Cocaine, cannabis and conscience

From Richard Nixon’s war on drugs in the late 1970s to Rodrigo Duterte’s 21st century extreme anti-narcotic campaign, the world has seen a lot in between that has shaped global politics, policies and actions to curb the drug trade. Antony Loewenstein’s book Pills, Powder and Smoke is an exhaustive journalistic account of how governments and corporations have pushed more of the world’s narcotic trade into the hands of notorious cartels that exploit vulnerable communities in some of the world’s most impoverished regions and the poor in rich nations to sell their deadly wares. Mr Lowenstein’s book is an essential read for an understanding of the global drug war as it stands today and its many debilitating ramifications.

The book provides the reader fascinating insights of the drug wars and politics in six nations, from Honduras in Latin America to the UK and Australia. Mr Lowenstein travels to each of these six nations to capture stories of how human lives have been destroyed by violence, substance abuse, government antipathy to softer solutions and greedy corporations that have knowingly pushed addictive chemical substances as alternatives to natural ones produced by indigenous communities.

One of the most path-breaking aspects of this book is Mr Lowenstein’s reportage from Guinea-Bissau, a West African nation whose role in the global drug trade is relatively unknown. The author says he was told that he was probably the first foreign journalist to visit Kassumba, a no-man’s land between Guinea-Bissau and Guinea, where the near absence of law enforcement makes it an ideal landing base for thousands of tonnes of cocaine every year by Latin American cartels to access the European market. A nation in which more than two-thirds of the population lives on less than $2 a day, Guinea Bissau became a preferred stopover point for Latin American drug lords after the US choked the drug’s Europe-bound transit through the Caribbean in the 1980s.

Guinea-Bissau’s case is also used to highlight the entrapment tactics of the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), another Nixon legacy.  The author examines in detail the arrest of Guinea-Bissau’s former navy chief Bubo Na Tchuto, who had been labelled a “narco-terrorist” by the US government. Na Tchuto was arrested in 2013 in international waters, handed over to the US and imprisoned for four years. The author notes, “My reporting reveals that the undercover sting operation and entrapment of these men is familiar tactic used by the DEA, which often relies on concocting stories around Farc in Colombia, cocaine and weapons smuggling. What went unsaid throughout the entire process was that the DEA created every element of the narrative, the drugs and weapons were never transported and the accused men had only become involved in the conspiracy after being approached by undercover agents. The DEA’s case against Na Tchuto was ethically problematic, largely futile in the battle against drug smuggling and disturbingly revealed the long reach of Washington in remote parts of the globe.”

Mr Lowenstein’s detailed account misses out, however, on what is happening in Afghanistan. With US troops being withdrawn and the opium-financed Taliban gaining ascendance, the consequences could be disastrous for India, especially in Punjab and Kashmir.

Of relevance to readers will be sections pertaining to the US, where recent damning revelations about the country’s opioid crisis and legalisation of medical and recreational cannabis in various states have stirred debates for legalising drugs in other parts of the world. Mr Lowenstein provides the historical context of the American drug landscape and the evolution of the country’s domestic narcotics policies.  From how cannabis became “enemy number one” in Richard Nixon’s war on drugs;  the explosion of anti-drug measures under Ronald Reagan; the continuation of Reagan’s agenda under Bill Clinton; George Bush’s attempts to crack down on medical marijuana; the dichotomy of Barack Obama years when a softened policy towards marijuana coexisted with the reality of exponentially rising arrests for possession; and, finally, Donald Trump’s progressive criminal justice reforms in 2018 that could  help those charged with drug offences live more dignified lives.

The author repeats the words of Ohio State University law professor Michelle Alexander to sum up the situation: “You know here are white men poised to run big marijuana business, dreaming of cashing in big— big money, big businesses selling weed — after 40 years of impoverished black kids getting prison time for selling weed, and their families and futures destroyed. Now, white men are planning to get rich doing precisely the same thing.”

That and other parts Mr Lowenstein’s book show a mirror to the world about its war on drugs steeped in delusions of moral superiority.