The Search for a New Drug Policy Framework

From the Barbados Plan of Action to the Ganja Commission

AXEL KLEIN

Over the past two decades drug control has become an issue of great concern throughout the English-speaking Caribbean. Most governments have established national drug councils as coordinating bodies and drafted a policy document or strategy. Each country files regular reports on drug trends to the International Narcotics Control Board and participates in the mutual evaluation exercises and training organized by the Inter-American Drug Abuse Control Commission (CICAD). There are regional coordinating mechanisms such as the Inter-Governmental Taskforce on Drugs and Crime to discuss and plan action on drugs. The Caribbean Community and Market (CARICOM) has a section dedicated to drug control with full-time staff, while policy makers and professionals meet regularly for information exchange, planning or training purposes.

Official activism is matched by widespread social concern. In almost every Caribbean country stories about drug use and associated criminality are providing a lurid mainstay for regional newspapers and broadcasting services. Drugs impinge on international relations, as in the case of Jamaican drug mules heading for the United Kingdom in 2002, and they fire the imaginations of the young. For many of the young people in the poor urban areas of Kingston, Port of Spain or Castries the drug don has become a role model.

Drugs, it can be safely asserted, loom large in the collective imaginary and figure high on the list of political priorities. Yet in few other areas of public policy is there such a hiatus between the vigour of rhetoric and available professional expertise. There is much posturing around drug control, but the information base is only slowly consolidating. This is all the more daunting, perhaps, because drugs are a complex policy issue, straddling a multitude of sectors and academic disciplines. Perhaps limited understanding of the phenomenon is part of the explanation for the very shrill note struck in the alarmist official pronouncements of the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Best known, possibly, is the grave prophecy of the West India Commission:

Nothing poses greater threats to civil society in CARICOM countries than the drug problem; and nothing exemplifies the powerlessness of regional governments more. That is the magnitude of the danger drug abuse and drug trafficking hold for our community. It is a many-layered danger. At base is the human destruction implicit in drug addiction; but implicit also is the corruption of individuals and systems by the sheer enormity of the inducements of the illegal drug trade in poor countries. On top of this lie the implications for governance itself – at the hands of both external agencies engaged in international interdiction, and the drug barons themselves – the dons of the modern Caribbean – who threaten governance from within. (West India Commission 1992)

The Commission identified the disparity between the capability of the small Caribbean states, and the powers of drug trafficking cartels as a present threat.

A decade on there is no sign that the threat has in any way abated. Indeed, by all accounts drugs have penetrated Caribbean society pervasively, with substances like crack cocaine, heroin and MDMA more readily available, cheaper and popular than they ever have been. The political situation in Latin America, meanwhile, has deteriorated further, as Colombia is plagued by seemingly irresolvable civil war, and Venezuela is sliding into crises, opening new wide spaces for organized criminal groups.

Notwithstanding the spectacular success of individual operations, the combined regional and international efforts at turning off the supply flow, or at dissuading people from indulging in drugs, have been manifestly unsuccessful. Yet there is a distinct shift in tone in the policy discussions on the issue. The ominous warnings of impending loss of liberty and stability have given way to preoccupations of a much more operational nature. Law enforcement agencies are adjusting threat scenarios emanating from drug trafficking to the radically different security concerns of their international partner countries. After 9/11, terrorism has upstaged and effectively decentred drugs as the primary security challenge. There are no doubts about the links between drugs and terrorism, particularly with reference to the Colombian rebel movements FARC and ELN, but drugs are now treated as a means to more dangerous ends: as a source of finance for terror, not as the principal danger itself.

One of the reasons why the threat posed by drug dealers and traffickers is viewed more sanguinely now than a decade ago is that the security agenda of the English-speaking Caribbean is co-authored by analysts in the US and, to a lesser degree, in Europe (Bagley and Walker 1994; Griffith 1993; 1996; 2000). Drug trafficking became a major concern in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet threat in 1990, when the security agenda was broadened, to embrace inter alia drugs, migration and infectious diseases. The Organization of American States, founded initially to contain the communist threat, turned its attention to a number of shared hemispheric concerns, the foremost of which was how to curb the trade in drugs (Lowenthal 1992: 309). With the emergent challenge of terrorism, the focus has narrowed once again, and drugs are now regarded as a secondary issue.

By interweaving external concerns with Caribbean interests, analysts have approached drugs largely from a trafficking perspective. Caribbean countries are mainly seen as hapless pawns in the wider scheme of Latin American organized crime groups targeting the North American market. The idiom is one of dual victimization, in which ruthless criminals and complacent or even colluding governments issue two distinct security challenges. First, an external military and economic threat arises from the structural vulnerability of mini- and micro-states within asymmetric power relationships: what Griffith describes as a 'subordinate state system' interacting with the 'United States, other important hemispheric actors such as Brazil, Cuba and Venezuela and other states such as Britain' as well as 'international financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund' (Griffith 1993: 4). Regional security concerns, as well as the register of possible policy responses, are clearly stated as contingent upon the wider security framework determined by the US.

Throughout the Cold War, the main challengers to regional security were conceived as state actors, or insurgents sponsored by state actors. In the Caribbean region, however, the drug trade has raised to a new level the danger posed by 'privatized violence'. According to former Jamaican Prime Minister Michael Manley, the region is 'dealing with a level of international criminal organization that is probably without precedent'. The capabilities of these criminals derive from their alleged level of organization, the amounts of money involved (see Chapter 10) and the quasimilitary capacity and ruthlessness of the trafficking organizations. There is an argument, then, that in the wider region, as indeed across the globe, this new phenomenon of privatized violence has 'contributed substantially to the protracted consolidation of the structures of violence' (Debiel 2002: 25). These organizations pose a violent external security challenge, and undermine the viability of the state by corrupting the institutions. This second threat scenario is not only more difficult to assess, but also a topic on which regional and North American scholars part company. According to Maingot, 'none of the important politician writers of the Caribbean in the 1960s, 1970s and even early 1980s have even intimated that the threat to Caribbean security would come largely from corruption, internal to their societies and external to the Caribbean as a whole' (Maingot 1994: 474).

The difficulty in discussing corruption within an international relations context is that too often it rests upon the silent presumption of a corruption-free institutional functioning in North America and Western Europe. This leads to an equivalence of the 'ideal type' with a given historic manifestation, which in turn compromises the objectivity of the proposition. What begins as an engagement with a local set of problems morphs into a spiky critique based on the irrefutable premise that 'our system is better than yours'. Alert to the danger of reaching this intellectual cul de sac, Maingot quotes Lipmann's insight that it is not corruption but only the exposure of corruption that can be the subject of historical analysis. We are reminded of Galbraith's (1955) observation that fraudulent practice is rife in any market economy, but only becomes exposed in times of crises, when the auditors come in.

Malfunction and corrupt practice, we therefore argue, are par for the course until they become systemic and slide into crises. Once public confidence in the capacity of institutions to deliver is lost, the stability of the state is in jeopardy. An ongoing discussion since independence has questioned whether Caribbean states, given the constraints of the resource base and the asymmetrical relationship with regional neighbours, are viable on their own: hence the involved discussions about a Caribbean Union. The impact of the drug trade, with its lavish emoluments for impropriety and malpractice, has severely tested that viability. It has tarnished the reputation of some Caribbean institutions and sections of its elite, but we would argue that so far – in most administrations at least – the overall integrity of the political system remains. This is no recommendation for complacency, however. In a sense the measures taken in response to the variegated drug threats contain the seeds for social discord and destabilization if not addressed in the very near future. We return, therefore, to the framing of the drug problem in both national strategies and the academic discourse.

There is a tendency in the security discourse to recommend conformity with US policy, as this 'can soften US disapproval of a small country's internal policy' (Khan–Melnyk 1994: 499). A simple realpolitik(al) acknowledgement that 'American dominance cannot be wished away' (Griffith 1993: 283), when taken to its conclusion, only serves to compromise Caribbean agency and autonomy of response. Regional actors are often presented as go-betweens or pawns, their activity contingent on the success of Latin American criminal groups in corrupting and co-opting state structures when transiting the region en route to North America and Europe. It is in their best interest to organize regional security by upgrading their security facilities (Griffith 1993), thereby implementing the resolutions of the international conventions to counter the drug trade (Maingot 1994: 476).

The commentaries on the Caribbean are less critical than what has been written on Latin America. US academics concede that drug control has been used to promote US hegemony in the hemisphere (Bagley 1994), and that the policy of interdiction and destruction at source is 'predicated upon the belief that drug problems were primarily foreign in origin' (Walker 1994: 12). With regard to the Caribbean, the US actions are treated as factors – the market for drugs which is triggering the traffic, the convicts forcibly returned to their Caribbean countries of origin, the trade policy pushing for a removal of protection for Caribbean bananas while maintaining protection for US sugar producers – but lie outside the realm of policy discussion. The only suggestion found in the publications from the inter-governmental organizations (IGOs) dealing with drugs in the region and among the interventionist scholars is for greater US and European material assistance to Caribbean drug control.

A reminder is needed that drug control policies exported by bilateral partners and promoted by the IGOs are mired in controversy. The effectiveness of treatment modalities, the impact of educational messages, and the link between drugs and crime are all subjects of intensive debate (MacCoun and Reuter 2001). The security discourse tends to gloss over the ideological character of the prohibitionist policy espoused by the US government, albeit with the support of key allies and international organizations. Instead, ideology, where analyzed as a factor, is presented as a phenomenon encountered in the Caribbean, be it in the guise of Cuban-inspired communism or Rastafarianism or militant Islam (Griffith 1993). The ideal of a drug-free world, with its ideological roots in the temperance movement, revivalist Christianity and the search for an identifiable adversary for the state apparatus, does not get a mention.

For the purpose of objective analysis we seek to move beyond the mere admission of 'hyper-puissance' and seek to understand the tenor and objectives of the hegemony in order to carve out a niche for self-determination. The policy framework provided by the 'war on drugs' is therefore open to challenge, particularly within the context of a developing country transit zone with a history of culturally validated substance use. The genuine danger posed by corruption has to be contrasted with a different challenge, with similar distorting consequences: the control of institutions by special interest groups. With reference to the Caribbean justice sector, this danger has been described by the Inter-American Development Bank: 'Government agencies that are so captured lack the autonomy to formulate and execute policies that benefit the general population and instead serve the narrow interests of the small groups of elites that control them' (IADB 2000: 11). The room for change may not be foreclosed by national agencies alone, but also by the activities of external partners, be these bilateral or multilateral. There is always the danger in the asymmetric relationships between agencies in resource-rich and resource-poor countries of pursuing programmes against the evidence of local needs. The paucity of success in drugs interdiction would, in other areas of politics, call for a radical review. A number of circumstances conspire to preclude this: the rhetorical requirement of US (and European) policy makers to be 'tough on drugs' (MacCoun and Reuter 2001); the convenience of 'exporting' the resolution of US (and European) drug problems to producer and transit countries (Walker 1994), and the incentive of government departments working in drug control to preserve as much of their budgets as possible (Mabry 1994: 55). Small amounts of money buy considerable leverage for agencies like the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), the Bureau for International Narcotic and Law Enforcement Affairs, the US Customs Service, and the Department of Defense. With so many Washington agencies involved, 'reallocating or reducing the size of the pie is probably impossible' (Mabry 1994: 55).

There is a danger, then, of national and regional agencies becoming locked into a drug strategy that is based upon a false and ideologically driven analysis of the drug problem, and motivated by particular interests. Indeed, such observations could be made about any part of public policy, all of which is subject to the push and pull of public pressure, changing paradigms and new needs. The difficulty with drugs is that it is such a cross-cutting issue, with tentacles reaching into every aspect of government. This involves, by necessity, a limitless cast of players and interest groups at national, regional and global levels. Moreover, drug policy is the locus of an epic clash between social forces, moral censure and political will. The search for objectivity in the critical analysis of issues, policies or impacts is not always easy. We hope to contribute to an opening of the discussion by raising forbidden topics.

Few issues demonstrate the need for drug policy to become integrated into the wider needs-driven policy framework of the region better than the allocation of technology spending. St Lucia, the Cayman Islands and Trinidad are all countries where scarce resources have been used to acquire drug-testing kits. They are used, for instance, to test prisoners already convicted of an offence to establish if they are drug-free. The social value of this procedure is uncertain. Meanwhile, none of these jurisdictions employ breathalysers, even though drink driving provides the most serious drug-related hazard. But since alcohol is legal, and enjoyed by some of the law makers themselves, no resources are provided to enhance road safety. This is an instance of the spirit of the crusade getting the better of rational policy making. It is in the public interest to assert the primacy of politics and to critically evaluate the policies and models of drug control in the Caribbean region.