 This is our first discussion program for great decisions. It's nice to see all of you here. So today, as Mr. Terrell already said, his name is Pablo Terrell, and he's a professor of environmental studies and international relations at Beloit College, where he currently chairs the environmental studies program. He teaches courses in international political economy, environmental politics development, international governance, international relations of Latin America and Europe, and peace studies. A lot of courses. Pablo received his PhD in international relations from Florida International University in 2003. He also holds a BA in journalism and an MA in international studies. His main research interests include political economy of the environment, multinational enterprises, development, social theory, and pedagogy. His publications include multinational enterprise in Latin America, Latin America's quest for globalization, the role of Spanish firms, and the reconquest of the new world, multinational enterprises, and Spain's direct investment in Latin America. And as we were chatting, he told me that he grew up in Spain. So, a very distinguished individual here to prevent or to present drug policy in Latin America. So, let's give him a round of applause. You thank you all for coming. Thank you very much for that generous introduction, and thank you for coming here today, and thanks to the Meet Library of the Organizers for organizing this wonderful series. Is the sound okay? Do we need to turn it up, down, leave it there? Up a little, okay. Hope that works. Is that better? No? Okay. Is that better now? Okay. If it gets too loud or not enough, just wave at me and give me the sign. Okay. So, thank you. So, I teach international relations and environmental studies. My field is the international political economy of the environment. That's more or less where I feel comfortable, and I teach course courses related to that. One of the topics that was offered through the series this year was on Latin America and the US, and one of the key issues in the relations between the US and Latin America is drugs, drug policy. The one thing that I do want to emphasize in the opening is that the US and countries across Latin America in general have very, very rich and friendly relations in general. But those normally don't make news. So, what we normally hear in the news is the few two or three areas where there is disagreement. And this is definitely one of them for reasons that I will be discussing in a little while. But in general, US and Latin American countries consider each other their strongest allies. Normally at the United Nations international forum, they always collaborate. Sometimes they even help one another. If the US is going through rough times, the last one of the Latin American countries to introduce a proposal on their behalf, Mexico normally does that. So, really the work that happens behind closed doors would not really suggest that relations can be so complicated. But the good news about the US and Latin America is that they agree that the issues that they do not agree on deserve to be discussed further and that that should not really keep us from making progress in other areas. So, these issues flare up occasionally but don't really damage relations in general. So, I really want to make that clear from the get go because some of my presentation might suggest that relations are not friendly. Having said that, the topic is a very serious one because one of the things that we'll see with my presentation is that there is lots of people losing their lives. So, this is an area of policy that is costing hundreds of thousands of lives in the US and in Latin America. So, with that, I'm gonna move on to the presentation. Most of the key points I have are here in the PowerPoint. I will be making reference to some key concepts that I'll put there, but I will divide the presentation in three main parts. First, I will introduce US drug policy. Second, I will assess the record of US drug policy. And three, I'm going to discuss some alternatives that have been floated out there that have been tried elsewhere. And then we'll open it up for questions from the audience. One more thing before we get into this. As I mentioned, I am a political economist. I emphasize the environment. So, the way that in political economy, we look at these things is what policy do we have in place? What are the results of that policy? What are the gains? What are the losses? What are the costs? What are the benefits? Are there alternatives? And that's the way that we approach this. In social science, we try not to pass judgment on who we study. Our job is to explain what's going on and why it happens. It's very hard sometimes not to get your values in the way. But in general, we try to do that. And this is one of the things that I always tell my students. We can all come from different geological perspectives, but in the end, we have data. We need to look at the data and try to make sense of that. And that's what I intend to do today. Okay, so that's me. So I'm gonna move quickly through that because we have already discussed this. Some of the ideas that I have here today, actually, the main ideas are coming from Monica Serrano. Monica Serrano is a very well-known academic who studies US-Latin America relations. She's teaching at El Colegio de Mexico, which is one of Mexico's top schools. It's a liberal arts school in Mexico. It would be like the Dartmouth College, for example, in the US, small school, but very prestigious with some of the best teachers and scholars. The people that put together the great decision series, they reached out to her and they asked her, based on your expertise, you've been studying these for about 40 years now, could you just write a piece with your analysis, one that is accessible to intelligent people who care about the topic and see what you take is and write a piece that is spicy, that invites reflection, hopefully one that will open up difficult conversations. And that's what she did. So some of the key arguments that I will make here are hers, I will let you know when that is. And then what I did is I did research to include data because she doesn't include a lot of data. She provides an overview and analysis. So what I do is collect statistics and put together some graphs to see if the record supports her analysis and it does in general. So that's one of the takeaways. So with that, okay. So one of the, let me start by providing a little bit of framework or background on the topic, US drug policy. So the way that we look at this is that current drug policy in the US is an executive decision. It came out of the executive in the 1970s. The executive branch is not a legislative initiative but the legislature went with it and it came out of the Nixon administration. President Nixon wanted to come up with a way to put an end to the drugs that the idea was at the time was causing all kinds of problems to young people in the United States through the 60s. And he said, well, we've had enough, we're gonna deal with this. So the key here is people are doing drugs because there are drugs on the streets. So the key here is take the drugs away and people will not be doing drugs. But how do you take drugs away? So in international relations, we call these through an exportation of policy, we're gonna ask the people in other countries to keep our streets free of drugs. So we're gonna ask the producing countries not to send drugs to the US. So that was the goal of the policy. So the advantage to the US is that then the owners, the work is to be done elsewhere, not in the US. Technically speaking, that's a zero cost policy in the US. We have a drug problem, but we're gonna ask you to fix it for us. Beautiful, that's excellent policy. All of the gains, none of the pain, no tax money involved in this. What that means also is whatever negative side effects of dealing with the drug problem, social, economic, institutional will be born abroad. So no problem along those lines in the US. And the US gets the benefit, a drug free society. That was the plan. Something was done in the US. There is a second part of the policy that is implemented domestically. The idea is drugs are determined to be a crime, drug use and drug consumption. So that's when Nixon reached out to Congress and said, okay, I want you to pass law that makes it illegal to use and trade drugs. We want some penalties that come with it. And the idea is that the few drugs that find a way to American streets, people will not use for the fear of going to jail or whatever policies might come into play. The idea here was mostly vague draconian jail sentences. If we actually attach very serious incarceration punishments to these policies, then people will say, well, we're not gonna do that because the risk is just too high. So that was the rationale, both supply side, let countries that send the drugs deal with that and not send them. And then at home, we're gonna tell our youth that they shouldn't do drugs because if you do, you go to jail and then the problem will disappear. Okay, from Latin America's perspective, there is the good, the bad and the ugly. The good is the US wants to work with Latin America. That's always good news. So positive, good relations. Also, the fact that we found a common issue that matters a lot to the US means that we can do what we call issue linkage. The US cares about drugs. We don't care so much because we don't have a drug problem, but if they care, we can help them with this and then we can get the US to help us with other things that we have problems with. For example, natural disaster relief. Whenever a hurricane hits one of our countries, we can ask the Americans, we need your help. Send us the batteries and the flashlights. Okay, so this is both issue linkage and also spillover effect. We call a spillover effect when I go, okay, Americans do care about this. What can I actually sell them now? So I connect one thing to the other. So one policy spills over into others and one of the consequences of the drug policy is that it definitely spilled over to many other areas to the point that it's very hard to tease out what's drug policy from what's institutionalization, good governance, security, police, enforcement, et cetera, et cetera. The bad news for Latin America is that the US is exporting its policy preference. The US is not telling us I need your help with the drug thing. The US is also telling us, are you gonna do it this way? That's something Latin American countries didn't like so much. We're willing to help with drugs, but we don't like it to tell us what we want to do, especially because we know that this has bad publicity in the US, so you don't have the right to ask us to implement a policy that you don't want to do at home because it has high political costs. Although we understand why you do it, you're smart. And the ugly is that if this goes wrong, things can go really, really ugly both in the US but also in Latin America where the problem is not. But if we get involved and things don't work according to plan, then there's gonna be fireworks in Latin America as well. Okay, so the US said, let's get to work. Let's pass laws. We like to put it on paper. If we pass legislation, we're bound by it. So this is what we call international regimes in international law. It's a set of principles that inform norms and rules and decision making procedures on a particular issue area, in this case, drugs. The international drug regime has been around since the early 20th century. In general, we've given every time we have some big global piece of international law that we want the world to embrace and work together on, we give the job to the United Nations. We never give the UN resources but we give the job to the United Nations. And that's unfortunately how things sometimes don't get done because the UN can only do so much. This is one of those cases. So the UN was asked by the US to spearhead efforts to come up with global drug policies so that all countries willing to help the US would be bound by the same rules. Again, the US exported its policy preferences and got the UN to sponsor international law so that all the countries of the world would be bound by the same idea. And the key here is to come up with a list, a longer list of drugs that we agree we're not going to produce, we are not going to sell, we are not going to trade. So what we need to decide is which ones go into the list, alcohol, well let's leave that out because it does help us do good policy. So we don't wanna do that politicians thought, okay, because we do that. We need to focus on the drugs we don't use. Okay, so I'm exaggerating a little bit but there's also a school of policy that claims that you normally pass legislation against when it comes to drugs, the ones that are used by the others, no but your kids, no but your family and not the ones that you do during break. Such as coffee of course, that's what I'm talking about. Okay, so what was unexpected about this? What was unexpected from a political economy perspective is that Americans wanted to continue to do drugs in spite of the closing of the market, the fact that drugs, there was a drop in the import of drugs into the US and the fact that the draconian punishment for those who got involved in the drug trade or drug consumption, they did not work. Americans continued to do drugs, so demand continued to be there. So basic economics, if there is demand, entrepreneurs are going to try to get into that industry. They will provide the supply and when government intervenes and manipulates the market, the price goes up. So that's basic economics. So by making the drugs illegal, the risk of getting involved in that trade are very high, which means that that trade, that industry commands a premium. Lots of money to be made. And as a result of that, some of the best and bravest minds decided to switch industry and get into the drug trade and some not so bright as well. So basically the idea here is that we created a very lucrative market where there wasn't. Another thing that we also realize is what we call the displacement effect. By having the US put pressure on the countries that produce the drugs in the 60s and 70s, we call these displacement effect or the balloon effect. Those countries get to work, they basically reduce production of drugs but because this is a very lucrative industry, those entrepreneurs go to the country next door or to another country where conditions are good and production just moves. It's like very similar to, you know, when you go to the supermarket, you like bananas, there's always bananas, but the bananas come from different places. There's all these fungi that kill the banana trees but because production is distributed around the world, we always have a very steady supply of bananas and this is similar in the case of drugs. So the drug industry diversified into new markets for production. Another one is the substance displacement. If there was success in terms of reducing production of a particular drug and that drug was not available in the market, the industry was very good at producing new products. Say, well, we don't have those drugs today, but we have this one that is even better, stronger, and it's cheap. So what we have here is another case of displacement. So okay, we can't get you that because we just don't have access to it right now, but we're gonna give you this. So what we see is a proliferation in the different kinds of drugs that start arriving into the US when there is success. Addressing one drug in one country, production of that drug shifts to another country and in the meantime, the industry start coming up with new ideas as to what drugs they can get into the US market. So we have production moving around the world and an incredible display of new drugs that come into play. For example, in 1971, when this policy was adopted, Turkey and Mexico were the two main producers of the main drugs that were used in the United States. Synthetic drugs, sorry, yes, these are key, but when the US put pressure on Turkey and Mexico to address these, those countries have success in minimizing drug production and then production moves somewhere else. Colombia takes over from Mexico and Mexico and Cortel take over from Turkey. So what we see is that there is some know-how on infrastructure in Mexico that doesn't necessarily go away, they just shift from one drug to the other and they take advantage of that to try to control and centralize the market because of proximity to the US. Where you are matters a lot. If you're in retail, being close to the best market or to the best consumers is an advantage. You don't have to work too hard to get to them and that's Mexico's comparative advantage when it comes to the drug trade into the US. These graphs suggest that. So we see a case here of displacement. On the left, we can see that consumption of marijuana fell as it was, the policy was successful. This is a case of success in pursuing the marijuana trade. So we see that from the 70s and 80s consumption declines but then we see that opioids go up and that is the idea, okay, so we can't get marijuana into the US but we can get you opioids and we can see an increase in the use of opioids in the 80s and 90s. This is cocaine and we can see that the increase happens in the 70s and 80s as they use and consumption of other drugs declines and we see that in the case of cocaine we see a significant increase in heavy use not just casual use but heavy use. We call these some form of addiction whether cocaine is addictive or not. I'll leave that to the experts. Okay, so displacement continues. The US knows that production has shifted. They also know that transportation has shifted as well so they start putting pressure in different countries. So we can see that cocaine comes from Bolivia and from Peru in the 1970s. As production moves there, we can see that the Colombian cartels that have started to become reactive in this trade start to become very powerful and they try to compete for control of the industry with Mexican cartels. So what we see is you have to control production and trade. The advantage of Mexican cartels in the 60s and 70s is that they had production of drugs and transportation but as production moves to different countries the Mexican cartels try to use their know-how to try to bring new production to Mexico but especially transportation to smuggle it into the US. And the Colombian cartels as production moves to South America try to control production and use that to actually start controlling the trade as well. And they will be very successful. They did not want to give the money to the Mexican cartels so they create their own network through the Caribbean Puerto Rico for example. Jamaica, Miami. Miami is the main port of entry, has huge ports so it's very easy to put the drugs there, comes to the port of Miami, the money gets laundered in the banks of Miami, nobody asks any questions, so the fortunes that are made stay in South Florida and the high rises come up and at night they have no lights because it's just an investment, nobody lives there. So that's the story of Miami Vice 1980s for those of you who are old enough to remember the series. So by the late 1980s, most of the drugs that are coming into the US, cocaine in particular, is controlled by the Colombian cartels. So that point the Mexican cartels have been pretty much driven out of the market for the most part. The US then realizes that something's going on in South Florida within the US that is getting the drugs into the US. So they start getting their security in order, they start working with countries in the Caribbean to try to keep the drugs from coming and ironically the one country that does best in this regard is Cuba. So for a number of reasons, US-Cuba relations are not in the best shape but when it comes to drugs Cuba is the strongest ally. Cuba has no interest in having their young do drugs and they'll do whatever it takes to keep the drugs out of Cuba and they'll help with the US to try to keep drugs out. So imagine if Cuba had been part of the drug trade so close, so close to the US, 90 miles. It could have been a very different story. As the US starts to, the US government security agents start to get really active in Florida, they start to get more drugs and then the Mexican cartels say it's time to go back to Mexico. So let's reroute drug traffic away from the Caribbean through Mexico and what we see is starting in the 1990s and in the 2000s is the Mexican cartels takeover again from the Colombian cartels. Because the US keeps putting pressure on Mexico, sometimes what we see is that as Mexico becomes better at dealing with the drug trade, we can see that some of these cartels move to Guatemala, Honduras, to countries further to the south, where institutional capacity is weaker, the police is weaker. So we can really see the displacement effect in all kinds of ways. Back to the US, the criminalization of drug use. So we said that on the supply side, the idea is that if we criminalize drugs, people will not use them. So one of the ways to address these by the drug cartels is what we call state capture. If you can control the state institutions that are supposed to capture to get the drugs, keep you from doing the job, then you have an advantage. So what the drug cartels do is that they control some of the American authorities that are supposed to get the drugs. So the customs people at the border towns in Texas, they're in the payroll of the drug cartels. So they will occasionally say, we got this, and then there's 20 tons that are going through. So they'll get the TV to say, look, we got this box with two grams of cocaine success. And then the 20 tons are going in the trucks into the US. Also, if you can control the Mexican police, if you can control the administration in Mexico, then you can move through Mexico more easily, same in Guatemala. So what we see is starting in the 1980s in Colombia, and that continues through the 19th and the 2000s, the drug cartels try to engage in state capture. If they can't capture the institutions to their advantage, success. And they've been very successful at capturing American enforcement, capturing Mexican and Central American as well. So state capture is a term that we use in political science to refer to when one group, self-interested group, controls the state institution that are supposed to be there for the common good. And the idea here is that cartels will control parts of or all of an institution to further their own agenda, which is not necessarily the interest of society. Okay. Another additional problem that we had in some countries in Latin America where drugs were produced is that there is guerrilla movements. Marxist-inspired guerrilla movements in Peru and Colombia that needed money to fight the state that they were fighting to try to bring about a revolution. So what you get is a very interesting combination of partners. Some of these Marxist guerrillas decide to offer security to the drug cartels to protect them against the army and the police. So the idea here is that you grow your drugs, I'll help you get it through and I'll be killing the police and the army if they get close. If the local politicians could struggle, I get rid of them as well. I put a bomb or two and I tell them that Marx told me to do this for the revolution. So we have a very interesting combination here of common interests. And that really made it very hard for countries in the producing regions to actually be effective in addressing production because they didn't have control over the whole territory. Some of the areas of the territory, particularly in the drug producing regions were in the hands of the guerrillas and the guerrillas kept the army away. When the US government is made aware of this, countries across Latin America tell the US, this is all I can do. I can't do any better. I have needs in my society. I need to build hospitals. I need to build schools. I can't just use all of the tax money to deal with your drugs. I mean, you have a problem with your society. Deal with it. That really is one of the complicated parts of the relationship over the last few decades when countries across Latin America start to say the problems that come with your policy are huge and we just reached the limit. We are not going to go any further. And at that point, the US executive and legislature start to send resources to Latin America, huge amounts. We have Plan Colombia in 1996, which is billions of dollars that were given to the government of Colombia to beef up the army, to buy weapons for more training. American security went to Colombia to train the locals to try to keep the drugs cartels under control. The Medida initiative in the 2000s, a trade move from Colombia to Mexico. Then the idea is that we train the Mexican armed forces for this and we try to create alternative industries as well. One of the cornerstones of both Plan Colombia and the Medida initiative is to create jobs for the people. If most of the people engaged in the production and harvesting of drugs are local peasants, farmers who make more money from the drug trade and from farming. So if they really want to get their kids through school, their chances are better with four or five good years of drug production as opposed to growing corn. And one of the problems with growing corn or wheat is that the US heavily subsidizes those industries in the US. So they can sell very cheaply in Latin America. Countries in Latin America don't have the capacity to subsidize their farmers. So American corn and wheat is driving farmers and peasants out of business and then they resort to the drugs. Again, this is a typical political economy. You lose your job, you're a farmer, what do you know how to do? You know how to grow things. So then the drug cartels will say come with me and will give you what you need. Did you just work for me and I'll pay you two or three times what you were making per year? It's a very good deal. So the challenge of this policy of bringing back crops that would entice some of these farmers away from the drugs is very difficult because there is no crop that is as lucrative as these drugs. And some people switched. They went to legal crops, but many of them didn't. They said, well, you know, this is my chance to pull my kids through college. I'm just, if I have to pay the price, I have to pay the price. And it is a very difficult decision for the locals because we don't want to blame the locals. I mean, the peasants for these or the farmers. I'm sure that there are some people from farming background in the room. You don't want to accuse them of giving drugs to the country. So the US also offers logistics, you know, send guns and trucks and airplanes, also different pesticides to try to kill the drugs and military training to build capacity. One of the problems is that, you know, soldiers are poorly trained. The Americans will come and give them the training that we need. On the American front, what we see the criminalization of drugs is correlated with a significant increase in incarceration in the US. Crime rates in the US are not necessarily higher now than they were in the 70s, but the number of people in jail, as you can see, is significantly higher. And most of that has to do with drug consumption. You know, I once was invited to give a series of presentations in Beloit for people from the community that are coming out of jail. And there was a very young African-American man in his late 20s, early 20s. He said, I served 10 years in jail because I was caught smoking a joint. I mean, he said, I mean, I just cannot believe this. And was he telling me the truth? Well, there's probably a little more than that, but really, I mean, does he deserve to be in jail for 10 years? Imagine, couldn't get married, couldn't have a family, couldn't complete his education, he's in his 30s, and he feels that he's running out of time. So running out of time to create a family. If he creates a family, he doesn't have time to go to school. So then he can only get jobs which qualifications are low. I mean, his life was pretty much derailed at that point. So this is a very common pattern that we see. So one thing that I want to call your attention to for comparison is crime rates in the US in general, if you exclude drugs, are a lot lower than they are in many of these countries. The Salvador has gone through a civil war. There's lots of guns on the streets. Think about Rwanda, they went through genocide. Brazil, think about the favela kids. I mean, you're 12, you get a gun, you go kill someone and bring dinner. So we're really talking about very, very, very violent societies. And yet the US has more people in jail per capita than any of these countries whose crime rates are a lot higher. For comparison, you can argue many of these countries are low income countries compared to the US. I mean, look at anybody in a comparison group. Look at Europe, Canada, Australia. Their rates are not lower. They are significantly lower. They're about 10% of the rates in the United States. So when you do statistics, I mean, you know that this doesn't mean that Americans are 10 times more likely to be criminal than Canadians or Germans or people in China. Okay, so this is more of the same. Here we have the US. And I wanna call your attention to Germany and the Netherlands. I'm gonna be talking a little bit about Germany and the Netherlands, because I'm gonna be pivoting towards the end of my presentation to alternative. So these countries also have a drug problem. Why do they have such low crime rates? So what are they doing? So I'm gonna start moving in that direction. But I do want to show a couple more slides on the prison population, because this is a huge problem that we have in the United States. We have a lot of young people who are in jail. They cannot complete an education and their lives get completely disrupted. We see that one of the growing industries with this policy is that of prisons, building prisons. So that is what we call, in a way creates a conflict of interest because companies that make prisons are very likely to fund the campaigns of politicians who advocate for the status quo of policy. If you run on a campaign to change the law, the companies that make these prisons are going to run out saying that you want some of your kids to do drugs at school at age nine and that will not get you elected. So this is the dirty politics of this problem that keeps us from addressing this, the big elephant in the room. So look at the numbers of the number of people serving life sentences that we have in the United States. Again, crime rates are getting lower and lower in general. Take drugs out, drugs out. And yet we have more people serving life sentences. Many of them, most of those are related to the drug problem. But this doesn't affect everybody equally. You can see the bottom here, this is women, this is men. So we can see that most of the people involved in the trade are men. And most of the people bearing the brunt of this incarceration problem are people of color. If you are a black man, you have one in three chances of being going to jail. So think about the people in the room. If we were all African-American men, a third of us would be going through jail at some point in our lives. If you're Latino, you have one in six. If you're white, your chances are a lot better. And that also suggests when we do statistics that white people are not, or people of color are not genetically engineered to engage in crime at a higher rate than Latinos or people of color or women. So this also suggests that this is cultural. This is probably an aspect of American society that creates this outcome, this interesting outcome. This also means this policy is costing us billions of dollars in tax money. This is money that we have to use to pay to keep people in jail to build the jails. It's money that we could use for something else. So it's the trade-off. It's the tax money that we need to decide what to spend. We're spending it and keeping these people in jail. I invite you to visit the Sentencing Project. So you just Google Sentencing Project. So it does look at this information and it gives you data that you can break down per county, per state. I'm gonna get out of here my PowerPoint and go to it. So if you look at the state, this is where you would land. And if you look at the state, for example, these are the states that imprison more people. Luciana, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Arkansas. You can see a trend here. So it's in the South. But the statistics get really interesting if you look at what states are more likely to imprison black people as opposed to white people. If it loads, we'll see that Wisconsin tops the charts. So Wisconsin is one of those countries where we have a very significant racial bias in our incarceration policies. If you are a person of color in Wisconsin, your chances of going to jail are greater than they are in any state of the country bar New Jersey. But we can see that that's the case in Minnesota as well and Connecticut. So we can see that the trend is very different. Let's see what happens with Hispanic people. So there, Wisconsin drops a little bit. So we're more likely to incarcerate people of color one of the top in the state. And we're still high up when it comes to Latino. So what that means is that if you break it down by race, white people have a few chances of going to jail in Wisconsin than people of color. And that is not the case. It's the case across the country, but it's particularly acute in the state of Wisconsin. And again, it shouldn't be. There is no reason why people of color should engage in criminal activity at higher rates than white people. So statisticians would say that this suggests that there is a clear racial bias in the state of Wisconsin and nationally as well. OK. So I really encourage you to go and visit the Sentencing Project and you find this interesting. And you can really go and find other kinds of data by gender, by gender and race, et cetera, et cetera, trends through time. So the cost of the policy in Latin America is also very high in the US is mostly in terms of incarcerating people of color, men in particular. But in Latin America, what we see is a significant rise in the rates of homicide. The regions affected by the drug trade in Latin America have become some of the most dangerous in the world, in part because there is that turf war between the state institutions and the drug hotels. And people get caught in the middle. So this is the race from Mexico. I'll show you some other role numbers from Mexico. We're really talking about in the last, pretty much in the 21st century, about 300,000 people in Mexico have died as a result of the violence between the armed forces of Mexico and the drug hotels. 300,000 is a gigantic number. It's the population of Milwaukee, if you think about it. And 75,000 people are missing, we presume they're dead, but legally speaking, they're not dead because their bodies have an infirmity. We don't have any evidence of that. So we're really talking about 400,000 people who have died as a result of this conflict. In Colombia, there has been also on and off in the center of this, we're talking about more than a quarter million people who have died as a result of the drug policies. And that, in addition to the guerrillas in Colombia, we're talking about eight million people who were forced to leave their homes and move somewhere. And mostly, these are farmers because most of these war happens in the countryside. So these are farmers that had to pack up, leave the farm behind, and move to a city, find a way to make it there. Many of them became squatters, took the land that belonged to others, and eventually, more people came in, came in, came in, and then the city had to bring utilities because you don't want to create a public health problem, and that creates another legal problem. So who owns the land? Once you get 100,000 people that have taken over your farm, then the local government knows those people are going to vote, so they can evict them. But then you own the land. So we have a case of informal growth in many cities that comes with this problem as well. So imagine eight million farmers in Colombia that need to move to a city where they don't have land, they don't have a home, and they have to make a living, and they come with a family. And some of them come when they're young, some of them come when they're 80, and they have to start from scratch. It's a really, really difficult problem. And Colombia is still dealing with this. Right now, in the news, we're looking at Ukraine. We're looking at Syria. The numbers for Syria, the war in Syria is about 6.2 million in about four years. Colombia, the numbers are greater, and the numbers for Colombia are comparable to those of Ukraine. Ukraine that has lost, well, has lost at least a fifth of its country has been occupied by Russia. So the numbers of displaced people in Colombia are actually comparable to those of countries at war. With this, before I move on to the last part of my presentation, I really want to emphasize one thing that is incredibly important about the institutional impact of the war. So what we have here is a case in which, as the drugs continue to come, the US keeps putting pressure on countries across Latin America to mount the war against the drug cartels. So the government recruits more soldiers, more police sometimes, to get into the conflict, to try to fight the cartels. So as a result of that, what you get is that the drug cartels arm themselves to the teeth. They come to the US and they go shopping for guns, and that's another irony of the US drug policy. The US doesn't want the drugs, but the arms manufacturers are loving the war because they're selling the arm in the drug cartels and the arm in the soldiers as well. So it's a boon for the American arms industry. So what we have in an escalation of the fight on the side of the government will be matched by an escalation on the other side. We call these a security dilemma, and in the end, it's always a tie. What you get is an increase in the violence and the number of dead. So as the cartels invest more resources, they invest more heavily in trying to control the institutions. The war becomes easier if you actually control the heads of the police and the army, the local mayors, so they will tell the police, turn a blind eye, focus on speeding, not on the drug trade, so they control the state institutions. And as a result of that, the local people lose faith in their institutions and their government and they lose faith in democracy and they advocate for autocrats. The idea is if somebody claims I'm not like them, they're all corrupt, they're all in bed with the cartels. I'm tough, get me elected, I'll try to bypass Congress, I'll do what it takes, I'll be tough and I'll solve the problem. And then what they do when they elect these kinds of leaders is that they up the war and so do the cartels. So in the end, it's again a tie, but the people get caught in the middle. So the result of this, the cost for Latin America of the exploitation of U.S. drug policy has been huge. Socially, death, displacement within the country, outside of the country, many people who decide that they need to leave because they are no longer safe in their community, they're not welcome in other parts of the country, the land is taken, so they just move to the country next door or they come to the United States. Many people who leave their farms, they think that if they come to the U.S., they'll be working for farms in the United States, they just have to get here. So many of them who actually do make it, they will be going from farm to farm to farm through the seasons. They'll be working on strawberry farms in Florida in the winter, then they'll be moving up to work and say peaches in Georgia in the spring. They'll move to Wisconsin and Minnesota to do corn in the summer. They'll move to California in the fall and then they'll go back to Florida in the winter. So they're finally somewhere, but they're continuously migrating. And normally what happens is both that mom will be migrating and the kids will be raised by the grandparents or an aunt and uncle who have a permanent place to live. The parents will come and visit whenever they're able. Economic impacts is the resources that countries across Latin America have had to invest in the drug war is resources that couldn't invest in subsidizing the farmers. So the farmers didn't have to give up the trade because they can't compete with America and corn. You get caught between the American subsidies and the drugs. Another one is the institutional crisis. The military has taken over in many countries. The idea is that if it comes to being tough, nobody's tougher than the military. So the military has become very prominent and in the end democracy goes out the window. And support for democracy across Latin America is really low right now. One of the lowest rates it has been in decades. Is there a way out? So a number of presidents across Latin America and from a president say there is, it's very simple, legalized drugs. If you legalize drugs, the drug industry, as we know, it goes away and the violence disappears and you can tax it. And if you can tax it, then you can use those resources to deal with whatever problems might come. Is this new, has anybody done this before? Yes, this is an approach that has been implemented by a number of countries have a list there. So let's look at their record. What happens when you actually legalize? So these are the two approaches, American approach since the 70s, the punitive approach. If you do drugs, you go to jail for 20 years. The alternative approach is harm reduction. Doing drugs is not a crime. Doing drugs is a medical condition. It's a public health condition. You shouldn't do drugs. You have a psychological problem. I'm putting you in jail, it's not going to fix it. You need to talk to the doctor. So let's do that. Let's take the money from the prisons and put it to work in healthcare so that we can educate, treat, and help. So, Dierspiegel is a German newspaper. The Netherlands is one of the countries that pioneered this. So this is the face of any approach, the Dutch farmer. So where is the Dutch? Where are the Dutch? So here we have a few countries. Look at the US. So this is drug-induced deaths in the world for a select group of countries. We can see the US tops the charts. Look at the UK there. Look at the European Union average. The EU is the region that has experimented the most with this approach. We have a few countries in Europe that take the American approach and some countries that take the alternative approach. Germany and the Netherlands are somewhere in the middle. Around, if you see, they're clustering around the European Union average. But if you think about it, in the EU, which is economically as affluent as the US, the population is culturally very similar, the number of drug-induced deaths is 21.3 compared to the US, which is 185. That is astronomical. So the difference really, according to the experts, has to do with the approach. Look at Portugal. I call your attention to Portugal because Portugal is one of the countries that adopted this sooner. Another thing that is very important is if you think about drug policy or drug approach, you can see that the most successful countries, the ones with the number of drug-induced deaths or lowest are in Europe, particularly in Southern Europe. So you can see that Greece, Portugal, Turkey, Spain, Cyprus are there. If you go to Northern Europe, the numbers are a little worse, but it's not comparable to the US. The US really is the outlier here. Look at Sweden, Norway, they're really, really high. So the higher up you go, the worst policies become. The Netherlands, so this is what we get in the Netherlands. When the Netherlands legalized drugs, you see that the number, the victimization rate, people who suffer for victims of a crime began to fall. So we see a trend here. Portugal, we have Portugal and the European Union. So this is the number of deaths per 100,000 of the population for Portugal and for the European Union, actually in Portugal. So we can see that Portugal, one of the countries that decriminalized drug use is doing better. So you decriminalize, and this is a really important one, because by legalizing drugs, one of the concerns is people are gonna do more drugs and there will be more death. The evidence doesn't support that, which suggests that people are dying because they're doing drugs in secret, they don't necessarily know they're overdosing and they die. In Portugal, if you do drugs, you go to the doctor, the doctor will teach you how to do drugs until you don't need them anymore. So you get a professional helping you, ace yourself out of this problem. Recidivism, how likely are you going to do drugs after receiving medical attention? We see that in Portugal, the trend is falling. So there is also a correlation between drug use and HIV-AIDS. We see that in Portugal, the rates of HIV-AIDS are falling precipitously, to the point that by the late teens, only 10 to 12 people actually caught HIV from injecting drugs. So this is really, really, really a problem that has gone away. We can see here that sharing the paraphernalia has side effects, health had side effects, in this case in particular, in terms of HIV-AIDS. So we can see that Portugal has really solved the problem of HIV-AIDS, or a big part of it, just by decriminalizing drugs. It was one of the main sources of contagion. Number of homicides, one of the argument, we legalize drugs, then people are gonna be out killing each other. No evidence for that in Portugal. People, Portuguese people, prefer to kill themselves with a car or in a car. Not by doing drugs. And now back to the United States. So this is the trend. We have a draconian drug policy, and what we see is the drug-related deaths continue to increase. So back to where we were. Look at Portugal, really low. Look at the U.S. The two textbook cases of the two different approaches, criminalization and harm reduction. What's coming in the U.S., and with this, I start to conclude, there is a lot of advocacy for adopting the Portuguese-Canadian approach, for going this way. And because the federal government is very unlikely to make a move on these, I doubt anybody's gonna be elected for office on the legalization of drugs. So the best we can hope for is, what seems to be happening, is state by state. So I live in Boloit, and there is, so in Illinois, marijuana is legal. Interestingly enough, they build dispensary on the Illinois border, which is really for Wisconsin. So lots of people stop there, and then they go on. So it's in South Boloit, and South Boloit, the mayor of South Boloit was in the news the other day, and she was saying that with the tax money that the city raised from marijuana sales, they bought a new track for the firefighters in South Boloit. And that these years sales are doing better, so they have more ambitious plans. So it's actually become a very good base for taxes. So they're thinking of lowering other kinds of taxes in the city because Wisconsin is subsidizing their firefighters. Okay, so one thing before we move on, one of the president of the Boloit City Council ran for office on one issue, legalization of marijuana. He got elected and became the city council, and now he resigned and he's running for the Wisconsin legislature, and that's one of the policy options that he wants to pursue, to try to change the approach. I won't tell you who he is, because I don't want to endorse a candidate, but you might be hearing from him in the near future. So in conclusion, so we went through three parts in this presentation. One, we studied the goals of U.S. drug policy and what it meant for Latin America. Two, we looked at the consequences. Three, we looked at a few alternatives. And with these, I'm really going to close and bring us back to the reading in the series by Monica Serrano. She gives us some really interesting questions, and I don't necessarily intend to answer those or to even expect that we're gonna go through those tonight. But those are questions that she thinks interested citizens should be thinking about. Should the punitive approach continue to be used in the U.S. considering the record? Should the U.S. continue to dictate the approach of the international drug trade regime to other countries, especially considering that it's not going too well in the United States? Should Latin American countries set a new agenda that is based on decriminalization? Some countries in Latin America have legalized drugs as well, so they've joined this trend. So another problem is that the drug trade in Latin America has hurt the poor, and particularly farmers in rural communities who have lost their land either to the cartels, to the guerrillas, they've lost their land because they happen to be in the wrong place, and many of them migrated to the cities, many of them migrated to Wisconsin, or whatever they are, because they keep moving around the country. So is that fair that not everybody bears the brunt equally? And the final question that she's asking us to think about is to what extent the toll in terms of human rights violations justifies staying in the course of this policy? So these are some really interesting questions that some of them really invite moral answers, and with that, I appreciate your kind invitation to come here to talk about one of the few issues that actually cause trouble between the U.S. and Latin America, but they reiterate, relations are good in general, migration is another one, in case you didn't know it, I think you suspected it. So with that, I will close, I'll take a question to your comments, see if there are any, thank you very much. You're talking about people that are using drugs and getting arrested later, because what have you mentioned anything about the people that are dealing with drugs, and are making them, what are we doing, or is it the United States dealing with these people? They're getting arrested too, but the people who control the trade, they're either not in the U.S., or they're very safe in the U.S. So those, you know, the people at the bottom get caught, they're victims, but the people at the top continue to keep the trade. When we see pictures on TV about heads showing up on a highway in Mexico or Texas, that's when the drug cartels are fighting one another. Those are turf wars, I mean, I get this through, you know, South Eastern Texas. So you go somewhere else, you go through El Paso. So whenever we see that, that means that the guys at the top are really trying to send the other top people a clear message that, you know, I control this region, I control Tijuana, you don't come here, San Diego is mine, you know, you go elsewhere, Brownsville is yours. So I left you Brownsville, so just keep it to yourself, but just leave me alone here. No, other drugs that are considered. So I mentioned that the idea is that we put a list of a number of drugs on a list and we make them illegal. So any of those that are on that list and which ones are dominant at the time is a function of the success of the drug strategy. If, as I mentioned, marijuana was big in the sixties, but when the government began to crack down on it, then cocaine became big. So these come and goes. It's what we call the balloon effect and the displacement effect. So, and this is not necessarily probably not gonna change. It's been the pattern since the 1970s. So some drugs will come and they will go and some new drugs will come. And then they will go as well. You talk very nicely about the benefits of legalizing drugs in the United States. Are baby steps in that direction involved? As far as I know, only legalizing marijuana. Is that enough to help? Well, the record suggests it's not. Because people are dying from the use of other drugs. I mean, that takes part of the problem away, but then there is other problems there. So if you, you know, the drug industry is huge. There's many different drugs there. So, so yeah, that will solve part of it. It will allow stuff to get a new truck, but it's really not gonna make the problem go away. Yeah, I don't know who's next. As I listened to your talk, you seem to bring out more complexity in the problem. Would that be correct? Yes, this is what we call spillover effects. Okay. Normally one thing causes a- We'll go back to the Nixon administration. Considering our experience in prohibition, to come out with the simple program that they had, they could not see any possible complexity that would evolve over time with that decision. And especially you being an economist, that should be quite evident. Yes, I don't have anything to add to that. The policy didn't go as expected originally, but the rationale was incredibly simplistic to think that people are not, once there is a culture of drugs, they think people are gonna stop doing them because they're expensive or because they're afraid to go to jail, it's really not gonna solve the problem. Especially we live in a capitalist economy. The market is incredibly good at producing what we want. So there is huge incentives to keep the system going. And I think South Polo illustrates this very well. I mean, if you legalize, then you can tax. And with taxes, you can do certain things. I mean, most of the countries that legalize drugs, they would not necessarily buy a new track for the firefighters with the tax money. They have policy normally that uses the tax money that comes from the drugs to address the medical treatment and education campaigns. They normally do attach strings to that. On the concern that if you don't attach strings, then the tax money from drugs is gonna be used for a pet project of a politician who wants to get elected and decides to build a runway or an airport where it's not needed. And then you don't really solve the problem. That is correct. Yes, and if you're injecting yourself, there is facilities where you can do that. You're giving what you need. It's clean. You don't have to reuse anything and somebody will be overseeing the process. Not all. Okay. Yes, I show a statistic that showed that addiction is down, but it's not gone. Okay. So the problem is not entirely solved. But now you do have tax money and resources to deal with it. Yes, and the number of deaths has fallen, which is one of the biggest problems that we have with this policy. The people are actually dying. Right. Yes. So they can be a productive member of society. Yes. Exactly, and part of the money is gonna go for scholarships to get through college, for example. So there's the number of strings that look at the whole picture. First, you need to be healthy. You're gonna need psychological help on a regular basis. You have to have access. So money goes for that. But then you also have to get an education so that you're productive. So there's gonna be scholarship money that will be there for you so that you can get through school. Yes, normally what they will do, it can get into the wits here, is that they will try to get you away from the ones that are more difficult, exact, addictive. And then a physician will determine what is the best course of action for you. Yes, there will be an expert talking to you, looking at your case, and trying to guide you out of this. Yes, you have to, you basically, that's right, you have to go to this place and say, you know, doctor, I'm not feeling too good. So what is it? Well, I just have these drugs. I'm like, oh, okay, how often do you do that? And then you get the conversation started, okay, I'm gonna ask you to come and see these persons specializes in this. So then they send you to the person who knows, and then you take it from there. Alrighty, hi, doctor, excellent presentation. I actually have two questions. Number one, I'm from New York, so I apologize. With the midterm election coming up here in Wisconsin, how is it affecting Latin America in the drug policy? I don't think it's going to affect it because it's changing the current approach to drug policy. It's not on the agenda. Nobody's running on it. So we should expect more of the same. This should continue. Okay, and with the rise of cryptocurrency, do you think that's going to affect the US dollar if we were to legalize anything besides marijuana? Probably not, because, you know, there will continue to be a trade and the dollar will probably gonna be the currency of exchange. So that was not necessarily going to go away. I think what we probably would get is that, you know, some of those dollars are probably not gonna be in Colombia or Mexico, they probably would be here. Thank you. We're trying to get some national control over an industry that right now is controlled from Mexico. Yeah, I think the mic is coming to you. What about the Philippines and also Forbes magazines, the most recent cover is talks about marijuana meltdown. Some guy earned $345 million marketing marijuana. I'm not familiar with the policies in the Philippines, I'm really sorry. Yeah, so I cannot assess that. Yes, I focus on Latin America and the US. From your talk, I get the picture of that any attempt by the political action people of the United States to eliminate the use of drugs or making it a non-problem would be a severe problem for the drug dealers and the drug cartels. So it seems to me they would fight by subsidizing political people in the United States to continue to support a war on drugs, is that possible? Okay, one of the things that you might suspect about the drug industry is their accounting is not very public. So we don't know where the partner wealth and we don't know what candidates they support. So this is just a hypothesis. As my colleagues would say that this is a very insightful hypothesis. They don't want the business to change. So they'll do what it takes to keep it where it is. And that means keeping certain legislators from getting elected. And they will probably find ways to do that or try as hard as possible. So one of the interesting things about the drug trade is that it's the insurance industry around the drug trade is incredibly complex. So whenever the drug cartels have a shipment of drugs ready to come to the US, they will basically, it's like a stock exchange. 20 billion of this is going to California today. If it gets through, we're talking, just hypothetically speaking, $10 billion. So place your bid. How much are you in? And then somebody in Miami, somebody in Texas in California Bank will be collecting money and that's insurance. So you put, I don't know, 10% of the insurance money on the table and then in the end you get 10% of the profits. Transfer it into your bank account or somebody that you designate so that you get some privacy. So the drugs get through, everybody wins. The drugs don't get through, the cartels go through money. You lost yours. But investment. But if you keep doing this into the future, the next investment will be good and that's what you're going to do it again. It's better than Las Vegas. So it's a very complex industry. I mean, it's not just supply and demand. I mean, there's an insurance mechanism there. So if the drugs don't get through, the drug cartels already make the money from the investment that you make and people like us here, I mean, maybe you're doing this already. Feel free to explain how you do it. I don't, so I don't know the specifics, but you know, people in Mexico, in Europe, in Russia, in the US will be participating in this and there is companies that specialize in keeping it all a little bit obscure so that Uncle Sam cannot get into it and find out how you do it. So, but yeah, technically speaking from what we know, whether the drugs get through or not, the investments that we make in this industry, the cartels will make a profit regardless. If it gets through, it balloons and then you all make money too and you're probably going to work to keep the politicians from getting elected if they try to end this business because it's a good side business. Financially, I'm not passing judgment. Okay, I'm not passing judgment on the industry, but you know, if you think about it, it's just like a regular industry. There's risks involved so you have to get your insurance. Using the example of Portugal making drug legal, how long did it take to transition that industry? Very quickly, all you really need to do is when you change the law, all of a sudden, the demand is there and the cartels are willing to set up a legal company in Portugal to import it. They already have someone there. So it's very, very simple. What can we do as voting Americans to, let's say that we're like super gung-ho about this, right? We're so on board. What can we do in this moment right now to push this forward? The key here is politicians and people running for office are self-interested. They want to get elected. So they will run on the policies that get people to vote. So you just have to get your community to support one initiative and get the right politician to run on it. I mean, I mentioned the chair of the Boloy City Council. He ran on it when he was 17. I think he was 18 when, I remember that he kind of became 18 like a day before, the day after he could. And he ran on it and didn't get elected but then he did, got elected and then he became the chair. So he basically, this is his campaign. He's a libertarian. It's not the government's business to decide what I do in my bedroom. That's what I'm advocating. That was his idea and drugs is one of them. Whether I drink beer, whether I smoke joint is my business. It's not the government's business. So get me elected and get the government out of the way. And that's how he's trying to get elected to serve in Madison. Would you comment on the statement that having drugs in Central America helps some of the poorest areas? And the reason I ask you to comment on that is I regularly go to Nicaragua where I serve on the board of the school for students with special needs. And talking to the families there and you know, the politics there are very different too but talking to the families there, they're saying, you know, we're just a channel for the drugs to go through. It's only the rich that may benefit from it. It's not any of the poor people who are benefiting from that. Could you comment on that? Yeah, Nicaragua is not, it's a transit country. So very little money stays there. So the money really, the drugs really are coming from the places where they're produced to the US. And because most of the industries in the hands of the Mexican cartels right now, the Mexicans where the money goes. They will need someone in Nicaragua to do the job for them but the majority of the people don't. They don't grow the drugs so they don't make them in Nicaragua. So there are no jobs for poor people there. And I'm sure that the farmers in Colombia or Peru, they would like to make a living doing something else. They know what the drugs do in the US but they have to get the kids to school. That's, I mean, it's a very difficult choice. Well, if I don't do this, then I have to move. I mean, my friend tells me that back in Florida you can work in, you know, farmers move around so I'm gonna try to do that but then they don't let me get into the US. So people, I mean, countries have to export goods or services or people. One question, okay. If anybody knows how to fix this problem, please. This is your chance. As I'm listening to you and the complexities of this issue, it would seem to be that we would need to focus much more on the demand. What is causing people to turn to drugs? And do we need to fix this by fixing the way we treat people to make them healthier, access to healthcare, living wages, a war on poverty? Would that be the way to impact our problem with drugs? Yes, one thing to add to this, definitely education has been one of the cornerstones of the countries that legalize drugs. The fact that they legalize drugs doesn't mean they want everybody to do drugs. They want people to come out of the darkness so that we can work with them and we can educate them. We can tell them what happens if you do this. So the idea is that people who do drugs should not be celebrated. You know, this is a medical condition. You need to know about this. If you don't know how to deal with this alone and you probably don't if you get really seriously into the problem, then we have the professionals. That's the idea. So education is a good one. Now, when it comes to healthcare, one of the things to keep in mind is that this is both a healthcare and a public health problem. We think about healthcare as treating the disease when it's there. But public health is creating the conditions that prevent disease from happening. So creating the environment, the education where people don't overuse, they don't overdose. So this is a public health issue and that requires institutional campaigns, education, all kinds of work, creating alternatives in terms of jobs and avenues, et cetera. So role models, all of those things. So we need to take care of the two, not just wait for the program to happen and then send them to the hospital. I mean, if you can keep them from going to the hospital, you actually are better off. I mean, public health is a lot cheaper than healthcare. The problem with public health is that it requires the government to do it for the most part. And it's covered with tax money and people don't like to pay taxes. Healthcare in this country is private. So you pay for it, you pay for it. But if we add up, healthcare is way more expensive than public health. But this is, again, what we call a free writing problem. We don't want to pay more taxes. We don't want the government to do it because I pay taxes to treat your addiction or my addiction. Why would I do that? So with healthcare, you are in charge of your own health in a way, and then if you do the wrong thing, you and your insurance decide to deal with it. So this is a big problem that we have. So public health has proven to be cheaper than healthcare. And I don't remember the statistics of the top of my head, but the life expectancy in this country has increased since 1900 to today by, I think it's about 40 years. Five of those years are thanks to healthcare. 35 is thanks to good public health. You know, clean water, clean air, those kinds of things. And yet we invest more money in healthcare than we do in public health. I mean, it's one of those amazing contradictions of American society that makes a country so interesting to me that just does not make any sense. What really has given us a longer life expectancy, we're not investing money in, and so we're really investing in a second best strategy. So if we actually invest in more heavily in preventing disease before it happens, it could be better off. Yes, it's time to go. Time to go. Okay, thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.