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Two Takes on the Global Drug War and Global Drug Cultures [FEATURE]

Rerolled: March 4, 2020 | #STDW


Dopeworld: Adventures in Drug Lands byNiko Vorobyov (2019, Hodder, 414 pp., £18.99)

Pills, Powder, and Smoke: Inside the Bloody War on Drugsby Anthony Lowenstein (2019, Macmillan, 360 pp., $14.29)

[image:1 align:left]America shows signs of emerging from the century-long shadow of drug prohibition, with marijuana leading the way and a psychedelic decriminalization movement rapidly gaining steam. It also seems as if the mass incarceration fever driven by the war on drugs has finally broken, although tens if not hundreds of thousands remain behind bars on drug charges.

As Americans, we are remarkably parochial. We are, we still like to tell ourselves, "the world's only superpower," and we can go about our affairs without overly concerning ourselves about what's going on beyond our borders. But what America does, what America wants, what America demands has impacts far beyond our borders, and the American prohibitionist impulse is no different.

Thanks largely (but not entirely) to a century of American diplomatic pressure, the entire planet has been subsumed by our prohibitionist impulse. A series of United Nations conventions, the legal backbone of global drug prohibition, pushed by the U.S., have put the whole world on lockdown.

We here in the drug war homeland remain largely oblivious to the consequences of our drug policies overseas, whether it's murderous drug cartels in Mexico, murderous cops in the Philippines, barbarous forced drug treatment regimes in Russia and Southeast Asia, exemplary executions in China, or corrupted cops and politicians everywhere. But now, a couple of non-American journalists working independently have produced a pair of volumes that focus on the global drug war like a U.S. Customs X-ray peering deep inside a cargo container. Taken together, he results are illuminating, and the light they shed reveals some very disturbing facts.

Dopeworld author Niko Vorobyov and Pills, Powder, and Smoke author Anthony Lowenstein both attempt the same feat—a global portrait of the war on drugs—and both reach the same conclusion—that drug prohibition benefits only drug traffickers, fear-mongering politicians, and state security apparatuses—but are miles apart attitudinally and literarily. This makes for two very different, but complementary, books on the same topic.

 Lowenstein, an Australian who previously authored Disaster Capitalism and Profits of Doom, is—duh—a critic of capitalism who situates the global drug war within an American project of neo-imperial subjugation globally and control over minority populations domestically. His work is solid investigative reporting, leavened with the passion he feels for his subject.

He takes the reader as he visits places that rarely make the news but are deeply and negatively impacted by the U.S.-led war on drugs, such as Honduras. Lowenstein opens that chapter with the murder of environmental activist Berta Caceres, which was not directly related to the drug war, but which illustrates the thuggish nature of the Honduran regime—a regime that emerged after a 2009 coup overthrew the leftist president, a coup justified by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and which has received millions in U.S. anti-drug assistance, mainly in the form of weapons and military equipment.

Honduras doesn't produce any drugs; it's only an accident of geography and the American war on drugs that we even mention the country in the context of global drug prohibition. Back in the 1980s, the administration of Bush the Elder cracked down on cocaine smuggling in the Caribbean, and as traffickers sought to evade that threat, Honduras was perfectly placed to act as a trampoline for cocaine shipments taking an alternative route through Mexico, which, incidentally fueled the rise of today's deadly and uber-wealthy Mexican drug cartels.

The drug trade, combined with grinding poverty, huge income inequalities, and few opportunities have helped turn Honduras into one of the deadliest places on earth, where the police and military kill with impunity, and so do the country's teeming criminal gangs. Lowenstein walks those means streets—except for a few neighborhoods even his local fixers deem too dangerous, talking to activists, human rights workers, the family members of victims, community members, and local journalists to paint a chilling picture. (This is why Hondurans make up a large proportion of those human caravans streaming north to the US border. But unlike Venezuela, where mass flight in the face of violence and economic collapse is routinely condemned as a failure of socialism, you rarely hear any commentators calling the Honduran exodus a failure of capitalism.)

He reexamines one of the DEA's most deadly recent incidents, where four poor, innocent Hondurans were killed by Honduran troops working under DEA supervision in a raid whose parameters were covered up for years by the agency. Lowenstein engaged in extended communication with the DEA agent in charge, as well as with survivors and family members of those killed. Those people report they have never received an apology, not to mention compensation, from the Honduran military—or from the United States.

While the Honduran military fights the drug war with U.S. dollars, Lowenstein shows it and other organs of the Honduran government are also deeply implicated in managing the drug traffic. And news headlines bring his story up to date: Just this month, U.S. prosecutors in New York accused the current, rightist president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernandez, of meeting with and taking a bribe from a drug trafficker. This comes after his brother, former Honduran Senator Juan Antonio Hernandez, was convicted of running tons of cocaine into the United States in a trial that laid bare the bribery, corruption, and complicity of high-level Hondurans in the drug trade, including the president.

Lowenstein also takes us to Guinea-Bisseau, a dirt-poor West African country where 70 percent of the population subsists on less than $2 a day whose biggest export is cashews. Or at least it was cashews. Since the early years of this century, the country has emerged as a leading destination for South American cocaine, which is then re-exported to the insatiable European market.

Plagued by decades of military coups and political instability, the country has never developed, and an Atlantic shoreline suited for mass tourism now serves mainly as a convenient destination for boat- and planeloads of cocaine. Lowenstein visits hotels whose only clients are drug traffickers and remote fishing villages where the trade is an open secret a source of jobs. He talks with security officials who frankly admit they have almost no resources to combat the trade, and he traces the route onward to Europe, sometimes carried by Islamic militants.

He also tells the tale of one exemplary drug bust carried out by a DEA SWAT team arguably in Guinean territorial waters that snapped the country's former Navy minister in a "narco-terrorist" plot to handle cocaine shipments for Colombia's leftist FARC guerillas, designated as terrorists by the administration of Bush the Junior in a politically convenient melding of the wars on drugs and terror.

It turns out, though, there were no coke loads, there was no FARC; there was only a DEA sting operation, with the conspiracy created out of whole cloth. While the case made for some nice headlines and showed the U.S. hard at work fighting drugs, it had no demonstrable impact on the use of West Africa as a cocaine conduit, and it raised serious questions about the degree to which the U.S. can impose its drug war anywhere it chooses.

[image:2 align:right]Lowenstein also writes about Australia, England, and the United States, in each case setting the historical and political context, talking to all kinds of people, and laying bare the hideous cruelties of drug policies that exert their most terrible tolls on the poor and racial minorities. But he also sees glimmers of hope in things such as the movement toward marijuana legalization here and the spread of harm reduction measures in England and Australia.

He gets one niggling thing wrong, though, in his chapter on the U.S. He converses with Washington, D.C., pot activists Alan Amsterdam and Adam Eidinger, the main mover behind D.C.'s successful legalization initiative, but in his reporting on it, he repeatedly refers to D.C. as a state and once even mistakenly cites a legal marijuana sales figure from Washington state (there are no legal sales in D.C.). Yes, this is a tiny matter, but c'mon, Lowenstein is Australian, and he should know a political entity similar to Canberra, the Australian Capital Territory.

That quibble aside, Lowenstein has made a hard-headed but open-hearted contribution to our understanding of the multifaceted malevolence of the never-ending war on drugs. And I didn’t even mention his chapter on the Philippines. It's in there, it's as gruesome as you might expect, and it's very chilling reading.

Vorobyov, on the other hand, was born in Russia and emigrated to England as a child. He reached adulthood as a recreational drug user and seller—until he was arrested on the London underground and got a two-year sentence for carrying enough Ecstasy to merit a charge of possession with intent to distribute. After that interval, which he says inspired him to write his book, he got his university degree and moved back to Russia, where he picked up a gig at Russia Today before turning his talents to Dopeworld.

Dopeworldis not staid journalism. Instead it is a twitchy mish-mash, jumping from topic to topic and continent to continent with the flip of a page, tracing the history of alcohol Prohibition in the U.S. at one turn, chatting up Japanese drug gangsters at the next, and getting hammered by ayahuasca in yet another. Vorobyov himself describes Dopeworld as "true crime, gonzo, social, historical memoir meets fucked up travel book."

Indeed. He relates his college-boy drug dealing career with considerable panache, he parties with nihilistic middle-class young people and an opium-smoking cop in Teheran, he cops $7 grams of cocaine in Columbia and tours Pablo Escobar's house with the dead kingpin's brother as a tour guide, he has dinner with Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman's family in Mexico's Sinaloa state and pronounces them nice people ("really chill"), and he meets up with a vigilante killer in Manila.

Vorbyov openly says the unsayable when it comes to writing about the drug war and drug prohibition: Drugs can be fun! While Lowenstein is pretty much all about the victims, Vorybvov inhabits the global drug culture. You know, Dopeworld. Lowenstein would bemoan the utter futility of a record-breaking seizure of a 12-ton load of cocaine; Vorybyov laments that "that's 12 tons of cocaine that will never be snorted."

Vorybvov is entertaining and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, and he brings a former dope-dealer's perspective to bear. He's brash and breezy, but like Lowenstein, he's done his homework as well as his journalistic fieldwork, and the result is fascinating. To begin to understand what the war on drugs has done to people and countries around the planet, this pair of books make an essential introduction.

Source: https://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/2020/mar/04/two_takes_global_drug_war_and


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