Today’s edition of the Australian academia-linked website The Conversation carries a 10,000 word
essay by Desmond Manderson, Professor in Law and the Humanities, and ARC Future
Fellow at the Australian National University, on the subject of why the asylum
seeker problem is like the drug problem – a thought which has often occurred to
me as my involvement in Australia21’s
roundtables on the drug problem made me more familiar with our disastrous approach
to that issue.
In his introductory paragraphs Professor Manderson says:
I began to write this essay
because I was so frustrated by the lack of clear information around asylum
seekers. I wanted to clarify as well as I could a debate I couldn’t make sense
of. But seeing the problem afresh, the hysteria that surrounds it suddenly
reminded me of a political debate from ten or twenty years ago.
The asylum problem now is like
the drug problem then. Debate is framed in a moral language that excites a
crisis completely unrelated to the dimensions of the problem. The asylum
seeker, like the drug addict, is depicted as a piteous victim who must be
locked up for their own good; the “trafficker” or “smuggler” is considered a
villain against whom no action is too harsh.
Policy settings in both cases
depend on a zero-tolerance approach built around hugely expensive law
enforcement strategies. The underlying assumption is that if only our laws are
severe enough, people’s behaviour will change. But the prohibition of drugs and
the prohibition of boats make the same mistake. Supply-side responses to
demand-side problems often fail to make real inroads into the underlying
problems.
Indeed, the case of drug policies
shows that sometimes harsh law enforcement does not merely fail to stop the
problem. It can actually make matters worse; much worse. Raising the stakes and
driving people underground creates more profit, causes more deaths, and leads
to more suffering. But rational arguments have little purchase in a climate
fashioned by false assumptions as to what law can achieve, and a wilful
blindness as to its unintended consequences.
In what follows, I explore the
issues around Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers by developing this
comparison with drug policy. My aim is not only to demonstrate that we have
been this way before, with disastrous results. What is especially interesting
about the drug debate is that, remarkably, something has changed in the past
ten years. The shift from zero-tolerance to harm-reduction strategies provides
us with a model for how to rethink a policy agenda, which is just making things
worse.
In a Friday 14 January post on Salon’s Friday 14 January edition (accessible here) Glenn Greenwald goes to the heart of the tension between certain self-proclaimed “centrist” views and the rule of law.
In it he castigates Benjamin Wittes of The Brookings Institution, and by implication Brookings itself, for a centrism which:
... is devoid of any coherent worldview and instead has one overarching purpose: to defend Beltway elite prerogatives and specifically the bipartisan orthodoxies of the National Security State.
The particular target of Greenwald’s concern is the defence by this “centrist” of the effective immunity from investigation which the Obama Administration has granted to former Bush Administration officials in relation to murder, torture and other acts of criminality.
Wittes claims that this is in accordance with a two-centuries-old tradition of incoming presidents not prosecuting outgoing ones. Greenwald cites no less a figure than George Washington to challenge this view:
George Washington vowed, in a December, 1795 letter, that there must never be immunity for wrongdoing by high government officials: "The executive branch of this government never has, nor will suffer, while I preside, any improper conduct of its officers to escape with impunity."
He goes on to examine the consequences of a system in which presidents and there retainers know that they will not be pursued for criminal acts perpetrated in the name of national security.
Greenwald’s concern’s resonate with concerns I expressed in May last year in We need to talk about Kevin, about Kevin Rudd’s lack of interest in finding out who knew what when about AWB’s $300 million of kickbacks to Saddam Hussein in violation of United Sanctions; his lack of interest in holding something like the UK’s Chilcot Inquiry to examine events leading up to Australia’s participation in the invasion of Iraq, and who knew what and when regarding the disgraceful treatment of Dr Mohammed Haneef.
I might have added the shocking case of Mamdouh Habib, arrested in Pakistan, flown to Baghram Air Base in Afghanistan, rendered to Egypt for months of interrogation under torture, and then sent to Guantánamo, allegedly with the involvement of Australian officials, a case well described by Sally Neighbour in The Weekend Australian, 15-16 January 2011 (see here) – a matter in which neither the Rudd nor Gillard Governments has displayed any interests until now. The emergence of new evidence has forced the Gillard Government’s hand and the matter is now to be investigated further.
All officials and military personnel of democratic countries need it to be clearly understood that no person is above the law, ever, and no-one can expected to be shielded from investigation when government changes hands when there are grounds to believe they have, or may have, acted outside the law.
The World Bank has recently released a report entitled Innocent Bystanders: Developing Countries and the War on Drugs.
In its emailed notice of publication the Bank says:
The drug policies of wealthy consuming countries emphasize criminalization, interdiction, and eradication. Such extreme responses to social challenges risk unintended, costly consequences. The evidence presented in this volume is that these consequences are high in the case of current drug policies, particularly for poor transit and producer countries. These costs include the deaths of thousands in the conflict between drug cartels and security forces, political instability, and the infiltration of criminal elements into governments, on the one hand; and increased narcotics use in countries that would not otherwise have been targeted by drug suppliers.
Despite such costs, extreme policies could be worthwhile if their benefits were significantly higher than those of more moderate, less costly policies. The authors review the evidence on the benefits of current policies and find that they are clouded in uncertainty:
- eradication appears to have no permanent effect on supply
- the evidence on criminalization does not exclude either the possibility that its effects on drug consumption are low, or that they are high.
Uncertainty over benefits and the high costs of current policies relative to alternatives justifies greater emphasis on lower cost policies and more conscientious and better-funded efforts to assess the benefits of all policies.
The report may be purchased from the World Bank website here.
A couple of weeks ago a friend and colleague sent me the link to this article by Johann Hari, Johann Hari: Accept the facts – and end this futile 'war on drugs', published in The Independent on 11 November 2009. It makes what to me is a compelling case for abandonment of the law enforcement approach to the drugs problem, and in so doing crystallised ideas that have been running around in my head for a long time.
Hari acknowledges that the proponents of the "war on drugs" are well-intentioned people who believe they are saving people from the nightmare of drug addiction and making the world safer. In arguing that their approach has failed he makes three main points:
- The drug war hands one of our biggest industries to armed criminal gangs, who unleash terrible violence across the country.
- Under prohibition, drug use becomes more hardcore.
- The drug war doesn't reduce drug use – but the alternatives can.
After outlining the benefits Portugal has experienced since it decriminalised the possession of all drugs on 1 July 2001, he continues:
So the drug war doesn't achieve its goal of reducing addiction. All it does achieve is horrific gang violence – and in some cases the cartels gut whole countries like Mexico and Afghanistan. It does unwittingly press people into using harder and more dangerous drugs. And it does waste tens of billions of dollars that could really reduce drug addiction, by spending it on treatment for addicts.
If you are still not convinced, consider the following paragraphs from Shanon O’Neil’s article The Real War in Mexico: How Democracy Can Defeat the Drug Cartels, published in Foreign Affairs, July/August 2009:
Brazen assassinations, kidnappings, and intimidation by drug lords conjure up images of Colombia in the early 1990s. Yet today it is Mexico that is engulfed by escalating violence. Over 10,000 drug-related killings have occurred since President Felipe Calderón took office in December 2006; in 2008 alone, there were over 6,000. Drug cartels have begun using guerrilla-style tactics: sending heavily armed battalions to attack police stations and assassinating police officers, government officials, and journalists. And they have also adopted innovative public relations strategies to recruit supporters and intimidate their enemies: displaying narcomantas -- banners hung by drug traffickers -- in public places and uploading videos of gruesome beheadings to YouTube.
...
From [their] increasingly sophisticated operational structure, Mexico's drug-trafficking organizations aggressively moved into the markets for heroin and methamphetamine in the United States, as well as the expanding European cocaine market. They extended their influence down the production chain into source countries such as Bolivia, Colombia, and Peru. They established beachheads in Central American and Caribbean nations -- which in many cases have much weaker institutions and democracies than Mexico -- where they worked their way into the countries' economic, social, and political fabric, to devastating effect. They widened and deepened their U.S. distribution route. In the words of a recent Justice Department report, Mexican drug cartels now represent the "biggest organized crime threat to the United States," with operations in some 230 U.S. cities. They also diversified their domestic operations, with participants expanding into kidnapping, extortion, contraband, and human smuggling.
... Estimates of illicit profits range widely, but most believe some $15 billion to $25 billion heads across the U.S. border into the hands of Mexico's drug cartels each year. This money buys guns, people, and power. Compiled from thousands of retail drug sales in hundreds of U.S. cities, much of this money is wired, carried, or transported to the U.S.-Mexican border and then simply driven south in bulk. Mexican criminal organizations then launder the funds by using seemingly legal business fronts, such as used-car lots, import-export businesses, or foreign exchange houses. Laundered money not used to fund criminal operations or pay off officials in Mexico is often sent back to the United States and saved in U.S. bank accounts.
...
The number of drug-related deaths in 2008 far surpassed those for any other year in Mexican history. Disputes between rival criminal organizations have led to open gun battles on major city streets, often in broad daylight. Death threats have forced dozens of law enforcement and government officials to resign. Extortion rings in many cities prey on businesses, forcing owners to pay to protect their operations and employees. The fear of kidnapping plagues the upper, middle, and working classes alike.
O’Neil is not arguing for drug legalisation, far from it, although he does acknowledge that reduced demand for drugs in the United States would lower the drug profits that corrupt officials, buy guns and threaten Mexico’s democracy. On this ground he argues for drug-treatment and drug-education programs and other measures to rehabilitate addicts and lessen drugs’ allure for those not yet hooked.
But while drug treatment, drug education and drug education are admirable elements of social policy, they have no hope if they are swimming against the tide of a policy approach which has been a demonstrable failure since prohibition of alcohol was introduced in the United States in the 1920s. O’Neil unwittingly acknowledges this in his concluding paragraph, which begins:
The best the United States and Mexico can hope for in terms of security is for organized crime in Mexico to become a persistent but manageable law enforcement problem, similar to illegal businesses in the United States...
Is that really the best we can hope for? Let’s stand back a bit and get a grip on what is happening here. There is such a demand for illicit drugs in the United States that the economic rents created by their illegality sets up a cash flow into Mexico which is on the same scale as the $25 billion remitted annually to family and friends in Mexico by Mexican and Mexican American populations living in the United States. It is more than double the $11 billion earned by Mexico’s tourism industry.
This illicit cash flow rather dwarfs the $5 million that the United States gives to Mexico in official development assistance (that is not a typo, it is million, not billion), and indeed the less than $40 million in security assistance that the U.S. was providing to its neighbour until last year.
United States security funding for Colombia is on a larger scale at $600 million, but this is just attacking an upstream component of the Mexican problem.
In short, the criminalisation of drug use creates massive crime, violence and corruption in the United States, and makes important neighbouring states all but ungovernable. There has to be a better way than this, and that better way is to recognise that the need to take drugs is a psychological problem, and addiction to drugs is a medical problem.
Note: Shannon O’Neil is Douglas Dillon Fellow for Latin America Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and Director of the CFR task force on U.S.-Latin American relations. His full article may be viewed here. To access it you will need to be a subscriber to Foreign Affairs or fill out a free one-time registration.
