TOM FEILING

The Candy Machine

How Cocaine Took Over the World

PENGUIN BOOKS

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

PART ONE

How Did We Get Here?

  1 From Soft Drink to Hard Drug

  2 Building a Hard Drug Economy

  3 A Rush to Punish

  4 Cutting off the Lizard’s Tail

PART TWO

Supply and the Third World

  5 Smugglers

  6 The Mexican Supply Chain

  7 ‘Cocaine is the Atomic Bomb of Latin America’

  8 Globalization

PART THREE

Where Do We Go From Here?

  9 The Demand for Cocaine

10 Legalization

11 Prospects

Notes

Permissions and Acknowledgements

Index

PENGUIN BOOKS

THE CANDY MACHINE

Tom Feiling spent ten years struggling to make documentaries for television. Exasperated by the declining fortunes of the genre, he went to Colombia in 2001, hoping to learn Spanish and open a hotel. Realizing that he had neither the money nor the stomach for the Colombian hotel trade, he instead made a documentary, Resistencia: Hip-Hop in Colombia, which went on to screen at film festivals around the world. He came back to London where he became Campaigns Director of Justice for Colombia, a TUC group that defends trade union rights of Colombians. He is a graduate of the London School of Economics. The Candy Machine is his first book.

Acknowledgements

In the UK, I’d like to thank Julia Vellacott and Becky Swift for their advice when I first started looking for a publisher. Thanks too to my agent Broo Doherty and my editor at Allen Lane, Margaret Bluman, for taking a chance on a first-time writer. Sir Keith Morris, Danny Kushlick and Axel Klein are critics of the current handling of the cocaine trade. They made me aware of the main players in the debate, and I am grateful for the encouragement they gave me when I was in the early stages of researching this book.

Liam Craig Best of Justice for Colombia and Jenny Pearce of Bradford University advised me on who best to approach in Colombia. In the United States, the experience and analysis of John Walsh at the Washington Office on Latin America, Sanho Tree at the Institute for Policy Studies, and Adam Isaacson at the Center for International Policy were invaluable. In Bogotá, my friends Nick Perkins, Rusty Young and Ricardo Sanchez helped me a great deal with my research. Tiziana Laudato and Angelica Ibarra helped with translations. Journalists and film-makers Françoise Nieto Fong, Ricardo Restrepo, Daniel Coronell, Steve Ambrus, Romeo Langlois, Pascale Mariani and Carlos Lozano all had interesting things to say about the drugs trade in Colombia, and supplied me with plentiful leads. I’d especially like to thank the many people who agreed to meet and discuss the subject with me, especially since many of them will not share my methods or conclusions: Aldo Lale-Demoz, Rodolfo Llinas and Hugo Javier Bustos at the UNODC (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime); Juan Carlos Montero at DIRAN (Colombian Anti-Narcotics Police); Carlos Medina at the Observatorio de Drogas of the Dirección Nacional de Estupefacientes; Nick Eliades in the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) Public Affairs Office; Than Christie in the Narcotics Affairs Section of the US Embassy; Luis ‘Lucho’ Salamanca, Kevin Higgins, Chris Feistl, Colombian Vice-President Francisco Santos, Malcolm Deas of Oxford University and David Hutchinson. My thanks, too, go to Dan Scott-Lea, Yaneth Pachón, David Curtidor, Daniel Maestre, Adelaida Moreno at the farmworkers’ union Fensuagro, Congressman Luis Fernando Almario Rojas, Congressman Wilson Borja, Alberto Rueda, Markus Schultze-Kraft at the International Crisis Group, Ricardo Vargas at Acción Andina, Gustavo Duncan, Luis Eduardo Cellis Mendez at the Fundación Nuevo Arco Iris, and Omar Gutierrez at the Centre for Investigation and Popular Education (CINEP).

In Jamaica, I’d like to thank Geraldine O’Callaghan and Andy MacLean for letting me stay with them while I was on the island. Marta Shaw, Flip Fraser, Sarah Manley, Lois Grant and Paul Burke gave me plentiful insights and pointed me in the right direction. Thanks also to local law enforcement officers Inspector Michael Simpson, ACP Carl Williams and Carlton Wilson; and to the British police officers working in Jamaica as part of Operation Kingfish: Les Green, Paul Robinson and John McLean. I’m particularly grateful to journalists Anthony Barrett, Glenroy Sinclair and Mark Wignall, and to Bobby Sephestine and Olga Heaven at the prison charity Hibiscus. Lloyd Evans and Gordon Brown helped me to better understand the political situation. I’d also like to thank Barry Chevannes, Horace Levy and Donna Hope at the University of the West Indies at Mona.

In the United States, I’d like to extend my thanks to Marcela Guerrero for help in finding places to stay in various cities, and to Chris Robinson, David Russell, Carlos Tovar and Neerav Kingsland for putting me up as I travelled from city to city. Bruce Johnson, Doris Randolph, the late Dr John Morgan, Elizabeth Mendez Berry, Kym Clark, Larry Miller, James Peterson, Mark Mauer at the Sentencing Project, Clarence Lusane, Professor Peter Reuter and Steven Robertson at the DEA Public Information Office allowed me to pick their brains. The US chapters owe a great deal to ethnographies of drug users and dealers written by John M. Hagedorn, Rick Curtis, Travis Wendell and Philippe Bourgois. My special thanks to all of them. Alex Sanchez of Homies Unidos, Luis Rodriguez, Jeff Chang, Father Tom Hereford and Bruce George all shed precious light on the cocaine economy. Ethan Nadelmann, Tony Newman, Ed Kirtz, Gabriel Sayegh, Tony Papa and Margaret Dooley-Sammuli at the Drug Policy Alliance were supportive and helpful. Rusty White, Jack Cole, Celerino Castillo III, David Doderidge, and Russ Jones of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition provided an invaluable critique of the war on drugs from the point of view of those who have prosecuted it, as did Judge James Gray, Kurt Schmoke and Eric Sterling. My thanks also to Jon Veit, David Lewis, Julienne Gage, John Maass, Samuel Wilcher and Jacob Sullum at Reason magazine. Tom Horvath of Practical Recovery Services, Susan Burton of the ‘A New Way of Life’ re-entry project, Marqueece Harris Dawson of the Community Coalition, Lou Martinez at The Effort Community Health Center and Kenny Glasgow of the Ordinary People Society work with compulsive drug users. The conversations I had with them improved my understanding of addiction and social deprivation in the United States.

For help in investigating cross-border smuggling and the drugs trade in Mexico, I’d like to thank Elijah Wald, Jon Forrest Little, David Fry and Leticia Zamarripa at El Paso Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Sam Quiñones, Rafael Nuñez, Jaime Hervella, Howard Campbell, Tony Payan, Richard Cockett, John Dickie, Sam Logan, Dudley Althaus and Jorge Chabat. For insights into the street drug culture of Mexico City, Benito Azcano Roldán, Alfonso Hernandez at the Centro de Estudios Tepiteños, Carlos Zamudio, Ricardo Sala and Mister Hunter deserve special mention.

I’d like to thank friends who helped me out in one way or another in the writing of the book: Lauren Ferreira, Erin Howley, Mike Sadler and Anna Wilkinson, Chris Walker and Jordan Ethe in the United States. In Mexico, that means Elizabeth Clark, Danielle Savage, Ed Peterson and Jonathan Barbieri, who all helped to make breaks from the writing process more enjoyable. Back in London, when I wondered how to turn such a welter of information into a good read, Sharon Kinsella, Slawek Dorosz, Daniel Wilson, Bryony Morrison, Sam Low, Richard Garner and Michael Ryan offered valuable feedback on early drafts. Maribel Lozano and Nelson Diaz helped with translations and kept Colombia on my mind. Finally, I’d especially like to thank four writers whose insights into the drugs issue most inspired me: Harry Levine, Anthony Henman, Alonso Salazar and Francisco Thoumi.

Unless otherwise indicated, the Colombian interviews were conducted in September 2007, the Jamaican interviews in October 2007, the American interviews in November and December 2007, and the British interviews in May 2008. I would like to thank all the interviewees, particularly those who have chosen to remain anonymous, for investing their time and trust in me.

Introduction

In March 2008, the United Nations’ World Drug Report confirmed that the price of cocaine in Europe had fallen to a record low, fuelling record levels of cocaine use. ‘Celebrity drug offenders can profoundly influence attitudes, values and behaviour towards drug abuse, particularly among young people,’ the report warned. The United Nations blamed this on ‘celebrity culture’ and even accused the police of turning a blind eye to rich and famous misusers of the drug.1

High-profile drug casualties, like the singers Pete Doherty and Amy Winehouse, and the model Kate Moss, vie for space on the front pages of Britain’s tabloids and broadsheets alike with ever-larger drug seizures. In writing this book, I didn’t want to get swept up in the all-too-familiar mix of nosiness, envy and sanctimony that masquerades as the ‘public interest’, or the ritual inflation and deflation of mediocrity that passes for ‘celebrity news’. I have not sought the opinions of commentators, politicians or the drug-taking anecdotes of high-rollers. Instead, I wanted to hear from those who work day to day on the cocaine trade routes that run from London and New York via Miami, Kingston and Tijuana to Colombia. I wanted to see the impact of the war on drugs on the consumers, traders and producers of cocaine, and the impact they have on the soldiers, police officers, customs officials and doctors charged with prosecuting the war. I wanted to bring the tight-lipped mechanics who keep the cocaine economy ticking over on to the stage.

In 2002, I spent a year working in Colombia, at the end of which I made a documentary called Resistencia: Hip-Hop in Colombia. After a screening at a film festival in Bogotá, a Colombian told me that she was surprised but glad to see that a foreigner had made a film about her country that made no mention of the cocaine trade. Cocaine seemed to be the only thing that outsiders knew or wanted to know about Colombia, she told me, and their depictions of the business invariably ended up trading in stereotypes. Colombia is a fascinating and beautiful country and its tourist board will no doubt be happy to read that I would recommend a holiday there to anyone. But they probably won’t enjoy reading anything else I have to say about their country in this book. Colombians argue that their country is not the only cocaine-producing country in the Andes, that the business exists only because of strong demand for cocaine in Europe and the United States and that no country has paid such a high price for cocaine as theirs. But no other country is as well suited to cocaine production as Colombia. Most commentators never consider why this might be, for while the cocaine business, the war on drugs and Colombia’s civil conflict are tangled and confusing, once prised apart, it is shocking how oblivious each player is to the others. Attitudes, policies and institutions seem to function quite independently of one another. This incoherence is not particular to Colombia: it is characteristic of anti-drug strategies worldwide.

When I moved back to London from Bogotá, everybody seemed to be complaining about stress, information overload and how expensive everything had become. Why then, I wondered, did sizeable numbers of Londoners regard the strongest stimulant known to mankind as suitable Friday-night entertainment? Expensive, energizing, esteem-boosting, inclining its users to delusions of grandeur and paranoia in equal measure, cocaine seemed to have become the perfect accompaniment to twenty-first-century life. In 1903, the British Committee on the Acquirement of Drug Habits described cocaine users as typically ‘bohemians, gamblers, high and low-class prostitutes, night porters, bell-boys, burglars, racketeers, pimps and casual labourers’.2 By 2008, cocaine had become ordinary. Indeed, its ordinariness was what most perturbed the authorities. According to The Times, ‘police say privately that cocaine is becoming as acceptable in middle-class Britain as cannabis was a generation ago and that they are losing their battle against the drug’.3 On his first day as Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police in February 2005, Sir Ian Blair informed the waiting press pack that ‘people are having dinner parties where they drink less wine and snort more cocaine’.4 In fact, they were drinking more wine and snorting more cocaine. The exotic newcomer cocaine is more often than not consumed in conjunction with alcohol. The two combine in the liver to produce coca-ethanol, a whole new buzz which stays active for twice as long as cocaine.

‘I’m not interested in what harm it is doing to them personally,’ the new Commissioner of Police went on, ‘but the price of that cocaine is misery on the streets of London’s estates and blood on the roads to Colombia and Afghanistan.’5 The Commissioner’s words echoed those of Nancy Reagan, who in 1988 warned that ‘if you’re a casual drug user, you’re an accomplice to murder’.6 Critics of recreational drug use find themselves in a quandary. Without a social problem to crack down on or helpless victims to whom they might extend their help and compassion, they can only articulate their objections to certain mind-altering substances by invoking the misery that has been caused by driving drug use underground. The source of the problem, it would seem, is the desire for luxury. Cocaine has long been familiar and acceptable to the wealthy and famous. Young British people, aspiring to both wealth and fame, are paying for and enjoying cocaine as never before. Cocaine consumers, whether middle class, working class or lower upper middle class take flack for being uncaring and self-congratulatory, but office work, profligate consumption and a weekly mash-up to make sense of it all have become defining features of life and style up and down the country.

If the likes of Sir Ian Blair and Nancy Reagan were looking for a social problem, why didn’t they target the daily use of crack by the destitute? Unlike the prostitutes of 1903, most of today’s sex workers are in the business only to raise money to pay for their expensive, compulsive crack and/or heroin use. Casualties of crack cocaine have become part of the street life of my neighbourhood in London and several friends of mine have become compulsive users of heroin and crack. Why are there still so many ‘problematic’ drug users? Why do some people succumb to addiction, while others seem able to treat cocaine as mere ornamentation? And why is ‘addiction’ suddenly being bandied about to explain overeating? If we are all junkies of one potentially harmful substance and/or activity or another, does that mean that double espressos and excessive use of Play Station can also be addictive?

In 2004, a kilogram of cocaine typically sold for £655 in Colombia. Once smuggled north into Mexico, it was worth £3,940. Once over the border and into the United States, it would sell for £11,750.7 Once divided into a thousand one-gram bags, it would be worth £18,500. Had you adulterated or cut the kilo with 200 grams of laxative powder or glucose, you could increase its value to £22,200. If, on the other hand, you took that wholesale kilo of cocaine to Europe, you’d be able to sell it for an average of £23,845, more than twice the price it would have fetched in the United States.8 These figures come from a book by Sandro Calvani, one-time head of the Colombian branch of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. They sound credible to me, but it should be understood at the outset that when describing any facet of the cocaine economy, supposition can all too easily take the place of fact. Writing objectively about an illegal activity is difficult at the best of times and most observers seem happy to err on the side of wild exaggeration: figures such as $500 billion for world drug sales are thrown around quite glibly.9 You can’t blame harried journalists, since this figure originated in a press release issued by the United Nations. The Colombian economist Francisco Thoumi has since discovered that ‘the $500 billion figure was the result of “research” attempted by the United Nations agency responsible for coordinating the global assault on drug trafficking, when the boss was desperate for a quick number before a press conference’.

Such laxity is not unusual. The Financial Action Task Force, a multinational organization set up to tackle money-laundering by drugs traffickers, also commissioned a study to calculate the size of the illegal drugs business. When its author reported back that the global trade in illegal drugs was probably worth between $45 billion and $280 billion a year, his employers decided not to publish his findings because ‘some country members expected a larger figure’.10 When even international agencies set more store by what they expect to be true than by what they find to be true, it is no surprise that non-specialists follow suit. The writer of a popular book on the world drug trade claimed that illegal drugs provided Colombia with 36 per cent of its GDP. In fact the cocaine trade has never been responsible for more than 5 per cent of Colombian GDP.11 The United States State Department is required by statute to produce data on the scale of the drugs business, but given the lack of scrutiny of drugs policy by Congress, there is not much incentive to make that data plausible. Perhaps the need to appear authoritative in public discussions is sufficient motivation to produce the numbers, but not reason enough to do the job properly. In ‘The Vitality of Mythical Numbers’, an article published in 1971, Max Singer showed that if one tallied the official figures for the number of heroin addicts in New York City with the price of a heroin habit and an habitué’s dependence on theft to support that habit, New York City did not exist any more – it had been stolen by junkies.12

Opponents of the international war on drugs are also prone to exaggerating the size of the drugs trade. Colombia’s FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) guerrillas, who generally regard the United States as a nation of gluttonous savages and hopeless drug addicts, say that the drugs trade constitutes between 20 and 30 per cent of the world economy.13 Other critics are convinced that the US economy is a net beneficiary of the drugs business, and that the war on drugs is no more than a façade behind which Wall Street banks enjoy the fruits of prohibition. But there is no reason for US banks and corporations to prefer drugs money over any other kind of money. If people spend their money on drugs, it can only mean that they’re not spending it on something else. Francisco Thoumi has pointed out that if it were true that the illegal drugs business contributed to economic growth in the United States, canny economists would recommend that Colombia declare tobacco illegal, thereby raising cigarette prices and increasing smuggling, which would then generate revenue to buoy the country’s national income. Corporations pay taxes to governments; cocaine dealers do not. Corrupt people and tax havens benefit from the trade in illegal drugs, but a country’s economic system does not.

Thankfully, there are trustworthy sources of information on the size of the drugs economy. Whatever its size, the economics of the drugs business clearly favours its practitioners. There are thought to be about 300 major drug importers into Britain, 3,000 wholesalers and 70,000 street dealers. Approximately one in 500 Britons works in the business of buying and selling illegal drugs.14 Between them, they turn over sales of £7–8 billion a year, which is about a third of the size of Britain’s tobacco market and two fifths of its trade in alcohol. Annual imports of cocaine have recently been estimated at 33 tons. Given that a gram typically sells for £50, we can safely assume that the retail cocaine market in the United Kingdom turns over 33 million grams of cocaine, worth £1.6 billion a year.15 To put this figure in some perspective, sales of footwear in the UK were worth £5.7 billion in 2005 and soft drinks sales were worth £6.2 billion.

In the United States, the total value of illegal drug sales is likely to be around £25 billion a year, which amounts to less than 1 per cent of America’s GDP and less than 2 per cent of Americans’ total personal consumption. Given that the United States is far and away the biggest market for nearly all illegal drugs, the global figure is unlikely to be more than twice this. A £50 billion-a-year market is a big market, but in the context of total global trade flows of almost $3 trillion or £1.5 trillion a year, it is a very modest share indeed. The drugs trade’s share of total world trade declines to the trivial when you consider that most of the trade’s value is added only when the drugs cross the United States’ borders. Valuing the drugs trade at import prices reduces its overall value to no more than £10 billion. Besides, there are much bigger illegal businesses than the drugs business. Americans made roughly £350 billion from illegal activities in 1998, equivalent to about 8 per cent of the country’s GDP. The biggest earner was tax evasion, which was worth £131 billion a year, making the £25 billion a year drugs-trafficking business look paltry by comparison.16

I crunch these numbers to demonstrate that the subject of drugs is replete with inaccuracies. As we will see in Chapter 1, the first restrictions on cocaine use were imposed by politicians with moral objections to drug use, but their objections were informed by ignorance, prejudice and caricature. I urge the reader to proceed with an open mind. By giving airtime to those involved in the cocaine business, I hope to puncture some of those stereotypes and draw the reader’s attention to the motives and rewards that sustain both the supply of and demand for cocaine. A drugs policy fit for the twenty-first century will only emerge when these hidden stories are revealed, read and acted on.