Prohibition Racket Harms Indigenous Farmers

A Daily Kos diarist writes about the ridiculously destructive consequences of the War on Drugs for the countries in which it is waged. In short, the easy cash has built up gang infrastructure to the point that it acts like a parallel government and their rates of violent crime and execution-style homicides in trafficking zones are outrageous. Mexico alone lost 5,612 people to trafficking-related murders in 2008.

Here in the US, this insane debacle has led us to have the highest per capita imprisonment rate in the world. And looking at those prisoners, they're disproportionately black or Hispanic, or too poor to afford rehab. Overall, drug users are predominately white, with drug use among the wealthy often treated humanely, as a medical problem.

Why do people get that Prohibition was bad, but not this? Sure, some individuals get addicted to alcohol, but it's a lot easier to get them to seek treatment and keep their addiction from destroying their lives and hurting others than it would be if they could go to jail for having that addiction. It was easy to see that the increase in lawlessness, the power of street gangs, and disrespect for the law and its officers multiplied greatly during Prohibition.

But here's what the Prohibition on alcohol didn't have going for it: it wasn't making any important US business owners rich and it was mainly criminalizing white people. See? The War on Drugs is way, way better already.

If we're going to be fair, (ha!) alcohol and tobacco destroy the health and sometimes lives of a great many people. Yet moonshiners and tobacco farmers, stereotypically pictured as white, are built up as semi-heroic figures in a way that the originators of other recreational drugs aren't.

Though whatever you think of Central and South American coca farmers, often among the most desperately poor peasant farmers in a region characterized by grim rural poverty, the US government is waging a campaign of chemical warfare against them that's enriching one of the worst actors in agribusiness: Monsanto.

Coca is a traditional South American herb that native peoples would use as a light stimulant, like coffee or chocolate, chewing a few leaves at a time. At such doses, the active chemicals are in low enough concentrations that the effects are reported to be very mild. The point is that it was a culturally integrated native crop whose use and growth would have been hard to eradicate even if US citizens had never developed a taste for its concentrated form.

That means it sits side by side in many cases with farmers growing subsistence crops for their families or local communities. It's grown in areas where indigenous peoples live, near sensitive and important rainforest habitat.

I don't know if that's news to you, but the aerial eradication campaign against coca crops seems to be in common knowledge. What's it mean, though? Profit for the US, pain for indigenous farmers.

What's sprayed is the Monsanto-made chemical glyphosate, usually marketed here under the brand name RoundUp. It's like Agent Orange in most respects, except that it hasn't been shown to produce the same gruesome birth defects. It's sprayed on coca crops and sugar cane and bananas and fish ponds and cassava. It's sprayed over whole villages. It's sprayed on Amazon rainforest nature reserves that there's so much noise about trying to protect. Glyphosate leaves vast swathes of tropical land defoliated and devoid of food for the remaining (often sickened) people and animals.

It's a catastrophe for plant and animal life, as well as indigenous subsistence agriculture. It's a windfall for an American company that profits by contaminating the cereal genome and polluting our land and water with toxins.

And has this War on Drugs eliminated drug use or addiction while meting out these perverse punishments and rewards? Has it stopped the flow of drugs over the border? Has it increased respect for the justice system? Has it found a way for farmers to make a good living growing other crops? Has it bankrupted the criminal masterminds of the cartels? No on all counts. In fact, in Colombia, while ...

... overall figures indicate that Colombia has reached its goal of eradicating 230,000 hectares (561,000 acres) of coca in 2008. ... Colombia remains the world's leading producer of cocaine.

They say you can learn a lot about people both by the company they keep and the enemies they make. Our War on Drugs is good buddies with Monsanto and a determined enemy of small scale, indigenous agriculture from the Andes to the Yucatan. I know whose side I'd rather be on in that fight.