Category: Drug Law Reform

Julia Buxton sets herself two purposes: first, to explain how the “balloon effect” undermines even the best executed drug prohibition policies conceived according to the logic of supply suppression and, second, to lay the blame for all the evils associated with global drug prohibition at the feet of the United States. In both purposes she succeeds through the mobilization of abundant evidence – for the first purpose – and historical argument for the second.

The book is organized into sixteen chapters starting with the history of intoxicating substances and ending with a short but pointed review of how the global prohibitionist regime has deprived humanity of one of nature’s most flexible and useful products: hemp. Throughout, Buxton weaves historical narrative into a discussion of the political interests and personalities which shaped the ideology of supply suppression that came to be embodied in the institutions of international drug control through the United Nations Conventions. Missing from this account, however, is the public choice story of how specific institutions in the United States captured the drug control issue and turned it to the growth of their own mission, organizational ambit and resource base.

Though not unique to the United States, the political economy of American politics – particularly the outsized influence of specific individuals occupying particular offices – has given, and continues to give, the United States extraordinary influence over United Nations drug control conventions. Effectively, the United States has – with the compliance of most of the world’s major states – exported its own supply-side drug suppression preference to the rest of the planet through its control over the relevant United Nations institutions. This has resulted in these organs gaining extraordinary influence over the application of the drug conventions in member countries with the effect of limiting the range of the possible where harm reduction and non-prohibitionist alternatives are concerned. This, Buxton argues, has been a catastrophe – and not just for drug users.

For it is the irrefutable truth that drug prohibition cuts across and poisons every policy domain associated with the modern nation state. There is almost no issue area – as Buxton shows in chapter after chapter – that is not complicated or made more problematic by the aggressive criminality that supply-side drug prohibition unleashes. Nor does it have to be this way. But for the singular obsessive policy focus of American prohibitionists, much could have been done to address demand – and the harm that arises from demand – with considerable benefits for public health and the reduction of crime. Like others who have examined this issue, Buxton finds that drug prohibition, American-style, amounts to harm maximization.

Of the evils associated with global drug prohibition, she is nearly exhaustive – at least in itemizing the worst of them. A longer book could have gone into more detail on the pervasive corruption of authorities in countries which most vigorously enforce prohibition. Much of what is wrong with drug prohibition is explained at a high, though not too high, level of abstraction – and well referenced in the bibliography – making this a good choice for a university or college course on the harm and unintended consequences global drug prohibition.

Buxton spares no criticism for the mechanisms and methodologies of data collection employed by the international regimes responsible for prosecuting the global drug war. Anyone following this issue has already concluded that even the most reliable numbers and data leave much to be desired. From one annual UN World Drug Report to another the metrics change, trends are dropped or initiated and the reader comes away wondering whether there is a systematic effort to enable or inhibit critical scrutiny of what’s really going on. This, Buxton explains, arises from a preference for quantitative methodologies while ignoring qualitative data, methods and approaches that would create a more fleshed-out perspective of drugs and drug users.

Buxton is not the first, and won’t be the last, to argue that drug prohibition has been aided and abetted by the kind of science that is funded in its name. This too is an area that might have warranted deeper explanation. The political economy of research funding on drugs and their effects – much of it funded through the U.S. National Institutes of Health — is heavily skewed toward the production of negative findings, a feature of how the institutions which fund research into illicit drugs have been captured by the ideology and interests of supply-side strategies.

Students of drug prohibition have studied to the “balloon effect” since the debut of the war on drugs in the Nixon Administration. The phenomenon is easy to understand. Using a drug control strategy premised upon supply suppression – as distinct from demand reduction – initiates a pattern whereby eradication in one region produces a surge of production in another, much the way squeezing a balloon in one place causes it to expand elsewhere. This iterative model has been observed countless times, yet ideology and organizational interests combine to disable prohibitionists from learning any lesson except to do more of the same.

The second feature of the balloon effect that Buxton touches on, but not does fully develop, is the widely observed tendency for a process of natural selection to take hold with drug traffickers and suppliers. This takes the form of state authorities weeding out the week and inefficient trafficking networks through crackdown in one region which produces the unintended consequence of strengthening the survivors and reducing their competition. Drug prohibition, seen in this light, is a strategy for driving drug traffickers and producers toward more violent tactics and practices – such as we are currently seeing on the Mexico-United States border. Only the most innovative and ruthless producers survive, pushing the global drug war into a spiral of increasingly militarized violence as traffickers adopt the tactics and weapons of national armies with whom they are increasingly in direct combat.

For students of drug prohibition, there is little that is new here. Buxton puts the arguments together with good effect, showing how the execution of supply-side focused drug prohibition makes everything about drugs, and drug use, worse than it would otherwise be. My only quarrel is that she could have been more explicit in drawing out the political economy implications of her arguments for readers who ask “What’s this got to do with me?” Buxton could have been more explicit in showing how the crusading pursuit of an unachievable utopia bends the energies and resources of the state, and its enforcement apparatus, to undemocratic and militaristic ends while enriching and enlarging the power and violence of organized crime. We all have a dog in this fight. We are all collateral damage in the war on drugs.
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Craig Jones, PhD
Kingston ON