americans' multiple motives cloaked under a simple moral message. Irritation over the U.S. stance with its overtones of highmindedness and superior virtue was intensified by the expectation that while the great burden of the international control effort would be borne by other nations, the United States would be the beneficiary.

During those few productive years before World War One the United States challenged the world with the imperative that no drugs should be used except for medical purposes. Americans, however, had not always felt this way. Until about the mid-19th century, opium and morphine were seen more benignly, and when cocaine was introduced to the United States in 1884 the drug was hailed as a safe and powerful tonic. But as the American people grew more intolerant not only of alcohol (a movement that would lead in 1920 to total prohibition) but also more fearful of opiate addiction and cocaine, the national consensus turned around and opposed non-medical use of these substances.

Debate over alcohol continued right up the to ratification of the 18th Amendment to the Constitution, but opiate and cocaine control elicited little opposition in the decade prior to American involvement in the Great War. Thus, when U.S. delegates advocated a policy of strict opposition to any non-medical use of these drugs, not only were they comfortable with their position, they also believed it to be a global principle transcending regional and cultural differences. If the people of some regions permitted opium smoking as a harmless practice or not worth attacking or if Andean natives had been chewing coca leaves for millennia, those people were in error and should abstain.

For nations who disagreed or fell short, this rigid standard presented problems of appearance and compliance. Change came slowly. By the 1920s the United States was extremely impatient with those countries that would not take quick and direct action to root out smoking opium or control the production of raw materials in their lands. The refusal of more developed nations to stop the manufacture of heroin also angered American officials. In 1925 the United States walked out of the Second Geneva Opium Conference and withdrew from almost any cooperation with the League of Nations which then administered the Hague Opium Convention.

This volte-face was in keeping with Americans' great distrust of foreign nations in the years after World War One. The narcotics policy of the United States paralleled other more dominant themes in American foreign policy. Several elements shaping the pre-war understanding of the drug problem now changed. The United States no longer saw itself as having an inordinate appetite for drugs; rather, other nations allowed—perhaps, encouraged—their people to send drugs to undermine the United States. The American appetite for drugs was quite normal, possibly, better than normal. Other nations wanted to keep their drug production for the revenue or because they did not see the ethical issues involved.

The disengagement of the United States from the crusade it had started and promoted with such moral fervor detracted from any global plan to curb production, manufacture and consumption. More importantly, the civil war in China, which had begun in 1911 and soon led to the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty, fragmented one of the world's largest producers and consumers of opium. A central Chinese government did not recover control until the 1950s.

World War Two totally distracted the combatants from the narcotics issue. Then the war's conclusion in 1945 was quickly followed by new alignments of former enemies and allies splitting into two armed camps. During this "Cold War," which lasted until the early 1990s, great power rivalry dominated the narcotics issue. One striking example of this powerful influence is the question of opium production and heroin manufacture in the People's Republic of China (PRC).

In the early 1950s the United States accused the PRC of exporting heroin to obtain cash and undermine its enemies. The Soviet Union denounced this slander against the Chinese people. But when a split occurred between the USSR and the PRC in the 1960s, the Soviet Union began a campaign against the "Maoists" who, it claimed, were doing just what the United States had claimed. The United States, however, now defended the PRC and asserted the Soviets were slandering the Chinese people. Clearly, the chief factor in this prolonged international debate was not the "facts" of the case, but Cold War maneuvers between the two superpowers.

Eight decades of international crises have created complex issues. Necessarily basing control on sovereign nations has also meant that those sovereign nations can dissemble, postpone and ignore pleas for effective control. Then, also, major players in the drug field have been preoccupied with worries much greater than that of narcotics. The lack of confident statistical reports and the ingenuity of smugglers have further hindered evaluation of drug control policies.

Policymakers also face the difficult question of what is effective treatment for drug abuse. Treatment programs report varying degrees of success, but there is no treatment that has the success of penicillin against pneumonia. Treatments also have their vogue at one time or another. Acupuncture, for example, has had a vogue at times as a remedy for addiction, but has been dismissed at other times as an ineffective superstition.

Framing a policy for the globe is particularly difficult if the goal is imposition of a single standard. The American confidence in a strict anti-drug position meets the reality of countries in different stages of development and also varying cultural attitudes toward the use of drugs including alcohol. Small countries may lack resources to mount a vigorous anti-drug enforcement campaign or may feel the need to profit from laundering drug money. How these complexities can be taken into account and yet allow formulation of a comprehensive and effective anti-drug policy is a knot that has yet to be fully unravelled.

Internationally we are witnessing trends which exert strong influence on an attempt to achieve a global consensus on international drug control policy. Of central importance is the resurgence of nationalism as in the former Yugoslavia and the former Soviet Union. But we also see large movements of consolidation aiming to erase national boundaries, boundaries that earlier in this century appeared unmovable. The consolidation of Europe under the European Economic Community may be considered part of this lifting of ancient boundaries and an assumption of much broader geographical responsibilities. The North American Free Trade Agreement may be cited as another example.

Beyond voluntary movements to remove or reduce national borders, we may be entering a period of unprecedented international coalition-building and co-operation. We now hear of a "right to intervene" in sovereign nations under certain "humanitarian" circumstances. Sending troops to Somalia and the Gulf region and protecting the Kurds in Northern Iraq represent responses by the United Nations to moral and economic issues considered serious enough to justify military operations. This new role for the UN—one envisioned for the League of Nations but unfulfilled—represents a transnational, global response that is unusual. Is it possible that the narcotics problem, quintessentially an international problem of supply, demand and money laundering, will rise to the level which will elicit from the UN Security Council a "right to intervene"?

The fact that all five permanent members of the Security Council are open in their admission of domestic narcotic problems and frustrated by the inability of individual states to control their borders and narcotraffickers is an ominous sign portending concerted action that will be unprecedented in the nearly century-long struggle against drugs. Should, however, such unprecedented action be taken by the UN or regional coalitions the danger exists that other motives may animate intervention; just as the anti-narcotic efforts in the past have been multi-determined.

The window of opportunity does not assure reasonable cooperation; it only makes it possible. People alive today grew up in a world in which global cooperation against narcotics was always blocked by one or another massive obstacle. This circumstance may constrain our thinking and hobble policy by causing us to overlook new opportunities. Recent events suggest that this rare moment may be seized to revitalize the global antidrug campaign—or may be merely passed over with attention directed elsewhere.

Copyright © 1993 David F. Musto. Reprinted here with his permission. All rights reserved. No portion of this chapter may be reprinted without permission of the author.

2
U.S. Narcotics Foreign Policy in the Twentieth Century: An Analytical Overview

William O. Walker III

By early 1992 President George Bush and Secretary of State James A. Baker III had brought a semblance of order to U.S. drug policy. The White House had effectively defused drug control as the volatile political issue that it had been since perhaps 1969. More than any other administration since the inception of the world antidrug movement more than eighty years previous, the Bush administration endeavored to work closely with nations that produce and transship drugs. Whether bilaterally, regionally, or internationally, it sought to promote drug control in ways that in part broke with past practice. A recognition of the mutuality of the threat from drugs in the Western Hemisphere informed drug foreign policy since September 1989 when the Andean Strategy was announced. Success in the current phase of the war against drugs has remained limited, however, which ultimately brings into question the basic assumptions behind U.S. policy. Nevertheless, what the administration attempted to accomplish together with other nations had some historical precedent. What was different this time, though, was the way in which it pursued its goals. Bush, Baker, and others in Washington concerned with drug policy realized at the least that the United States alone could not effectively control the international flow of illicit drugs.

This essay examines how U.S. drug policy has evolved since the early years of the world antinarcotics movement. In brief, drug foreign policy has resulted from deliberations at both the national and international levels and has usually demonstrated little concern for existing conditions in producer states. In theory, that drawback is currently less true than ever before; in practice, awareness of the obstacles to control at the source is not quite so apparent.

As we learn more about the development of drug policy, it becomes increasingly appropriate to think of it in terms familiar to scholars, foreign policy analysts, and policymakers as well. That is, there exists something of a grand strategy; the point of U.S. drug policy has been to reduce the global flow of illegal opiates, cocaine, and marijuana. This supply-side approach to drugs has as its ultimate goal the maintenance of an antidrug regime, the contours of which have historically been set by the United States. Success in this endeavor means control at the source, that is, a dramatic lessening of the production of raw drug materials. Despite the nearly complete failure to reach this primary objective at any time in the course of the antidrug effort, no alternative strategy has been articulated that will conceivably replace the supply-side approach in the foreseeable future. Such has been the practical effect of U.S. influence over the movement.

Along with control at the source, U.S. officials pursued the interdiction of drugs in transit as a primary strategy Yet as early as the mid...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 The Global Drug Phenomenon: Lessons from History and Future Challenges
• 2 U.S. Narcotics Foreign Policy in the Twentieth Century: An Analytical Overview
• 3 U.S. Foreign Policy and International Narcotics Control: Challenges and Opportunities in the 1990s and Beyond
• 4 International Drug Policy and the U.S. Congress
• 5 The Role of Law Enforcement
• 6 The Role of the Military
• 7 The Role of Economic Development: Policy Options for Increased Peasant Participation in Peru and Bolivia
• 8 World-Wide and Regional Anti-Drug Programs
• 9 Drugs in Post-Communist Societies
• 10 The Limits and Consequences of U.S. Foreign Drug Control Efforts
• About the Contributors
• About the Book