[Financial Times] The unwinnable war on dangerous drugs

The unwinnable war on dangerous drugs
Published: January 15 2005 02:00 | Last updated: January 15 2005 02:00

Thousands of acres have been taken out of coca production in Colombia, fewer US teenagers smoke cannabis and drugs seizures are not too far off record highs. The British police are cracking down on drug dealers and Britain is leading the campaign against Afghanistan's opium industry. Yet, despite signs of what the US drugs policy chief describes as "real progress" in some areas, the US is no nearer to achieving victory in its war on drugs.

On US and European streets, cocaine and heroin are as pure, cheap and plentiful as ever, while consumption of amphetamines is rising. The gangs that operate the drugs trade continue to corrupt institutions in poorer countries such as Colombia and Afghanistan. If the spread of dangerous drugs is to be curbed, a new approach is needed.

The first step is to recognise that strategies based on eradication of the raw materials can at best be only partly successful and are easily reversed. In Afghanistan, for example, the area cultivated with opium poppy - the raw material for heroin - has risen more than tenfold since the toppling of the Taliban regime which had reduced it to just 8,000 hectares during 2001.

Spraying crops with herbicides has eliminated more than a third of coca plantations in Colombia in the last five years. But this could inflame political tensions in countries such as Afghanistan where legitimate crops are cultivated alongside opium poppies. Eradication also requires far more resources for promoting alternative development if the impact is not to be short-lived.

In any case, the decline in coca cultivation in some parts of Colombia has led to increases in other parts and in neighbouring countries such as Bolivia. Meanwhile, growers have improved yields by developing taller plants that are more resistant to herbicide and whose leaves produce up to four times more cocaine alkaloid.

Even if coca and opium poppy cultivation were to fall sharply, drugs traffickers now offer a wide variety of synthetic products. In the US a powerful painkiller legally available on prescription is becoming popular among heroin addicts, for example. The UN reckons that about 30m people already consume amphetamines, more than the combined total of heroin and cocaine users.

Legalising narcotics would break the grip of organised crime on the drugs trade. It would also help separate casual users who take drugs for recreation from the hard core of addicts who account for well over half the drugs consumed and who need special help.

But the risks to public health could be hard to sell in increasingly risk-averse developed societies. A limited tolerance of softer, less harmful drugs such as cannabis, however - already being tried in the UK and the Netherlands - is sensible, and releases resources for tackling harder drugs. The governments of wealthier countries must also look imaginatively at strategies for reducing demand - for example, by helping addicts reduce dependence gradually and safely.

For the US and other governments that advocate zero tolerance policies, these "harm reduction" approaches are anathema. But combined with greater efforts to bring growers in countries such as Colombia and Afghanistan into better-funded alternative development programmes - as well as vigorous suppression of criminal drug gangs - they offer a better way forward.

The war on drugs has simply shown that drugs and the drugs markets cannot be wiped out. It is time to look at more realistic and less ambitious alternatives.

http://news.ft.com/cms/s/d94570b8-6699-11d9-a832-00000e2511c8.html

 

Not directly related, but in the interest of not starting another thread...


Shooting the messenger in the war on drugs
By Bill Conroy,
Posted on Fri Jan 14th, 2005 at 08:15:45 PM EST
The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Newark, N.J., recently announced that Jorge Reyeros was slated to be sentenced in April of this year for conspiring with his brother, Juan, and their Colombian contacts to smuggle 150 kilos of cocaine into the United States in 1999.

Jorge Reyeros also was convicted of accessing a U.S. Customs Service computer without authorization. He is facing a prison sentence for his crimes of up to 30 years, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

On the surface, there is nothing remarkable about Reyeros’ story. He appears to be just another number in the war on drugs. But according to former U.S. Customs inspector John B. Conroy, Reyeros’ indictment in 2000 for his crimes should have happened some four years earlier – which is when Conroy first blew the whistle on his activities.

For Conroy, the Reyeros case is emblematic of how law enforcement itself has been corrupted by the war on drugs.

The press release issued by the U.S. Attorney’s Office describes Reyeros as a “former United States Customs Service inspector.” U.S. Customs was merged into the new Department of Homeland Security over the course of 2003, several years after Reyeros’ criminal activities came to light.

However, the fallout from the Reyeros case continues to this day for Conroy -- who claims his whistleblowing in the case is one of the driving reasons he was ultimately forced out of Customs.

What follows is Conroy’s tale of the Reyeros case and how it contributed to destroying his career. Conroy worked with Reyeros at Newark International Airport in the 1990s.

Buckstop

For starters, Conroy stresses that Reyeros was far more than a Customs inspector. In fact, he says from 1991 to 1998, Reyeros served at the Newark International Airport as the supervisor of a major narcotics and currency squad -- a unit dubbed the Outbound Currency Enforcement Team, or Buckstop.

Buckstop was designed to inspect outgoing passengers and cargo to stop currency (often drug money) from being smuggled out of the country.

Conroy also became part of the Newark airport Buckstop team in the mid 1990s; Reyeros was his boss.

“I was the union rep at the airport, and one of my inspectors came to me and said he needed to get off the Buckstop team,” Conroy recalls. “No one wanted to swap with him, so I did.”

That was in 1995. Over the course of the next year, while working as part of Buckstop, Conroy says he began to notice a number of problems related to altered computer entries, inappropriate procedures and Reyeros’ insistence on overseeing searches of the passengers and cargo on southbound flights of Colombian airline Avianca.

A year later, Conroy says he had seen enough to go to Customs management, Internal Affairs and even the Treasury Department’s Office of Inspector General to report his suspicions.

No one did anything about it, he claims.

However, some four years later, another federal agency caught two “Colombian gentleman” in a wiretap, Conroy says, “discussing the Customs manager they owned at Newark.”

They were referring to Reyeros, Conroy adds.

Only then did Customs take action.

Conroy describes what happened in April 2000 in the wake of that wire interception in an e-mail he sent to Narco News. At this point, Conroy had already retired from Customs -- forced out, he claims, because of his whistleblower activity.

Two IA (Customs Internal Affairs) agents came to my home in Florida and took an 18-page statement, including details about racial and religious profiling (carried out at the direction of Reyeros) -- including searching Catholic priests and protestant ministers with Roman collars for mission money, and then seizing it as “drug proceeds” for Buckstop -- plus falsification of (Customs computer) records to diminish the number of blacks (shown as) being strip searched and patted down on outbound searches, ... plus fake “KTP,” or Keep the Peace, stops on whites to keep the blacks from complaining.

He (Reyeros) targeted blacks going home to African, taking the village food money off these travelers. One seizure was $10,038, and included the small bills in the man’s pockets. None were over $15,000, and these were being used to “pad” Buckstop results. He falsified (computer) records by juggling racial statistics, or wiping race fields out when we entered them, or changed the race, to reduce the number of blacks being shown as “searched” and to show more Latinos and whites. Blacks at the time made up more than ... 95 percent of our strip searches.

He also inflated local records of how many bags were searched on Avianca and certain southbound Continental flights, didn’t use the provided X-ray van.... He was doing all this, apparently, to stay in charge of Buckstop, by producing $$ seizures, while trying to avoid doing (searching) Avianca flights. And when we did THEM (Avianca passenger and cargo searches), when the supervisor (Reyeros) was not around, we would hit $240,000, $275,000, etc., concealed.

Seaport

In 1998, Reyeros was transferred to a new job. He was put in charge of another narcotics unit, this time at the Newark-Elizabeth Seaport. That’s where Internal Affairs finally caught up to him.

The press release from the U.S. Attorney’s office describes how he was stung:

The evidence at trial showed that Jorge Reyeros ... who had been employed by the U.S. Customs Service since 1973, used a Customs computer on April 12, 1999, to conduct research concerning a company that his co-conspirators, including (brother) Juan Reyeros, intended to use to import a shipment of approximately 400 to 500 kilograms of cocaine. The co-conspirators were unaware that the company, which was called “TJ Import Produce,” had been invented by Customs agents a few days earlier as part of an investigation into the possibility that a Customs employee was assisting narcotics traffickers.

One of the narcotics traffickers, Hernan Uribe, a/k/a “Nacho,” 47, of Medellin, Colombia, was extradited from Colombia and arrived in the United States on Dec. 13, 2004. Uribe pleaded guilty before U.S. District Judge William G. Bassler on Dec. 14, 2004, to participating in the 1999 narcotics conspiracy. Uribe testified at the trial of his co-defendants on Dec. 16, and 21, 2004.

Uribe’s sentencing is scheduled for June 14, 2005, at 10 a.m. He faces a statutory minimum penalty of 10 years in prison, a maximum penalty of life imprisonment, and a fine up to $4,000,000.

The fourth defendant named in the Superseding Indictment, Rafael Garavito-Garcia, is a fugitive.

Conroy explains how the scam worked.

“Reyeros used the Customs computer to vet (screen out) import companies that were going to have their cargo searched to assure that the cargo (including the cocaine) got through Customs,” he says. “His people in Colombia fed him information on a proposed import company they wanted to use, and Reyeros would search and see if the company would trigger a search. There are only so many companies that import goods from Colombia, so he had a small universe of companies to look at that met the criteria (for shipping the cocaine).”

Conroy adds that because Reyeros was a supervisor of a narcotics team at the seaport, he also could override a search order or put it in the hands of people he knew would “miss” the illegal cargo.

“It was a near foolproof system for smuggling coke,” Conroy adds.

He says Customs foiled the racket by tricking Reyeros into using a phony importing company set up by Internal Affairs. The gig was up, and Reyeros was busted in July 2000, some four years after Conroy first attempted to put an end to his scheme.

If another federal agency had not stumbled onto Reyeros’s racket due to a wiretap, and subsequently put pressure on Customs to act, Conroy says it is very possible that Reyeros would still be gaming the system to this day.

Conroy points out that one of the cocaine-smuggling charges against Reyeros dated back to 1997, when he was still heading the narcotics unit at the airport.

From the press release issued by the U.S. Attorney’s Office:

In addition, Jorge Reyeros was charged with participation in a separate 1997 conspiracy to import cocaine into the United States, as well as three counts of accessing without authorization and exceeding his authorized access in 1997 to a computer of United States Customs Service (as that agency was formerly known).

Reyeros was acquitted of that 1997 charge. However, the fact that it was part of the indictment to begin with leads Conroy to believe that Reyeros was not only allowing drug money to leave the country while stationed at the Newark airport, but that he also was likely using the Customs computer system at the airport to facilitate the importation of cocaine through his connections.

“They just didn’t have enough evidence on that charge to get a conviction,” Conroy adds.

Ironically, Reyeros kept his job nearly a year longer than did Conroy, who retired in September 1999.

Conroy says he was essentially forced to retire after being put “back on the piers to haul cargo, intentionally, I believe, to injure me, and force my retirement, as I had a known cervical spine injury (fractures).”

Conroy says he did file an Equal Employment Opportunity discrimination complaint concerning his treatment by Customs, but the case was dismissed in May 2004. He says he never pursued the matter in the courts, “because the system is set up to retaliate against whistleblowers, so there is no point going through that system.”

He adds, “No matter what the best intentions of the leaders of these (law-enforcement) agencies are, it is the people under them, in the management ranks, who are completely out of control. So any change in the system that is implemented (by new leaders) will be corrupted from the start.”

Conroy quips that he was not completely accurate in saying that Customs management totally overlooked his warnings about Reyeros back in 1996.

“I wasn’t ignored completely….,” he explains. “After I went to management ... they did write me up on disciplinary charges and transferred me to the seaport to unload cargo and hurt my back.”

Strangely, Conroy adds, his Customs work-record file does not now reflect any of those disciplinary actions.

“It looks like my file has been sanitized,” Conroy says.

http://narcosphere.narconews.com/story/2005/1/14/201545/334

 

And the parade of law enforcement officers who see the folly of the drug war continues...
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Ex-cop: Rein in the war on drugs

By Mike Seate
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Tuesday, January 18, 2005

Howard Wooldridge rode into town last weekend on his horse, just like a lawman from the Old West. But the former detective didn't visit Pittsburgh to lock up bad guys. He was here to lecture on what he feels is the biggest fraud ever perpetrated on the American public.

"After 15 years in law enforcement, I realized what incredible waste the war on drugs really is. I was arresting drunk drivers who were a real danger, while my colleagues were going after kids with Baggies full of pot. It didn't make any sense," Wooldridge said.

His tour of Pittsburgh involved several guest spots on TV and radio, and a speaking engagement at Monroeville's Bethel AME Church. That Wooldridge delivers his message from beneath a weathered cowboy hat and crosses the country on horseback helps him gain a foothold with audiences who might not think decriminalizing drugs is the best plan for their communities.

A conversation with the man reveals an honest, passionate and often funny approach to this sensitive subject. His freewheeling style has won Wooldridge and his organization LEAP -- Law Enforcement Against Prohibition -- a growing nationwide following.

His main problems with the war on drugs are the astronomical costs in lives and money.

"What grinds me up is the way law enforcement people perpetuate the lie that arresting drug dealers will make a difference in the availability and strength of drugs," he said. "The smugglers are smart enough to factor in a loss of maybe 20 percent of a shipment. So even when there's a big bust, they just ship more."

It might seem odd for a former cop to question the sanity of locking up casual drug users, but Wooldridge said the $28,000 it costs to imprison a user for a year could be better spent on rehabilitation programs or tracking down violent criminals.

It's not a message that has a universal appeal for law enforcement personnel, he acknowledged.

While serving on the police force in Bath Township, Mich., Wooldridge said, he often kept his opinions on the drug war to himself. "It wasn't really something you could talk about in the doughnut shop with my friends," he joked.

As he began to speak out against the war on drugs and its annual cost of about $19 billion, Wooldridge said he met other cops who felt the same way. Today, he said, LEAP has about 2,000 members nationwide.

"Even though I knew this (anti-drug effort) was an incredible waste of time, when you're an active duty officer and you come out against (it), people think you must want to use drugs or that you can't be counted on to enforce the laws, so it's a lose-lose situation," he said.

With the constraints of police work behind him, Wooldridge plans to finish his cross-country horseback tour astride his faithful companion Molly. Then he'll head to Washington, D.C., where he'll put his skills to work as an anti-drug-war lobbyist.

"People are hungry for some answers to this problem besides just building more prisons," he said.

Mike Seate is a staff writer for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. He can be reached at (412) 320-7845 or e-mail him at mseate@tribweb.com.

http://pittsburghlive.com/x/tribune-review/opinion/columnists/seate/s_294202.html