The Drugs Wars
In the UK, the system is failing in a less dramatic way. Despite the millions (currently around £380m) spent on disrupting drugs supply lines, the retail price of cocaine continues to drop, and is now at almost half of 1990 levels. Cocaine use in Britain has doubled in the past decade (from 3% of 16-24 year olds in 1997, to 6% in 2006), and is now the highest in Europe. Seizure rates for cocaine are estimated to be around 9%; in order to put a major drug trafficker out of business, the seizure rate would have to be around 60%.
What’s more, as the Economist notes, one effect of supply-side seizures is to increase the impurity of drugs (which is one reason, along with upstream stockpiling and the willingness of lower-level dealers to absorb greater costs rather than pass on price increases to their customers, that the street prices of illegal drugs are so resistant to supply-side interventions). The impurities added to cocaine and heroin can be extremely harmful; benzocaine, often cut with cocaine, may pose greater health risks than cocaine. Not only is cocaine cheaper and more widely used than before, then, it may also be more dangerous.
In the light of the failings of the current enforcement systems, there are growing calls for a change of approach to the problems of drug misuse; for the problem to be framed in a different way. One of the most interesting passages in the Economist article on the Mexican drugs wars is a quote from Mexico’s Attorney-General, Eduardo Medina Mora; The aim, he says, is not to end drugs-trafficking, because that is unachievable. Rather, it is to take back from organised criminal groups the economic power and armament they’ve established in the past 20 years, to take away their capacity to undermine institutions.
After decades of attempting (and largely failing) to address the problem of drugs trafficking directly, Mexico now focuses on the constellation of problems surrounding this issue. Back in the UK, the Economist quotes a SOCA official who expresses some doubts over the utility of supply-side interventions; We may have to say at some stage that taking heavily adulterated cocaine is more physically harmful to the user than taking cocaine that’s less adulterated…We’ve got to keep asking the question. I’m aware that one day the health equation could one day say; Stop trying to stop cocaine coming in. More radically, last year Julian Critchley, the former Director of the UK Anti-Drug Co-Ordination Unit, wrote that he left this position because he believed that the illegality of drugs ‘created more problems that it solves’.
For the scope of Connecting the Dots, such cases of ‘cognitive dissonance’ are particularly interesting. Wicked problems are marked by deep disagreements as to what the problem is; and illegal drug use and control presents an extreme case of such disagreement, in which the very system used to manage the system is itself seen by some to be the problem. As our co-author Jake Chapman put it, ‘one person’s solution is another person’s disaster’. What do such profound disagreements over problem-definitions mean for the working of institutional systems? If individuals within the system hold the ‘dissonant’ belief that the system is worsening the problem, when and how does this lead to disruptions within the system? Given that many of these disagreements are intractable, how should they be accommodated? We hope to address these questions in Connecting the Dots.
The Economist calls for the ‘scrapping’ of prohibition on the sale and possession of drugs. Although the proposals are sketchy, the idea seems to be that drugs should be sold in controlled markets, with stricter controls (and higher prices) for more dangerous drugs (what, though, would a ‘controlled market’ for crack-cocaine look like? How low would prices have to be to stop a black-market springing up?) Given the systemic failings of the current strategy, it’s easy to see why it is a tempting position to hold that the system is broken, and so it should be replaced by a whole new one.
Yet the very factors which ground the critiques of the current system should likewise make us to suspicious of calls for radical system-change. The drugs-trade is so complex, so thick with messy causal interdependencies, that interventions lead to multiple unintended (and often negative) consequences; it’s these consequences that lead many to despair of the current system. Similarly, though, to replace the current system of enforcement and prohibition, with a regulated legal market would be to set up another hugely complex system; the one thing that we can be sure of, is that such a complex system wouldn’t behave as would be predicted. Complex systems are inherently unpredictable. Further, the disagreements as to what ‘the real problem’ is aren’t going to go away; how will the ‘dissonant’ beliefs of those committed to legal controls on drug use, and the ideal of dramatically reducing drug use, be accommodated? How will they impact on the new, radical system that they do not believe in? Once again; one person’s solution is another person’s disaster – and such disagreements can mean that one’s 'solution' ends up being far less attractive and feasible, and working far less well, than one first thought.