How to win the "drug lord" war: stop romanticizing.

Recently I'd had the impression that the news media were gradually phasing out the romantic, respectful words they had used to describe rich thugs in the drug trade: lords, barons, kingpins, masterminds, etc. In The Wall Street Journal of October 13, 1997, for example, a front page article describes cutthroats who are taking over the charming city of Guadalajara, Mexico, as "drug traffickers." The word "lord" is used only once (p.A-11), referring to a thug as "... the country's most notorious drug lord."

A little library research, however, with a review of my own file of clippings, showed that the romantic, respectful words are still being used routinely in major news media.

The lords-and-barons usage helps to justify federal interdiction policy. We hear it said that the drug war depends on making an evil demon out of a hippie who is brandishing a marijuana cigarette; but that is not all of it. If you are an interdiction partisan and you want to conduct a war that costs 30 billion dollars per year (federal and state money combined), you need a big enemy. You need something bigger than a hippie demon. You need a Satan. You will have to describe this Satan to journalists and to opposition policy experts who do not believe in spooks; so you want a classy Miltonian Satan who has the aristocratic cachet of a lord or baron. You want your enemy to be the Kingpin of Hell, a Satanic Mastermind whose power is superhuman.

That is what we have now.

Let us shrink this spook to the size of a gremlin. We can do it by sharpening public perception of the lords-and-barons terminology, and getting rid of it.

The job will not be easy. Habit has Set in. The lords-and-barons usage is common parlance, used by writers from all points of the policy compass. Here are a few samples:

* William Satire bestowed a formal imprimatur on the word kingpin, in his "On Language" column in the New York Times Magazine of 9-24-89: "Kingpin seems to be the only acceptable term for drug big shots ..." It did not matter that he erred in making it number-one. The public library's Infotrac computer demonstrates that "lord" is used ten times more frequently than "kingpin" in newspapers and periodicals.

* A. M. Rosenthal, former executive editor of The New York Times, in his Op Ed column of 12-15-89, defined the enemy as "drug kings," twice. He estimated the cost of fighting them in this way: "Never mind money. If we can afford the savings and loan bailout we can afford the drug war." That bailout cost would be at least $500 billion - a figure, including interest, that has been widely quoted in major news media.

* The 1-6-90 issue of TV Guide describes the torturers and murderers of an American DEA agent as "Mexican drug lords who, like ancient Aztec kings ... are revered and feared as demigods, answerable to no law but their own."

More recent stories continue the same trend:

* The Nation of 4-28-97 reported that President Clinton officially certified Mexico ("steeped in corruption") as a drug war ally; and just before the announcement "the Mexican drug czar Gen. Jesus Rebollo was arrested for cooperating with one of the country's most powerful drug lords."

* USA Today's Cover Story of 5-16-97 says members of a family in Florida are afraid to visit the grave of their grandmother, who was "shot to death after she testified against a neighborhood drug lord."

* The Economist of 8-9-97 mentions a "baron" named Carrillo whose aptitude for smuggling drugs by airplane earned him the romantic sobriquet, "lord of the skies."

* A front page drug-war story in the 3-23-97 Washington Post says that the murder of a Mexican investigative reporter was ordered by a "mastermind."

If individual members of the news media were to receive 1,000 critical letters every time they used such terms, they probably would find better ways to describe rich thugs in the drug trade. This change would shrink the spook that we are now spending $30 billion a year to fight.

As to the question of what alternative words to use, "traffickers" is currently popular but in some ways it is almost as bad as lords-and-barons. It is dull. It sounds legitimate. "Traffic" sounds like normal business. In fact the traffic in question is a bunch of thugs getting rich on a black market created by the so-called drug war. And the popular "cartel" is a romantic usage when the international organization being referred to is simply two or three gangs of thugs who know how to make a long distance phone call.

I am confident that the natural grass roots plain-speaking lexicographical genius of the American people will spontaneously produce a new set of alternatives words, some with a comic tone, after a letter-writing movement gets going and the lords-and-barons usage fades away.

Michigan Jackson, a former teacher and management writer, has recently completed a novel about grass-roots leadership, The Sky Blue Taxi. His essay, "What's a 'Casualty'?" appeared in ETC vol. 48, no. 2, Summer 1991.