How America Lost the War on Drugs

The new ads took a counterintuitive approach. "We wanted to make sure we were getting through to the thrill-seekers — those teenagers who are much more likely to use drugs — and convince them that it was more exciting not to do drugs," says Palmgreen. In a heralded spot called "Pete's Couch," the teenage narrator says, "I smoked weed and nobody died. I didn't get into a car accident. I didn't OD on heroin the next day. Nothing happened. We sat on Pete's couch for eleven hours." Then the camera shifts to show other teenagers, presumably those who haven't smoked weed, doing fun things — biking, playing basketball, flirting with girls. "You have a better shot at dying out in the real world," the narrator says, "but I'll take my chances out there." The advertising community was impressed with the spot: "Finally, an admission that smoking pot isn't calamitous," cheered Slate's advertising columnist, Seth Stevenson. Said Palmgreen: "Really good spots. The focus groups of thrill-seekers gave them great grades."

But the reality is that such ads — no matter how persuasive — do little if anything to prevent teens from trying pot. In 2005, a government-commissioned study designed to evaluate the prevention campaign over five years delivered its conclusions: Kids who had been exposed to the campaign ended up with rates of drug use that were roughly the same as those of the control group, who had not seen the ads. Murray loudly challenged the study's methodology, but when Congress asked federal analysts at the Government Accountability Office to assess the findings, the GAO upheld the report. The anti-drug campaign had not worked at all.

There was another problem with the Walters approach: Just as the federal government asserted the dangers of smoking pot, the states — first California, then three others — were permitting doctors to legally prescribe marijuana to relieve the chronic pain that came with cancer, polio and other debilitating long-term diseases. Attorney General John Ashcroft dispatched federal agents to begin raiding the suppliers and purchasers of medical marijuana in California — people who were operating completely within state law. The raids were even more surreal in their theatrics than the ones that had been launched by McCaffrey: In one particularly ludicrous incident, a forty-four-year-old post-polio sufferer named Suzanne Pfeil, who smoked prescription marijuana to relieve her pain, was hauled off to jail by DEA agents who pointed automatic rifles at her head and handcuffed her to her wheelchair. The rhetoric reached the level of crusade: Walters called citizens who plant and tend marijuana gardens "terrorists who wouldn't hesitate to help other terrorists get into the country with the aim of causing mass casualties."

What was striking to many veteran drug warriors was how fully the drug czar's office had bet on the youth marijuana initiative. For all Ashcroft's bluff talk about wanting to "escalate the War on Drugs," only a very small portion of it was being escalated. Funding for drug courts, which channel nonviolent drug offenders through treatment programs rather than prison, was zeroed out, and funding for local police was gutted. Carnevale, who quit his job after overseeing the transition in 2000, began to feel he was in a time warp. "This White House is walking away from prevention funding and treatment," he says now. "They haven't supported the community anti-drug coalitions, which actually work pretty well, and domestic law enforcement is flat or declining. To have a successful drug policy, you need all these elements, and what this administration has done is go crazy on exactly the element that doesn't work."

By the summer of 2005, the drug czar's failures were beginning to spill out into the open. For four years, while he focused obsessively on pot, Walters had done virtually nothing about meth, which was rapidly devastating the red states that had elected his boss. Walters struck a strangely discordant note on the growing epidemic, insisting that even as methamphetamine spread from the West Coast to the East, it remained a regional problem, not a national one, and therefore did not place high on his list of priorities. That September, the House's meth caucus asked Walters to come in for a meeting, to see if they could restore some element of dialogue and begin to rebalance the budget. The drug czar, once again downplaying the issue, sent Murray in his place. The congressmen, who had excluded the press to prevent grandstanding, went through the budget in detail and told the drug deputy what they wanted restored to fight meth. But, according to one staffer, Murray just sat there: "He didn't even bother to ask a question."

Incensed, Rep. Mark Souder, a Republican who chairs the House Subcommittee on Drug Policy, walked out of the room and held an angry press conference. Murray's testimony, he said, had been "pathetic" and "an embarrassment," and Walters was not doing his job: "If he does not lead, we need a change of the drug czar." Sen. Grassley, the Iowa Republican, echoed Souder a few days later. "What I've never understood," he said, "is why they took marijuana so much more seriously than methamphetamine, when methamphetamine is a much more serious drug."

By virtually every objective measure, the White House had lost the War on Drugs. Last year, Walters boasted that drug use among teenagers has fallen since 2002 — ignoring the fact that overall drug use remains unchanged. The deeper problem is that the drug czar has stopped measuring anything other than drug use. During the 1990s, at the direction of Gen. McCaffrey, Carnevale had created a comprehensive system to measure whether we were winning the drug war. The system took into account drug price and availability in the United States, how difficult it was for drug smugglers to get their product into the country and the consequences of drug use on public health and crime. But Walters simply tossed out that system of evaluation — as well as the unflattering facts it highlighted. "Had we kept it," Carnevale tells me, "we would see that the Bush administration has not made a positive impact on any of the measures."

Most unexpectedly of all, crime — a problem that seemed to have been licked a decade ago — is beginning to creep back up. In October 2006, the Police Executive Research Forum released a report declaring that violent crime in the country was "accelerating at an alarming pace." Murders were up twenty-seven percent in Boston over the previous year, sixty percent in San Antonio and more than 300 percent in Orlando. Even in the cloistered world of policing, complaints began to build about the numbers and about the cuts in federal funding. "The reality is a lot of police officers are politically conservative folks," says Ron Brooks, the president of the National Narcotics Officers' Association. "But there's been a lack of leadership in this administration on this issue."

10. THE RETURN OF DON BERNA

While the drug czar was cracking down on medical marijuana, the Bush administration was also overseeing a dramatic escalation in its overseas front of the War on Drugs. From the start, the White House had trumpeted Plan Colombia as an essential weapon in its anti-drug arsenal, eliminating inconvenient rules that had gotten in the way of a full military commitment to the project. For "those in the drug business," Walters declared in January 2002, "now is the time to get out." But despite the billions the administration spent on the program, and the new impunity given to the Colombian military, nobody really knew whether it was working. In July 2006, Adam Isacson decided to see for himself.

Isacson, a scholar who runs the Colombia program at the Center for International Policy, flew down to the Andes to construct his own assessment of Plan Colombia. He decided to make two stops — in Medellín, to determine how much the country's security situation had improved, and in Putumayo, to determine the success of the plan to eradicate the drug traffic. Regular assessments compiled by the White House drug office suggested that the crop-eradication program had reduced the acreage under coca cultivation in Colombia, but Isacson was skeptical: The price of cocaine on the American street had not risen, and separate estimates by the United Nations undercut the Bush administration's findings.

The modern Medellín he found looked more like Miami than a front in the drug war. The government and its paramilitary allies had secured the city, and U.S. officials went out of their way to praise the cooperation they were getting from Colombian police and military units — which had been cleansed, they said, of corruption. When Isacson pressed people about why the violence had decreased so dramatically, he was told repeatedly that "the paramilitaries won" — that government-supported forces had simply driven off the left-wing guerrillas and ended civil war in the city.

The paradox for Americans was that paramilitary commanders, such as Don Berna, had also taken control of the cocaine trade and retained enough political clout, according to a study by a Colombian think tank, to alter the composition of the Colombian Senate. When Don Berna was arrested two years ago, the entire bus transportation system of Medellín shut down for a day. "The command came down from the prison phone," says Aldo Civico, a professor of international relations at Columbia University who has done extensive research on drug smugglers and the paramilitaries. Don Berna is now in a jail cell south of Medellín, from which he continues to control his trafficking organization. "It is a signal to everyone that Don Berna is the one who is in power in Medellín," Civico says.

In Putumayo, Isacson found tent cities buried in the thick jungle, migrants living underneath sheets of plastic. Though tens of millions of American dollars had been spent on trying to improve the local economy, the main road that farmers were supposed to use to ferry their legitimate products to market was still unpaved, and a factory American money had built in 2003 was already shut down. Putumayo had been the first target of Plan Colombia's spray-eradication efforts and the site of its initial success: Coca cultivation had been cut by ninety-three percent from 2000 to 2004. But the place Isacson saw only two years later was "depressed." With no real financial incentive to switch to legitimate crops, farmers in the region had once again begun planting coca: Cultivation doubled in 2005. "We didn't see anything to suggest the improvement was sustainable," Isacson tells me.

The problem was that coca had simply moved next door, to the rural province of Nariño, along the country's Pacific Coast. Traffickers were planting strains of coca that could grow from seed to harvest in just six months. "The spray planes eradicated Putumayo," Isacson says, "and then all of a sudden coca cultivation starts in Nariño, and you see the same pattern — coca money means all these nightclubs and stores go up in these nothing towns, the police start reporting a sharp increase in murders, and eventually the provincial government is overwhelmed." The traffickers hopscotched across the country — Putumayo to Nariño, Nariño to Antioquia — always one step ahead of the drug agents and soldiers.

"As a drug-control policy," Isacson says, "it's hard to come to any conclusion other than that Plan Colombia has failed." In June of this year, the CIA released an assessment that confirmed Isacson's conclusion. Admitting that it had previously been undercounting the coca crop, the agency issued revised numbers showing that six years of Plan Colombia, at nearly $1 billion a year, had not cut coca cultivation at all. The effort to stop cocaine at its source had not made a dent.

"We've been working in Colombia for thirty years, and we don't have a hell of a lot to show for it," says Myles Frechette, the American ambassador to Colombia during the Clinton administration. "This is like a cancer. Every year the lesion, if you took a snapshot, would be bigger."

11. THE WATER BALLOON

At night, the population of el Paso, Texas, is 700,000, and that of Ciudad Juárez, just across the border, is 1.4 million. During the day, those numbers shift, as Mexicans stream across the cobblestone bridge over the Rio Grande for legal work in the United States. Every twelve hours, the two cities pass 100,000 people back and forth, squeezing them from end to end like the contents of a water balloon. "Among them," says Tony Payan, the political scientist at the University of Texas-El Paso and an expert in the dynamics of the local drug trade, "you see the spotters, the lingerers, mostly young men who are just standing there, watching out for when the coast is clear or when an American border agent who's been paid off by the cartel comes on duty. Then they tell the people that need to know, so they can make their drug runs across the border into Texas." With the failure of Plan Colombia, a handful of bridges along the Mexican border have become the main front in the War on Drugs.

Cocaine trafficking in Mexico has its own prehistory. For generations, family networks of smugglers had moved marijuana and cheap, black-tar heroin across the border — veteran DEA agents were accustomed to arresting the grandsons of men they had arrested years earlier — and the whole drug traffic in Mexico was small enough, by the mid-1980s, that it was effectively controlled by one man, Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, who ran a violent trafficking organization out of Tijuana. As Colombian groups, chased from the Caribbean by American interdiction efforts, began to look to the southwest border in the early 1990s, Felix Gallardo discovered he could no longer control the traffic himself from prison. "He had a meeting with his lieutenants and divided the Mexican border crossings up among them, creating the modern cartels," Payan says. "His nephews kept Tijuana, and one group got the Sinaloa-Arizona crossing, another got Laredo-Nuevo Laredo, and Amado Carrillo Fuentes got El Paso-Juárez."

Mexican officials along the border, whose PRI party had kept a lock on national power for seventy years, allowed traffickers to move their product in exchange for reduced violence. "In order to coexist, the government looked the other way as long as the cartels didn't wreak havoc in the country," says Armand Peschard-Sverdrup, director of the Mexico Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "It became somewhat of a safety valve in terms of dealing with organized crime, as a way of mitigating the political instability." Though the U.S. government pushed Mexican officials to crack down on corruption, its pleas and threats went largely unheeded. By 1997, Carrillo Fuentes — the Lord of the Skies — was moving tons of cocaine across the border every year and had amassed a fortune worth $25 billion. But that same year, Carrillo Fuentes died on an operating table in Mexico City, where he had been undergoing plastic surgery to change his appearance and avoid detection: In the ghoulish post-mortem photographs, his face is speckled like a snake's skin, two shades of brown and one of pink. Juárez fell into a testy, three-way competition for control of the drug trade, and the murders took on a symbolic vocabulary of their own: Tortured victims piled in oil barrels filled with concrete and buried alive, members of opposing cartels murdered and left to rot in car trunks in their own neighborhoods, snitches killed and left on the side of the road. The violence between cartels is so pervasive, Payan says, "if you move into a home in Juárez, you will never know whether there's a body underneath the floor in your dining room."