This Is a Bust: The futility of drug interdiction.

The drug war works, at least in Bolivia. Between 1995 and 2000, the amount of land in Bolivia with coca cultivated on it declined from almost 50,000 hectares to fewer than 20,000. In Peru, during the same period, land under cultivation for coca declined from 115,000 hectares to roughly 30,000. It was a nice winning streak for the American policy of coca eradication in the Andes, except for the minor matter of Colombia, where the coca crop doubled-keeping the level of production in the Andes approximately the same as it had been before those victories in Bolivia and Peru.

In the drug war, the victories never end, because they never last. Last year's annual report from the Office of National Drug Control Policy noted progress in the Caribbean: A "decline in the cocaine trafficking in Jamaica, the Bahamas, and Cuba followed the execution of several joint interdiction operations in the area." But wait: "There were . . . increases in overall drug trafficking in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico as well as smuggling through fishing vessels in the Eastern Pacific." It's a wonder that drug warriors make even this "one- step forward, one-step back" progress. The report notes, matter-of- factly: "Drugs coming to the United States from South America pass through a six million square-mile transit zone roughly the size of the continental United States." Oh, is that all?

As a Council on Foreign Relations report on drug-eradication and - interdiction policies puts it, "For twenty years, these programs have done little more than rearrange the map of drug production and trafficking." There is more rearranging yet to come. Bush drug-czar nominee John Walters is, in drug-war terms, a die-hard supply-sider, convinced that more aerial spraying and harsher measures against traffickers will squeeze the drug supply in America, force up prices, and prompt addicts to drop their habit. Together with his mentor and czarist predecessor Bill Bennett, Walters champions a kind of drug-war Brezhnev doctrine in which no drug-policy excess-the tougher penalty for crack compared with powder cocaine, mandatory-minimum sentencing laws, the ban on the medicinal use of marijuana-is ever to be rolled back. The current American escalation in the Andes, pushing the drug war further toward a real shooting proposition, is just another step in this hard-line logic.

The $1.3 billion Plan Colombia, originally funded by the Clinton administration and now being refashioned into a broader, even more expensive Andes-wide initiative by the Bush administration, will throw a massive amount of military aid, including Black Hawk helicopters, into the breach in Colombia. It will likely succeed the way so many other drug-war initiatives do-fitfully and temporarily, if it all. To examine the supply-side drug policies in behalf of which American money, materiel, and prestige will be expended in Colombia is to see the free (in this case, black) market working in all its marvelous and appalling ingenuity, frustrating the drug warriors, whose efforts constantly double back on themselves like a cat chasing its tail. In its dishonesty and strategic confusion, Plan Colombia is-to paraphrase Omar Bradley-the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy.

The economics of drug production will always bedevil drug warriors. Take efforts to destroy coca leaf through eradication. Such efforts will have little effect on consumption in the U.S., since the price of coca leaf is such a tiny fraction of the street price of cocaine. Expecting eradication to drive up retail drug prices is like increasing the cost of dashboard cupholders in hopes of raising the showroom price of automobiles. "Indeed," University of Maryland drug-policy expert Peter Reuter argues in an article in The Milken Institute Review, "leaf prices have varied enormously over the last decade, while the retail price of cocaine has steadily fallen."

Then, there's the sheer perversity of raising the price of something as a way to discourage its production. As Patrick L. Clawson and Rensselaer W. Lee write in their book The Andean Cocaine Industry, "It is not clear why Washington thinks that a crop reduction program raises the income of Midwestern wheat farmers but lowers the income of Andean coca farmers." Crop eradication also can't be much of an obstacle to the captains of the drug trade, because they have an enormous incentive to pay whatever it takes to keep coca in production, given the enormous retail bonanza awaiting them on U.S. streets (which, of course, is itself a product of the drug war-otherwise, there's no reason heroin, say, would cost more than gold).

This is the nub of the problem: The very illegality of drugs makes the drug business so lucrative that new actors will be drawn to it, no matter what. Imagine, by way of comparison, setting a $100 million lottery prize, then expecting people never to try to buy a ticket. According to a recent RAND study on Colombia, "By one gauge, the 520 metric tons of cocaine that Colombia produced in 1999 could, at an average retail street price in the United States of one hundred dollars a gram (or $100 million per metric ton), have netted as much as $52 billion-more than the gross domestic product of many nations."

The other supply-side policy, besides eradication, is targeting traffickers. The idea here is both to collapse the price of coca leaf, since there will be less demand for it from the dead, jailed, or scared-off traffickers, and to raise the retail price, since there will be less of the product on the streets. Thus, coca farmers and addicts will be discouraged all at once. This theory has arguably been demonstrated a few times, for at least a few months after major disruptions in trafficking networks. But the market always bounces back. And, as in the case of the price of coca leaf, the costs to traffickers of seized drugs, abandoned or shot-down airplanes, etc., is minuscule compared to the eventual retail payoff.

So, the cat never catches its tail. "Interdiction, in fact, seizes a quite high share-perhaps one-third-of the cocaine that is destined for the United States," argues Peter Reuter. "Nonetheless, this still leaves plenty of product to support the large United States cocaine market at prices that are modest by historical standards." All the splashy successes, all the record-setting busts, fade away in the relentless reality of an insatiable and highly profitable market. Take the high-profile smashing of the Medellin and Cali cartels in Colombia. "The weakening of the cartel structure in Colombia and the impressive U.S. seizures of more than 760 tons of cocaine between 1990 and 1996 have had no discernible effect on the underlying traffic infrastructure and on the availability of the drug domestically," report Clawson and Lee. "Indeed, the price per pure gram of cocaine in the United States reached a 15-year low in 1996, declining 37 percent since 1990."

Crushing the cartels, which may have been a worthy goal in its own right since they were massive and corrupting criminal organizations, has just-in typical drug-war fashion-created another, in some ways more difficult, problem in Colombia. The drug trade is now dominated by smaller, looser groups that have been more difficult to fight, and that include the various guerrilla forces-both the Marxist FARC and the paramilitary vigilantes-in Colombia's civil war. Hence, Plan Colombia. It will throw everything in the drug-war arsenal at the problem, disrupting trafficking networks, eradicating crops, and promoting alternative development. The essential dishonesty of the plan is that it pretends to be just a war on drugs when it is really meant to be a war on FARC (the hideous paramilitaries, also involved in the drug trade, won't get the same attention).

Plan Colombia has a two-step strategic thrust of starving the guerrillas of drug funds and, consequentially, forcing them to the bargaining table. Both steps are flawed. Although FARC reaps major benefits from the drug trade, it's not clear exactly how dependent it is on drug money. Even if all drug funds were to dry up-which is extremely unlikely, given the progress of the drug war in the Andes to date-there would still be plenty of financing available through various protection rackets and kidnapping, Colombia's other explosive growth industry. (By one estimate, according to the RAND study, Colombian guerrillas account for up to 30 percent of all kidnappings in the world.) Indeed, another, smaller guerrilla group, ELN, has managed to prosper in Colombia without much connection to the drug trade.

The second step speaks of a deeper problem. In Colombia, it's as though a particularly gruesome Aeschylus play were continually in production; it features the most vicious and extensive carnage this side of the Congo. FARC is soaked in this bloody culture, which is why it has been in the field for four decades. For them, negotiations are just another stop on the way to more fighting. FARC won't go away unless it is beaten, but the Colombia elite seem to have little taste for that. The military budget is still relatively small, and the country's most prominent families have all been victimized by kidnapping, and so are accustomed to trying to cut deals with thugs. Vanquishing FARC might well require a dose of Fujimorism, but that would probably prompt a cutoff of U.S. aid. As it is, Washington is backing a policy that is likely to fail, will require an increased U.S. commitment, and eventually will force us to admit the fight in Colombia has little to do with whether American high-school kids will snort cocaine.

Indeed, the larger deception behind Plan Colombia is that the drug war, as currently conceived, is winnable. And because people readily believe this, U.S. entanglement in a nasty, decades-long civil war is an easy political sell. Bill Bennett, in a recent op-ed piece entitled "The Drug War Worked Once-It Can Again," wrote, "According to a national drug survey, between 1979 and 1992, the most intense period of antidrug efforts, the rate of illegal drug use dropped by more than half, while marijuana use decreased by two-thirds. Cocaine use dropped by three- fourths between 1985 and 1992." But in Bennett's telling, after all of Reagan and Bush's hard work, Bill Clinton threw the drug-war machinery into reverse: "Between 1992 in 1999, rates of current drug use-defined as using once a month or more-increased by 15 percent. Rates of marijuana use increased 11 percent."

This interpretation-endorsed by John Walters as well-just doesn't add up. As Jacob Sullum points out, drug use peaked in 1979, two years before Reagan took office and three years before any of his policies could have had any effect. Drug-taking habits move with fashion and in epidemic boom-and-bust trends that policymakers may have some influence over, but not as much as Bill Bennett press releases suggest. That the amount of cocaine consumed in the U.S. rose into the mid 1980s, then leveled off (was Reagan "soft on cocaine" in his first term?), may have as much to do with the 1986 death of basketball star Len Bias as with any public policy. As for the increases Bennett attacks in the Clinton administration, they have been small in absolute terms, and mostly involve high-school kids smoking more marijuana, the least harmful illegal drug and one about which attitudes have been softening (marijuana use by high-schoolers has also declined since 1997).

Indeed, the last two decades should have been fatal to the Walters theory that a supply-side crackdown reduces supply and increases price, thereby curtailing use. About half of high-school seniors reported that cocaine was readily available to them in 1999, roughly the same figure as in 1991, and the number for marijuana-80 percent or more-has remained steady since the mid 1970s. As for price, Peter Reuter reports in a new book written with Robert MacCoun (Drug War Heresies) that "during the period of increasingly tough enforcement, prices for cocaine and heroin have fallen steadily since 1981; by 1995, after adjusting for inflation, they were only about one-third of their 1981 levels. For marijuana, prices rose steadily and substantially from 1981 to 1992 and then fell in the next four years back close to their 1981 level."

And what Bennett and Walters don't ever dare acknowledge, since it is fatally inconvenient to their case, is the boom in arrests that has continued to roll right through the supposedly lax Clinton years. Reuter and MacCoun again: "The total punishment levied for drug control purposes has increased massively since 1981, when concern with cocaine became prominent . . . The number of commitments to state and federal prison has risen over tenfold during the same time period. By 1996, there were over 400,000 people in prison or jail serving time for selling or using drugs; the comparable figure for 1980 was about 31,000." According to the authors, "arrests for simple [marijuana] possession have doubled in the last five years." If this is an insufficiently vigorous drug war, what would ever be an adequate one?

This is the deeper point. Skepticism about the drug war is often associated with libertarianism. But it also reflects a conservative distrust of utopian schemes, with impossible goals (eliminating certain forms of intoxication in the United States) to be pursued by nearly limitless means. Government can't straighten the crooked timber of humanity, the impulse for euphoria and/or oblivion constituting one form of that crookedness. By what silly presumption does John Walters think he can set the fashion at nightclubs and raves all over America? By what bizarre fantasy does he think he can do it with Black Hawks and pesticides? With enough resources, the United States may yet succeed in disrupting coca production and trafficking in Colombia-before they reassert themselves in some new, unexpected way.

Poor John Walters. He has many victories in front of him.