At Tuesday night's panel, "The International War on Drugs: Plan Colombia and Beyond," Peter Andreas, assistant professor of political science and international studies, admitted that he once inadvertently contributed to Bolivia's cocaine economy by agreeing to sit on top of a large stack of toilet paper on a public bus.
Unbeknownst to Andreas at the time, toilet paper is used to dry coca paste, and Bolivia's cocaine production depends on the surreptitious import of this seemingly innocuous product.
Andreas used the anecdote, though ironic, as a reflection of the inanity of the current state of the international drug war, which panelists said was riddled with contradictions.
Sanho Tree, director of the Drug Policy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, said that the logic of the international war on drugs is fundamentally backward and misguided and that this has created troublesome and undesirable results.
Tree said policy makers respond to the trade of illegal drugs by merely escalating law enforcement as opposed to considering the root of the problem - the staggering demand for drugs on an international level. This creates a Darwinian "survival of the fittest" dynamic that leads to authorities catching "only those stupid enough to get caught," he said.
"We have forced this economy to evolve at a lightning pace," Tree said.
However, Aung Din, policy director and co-founder of the U.S. Campaign for Burma, said that in Burma (also known as Myanmar) the problem is principally one of supply and not demand, asserting that eradication of the sources of opium was the only solution.
Andreas cited another absurd and unintended fruit of the drug war. Because marijuana is bulkier and easier to detect by dogs than cocaine or heroine, domestic production of cannabis has skyrocketed, and on an international level, there has been a diversification to other less detectable, more dangerous drugs.
Andreas and Tree agreed that calling the attempt to eradicate drugs a "war" was problematic, because unlike most wars, this one has no foreseeable end, they said.
"For decades we've been waging a war against an enemy that is literally incapable of surrender," Tree said. The "enemy" is incapable of surrender both because drug growers and dealers often have no viable alternate livelihood and because they are not a united group that is able to make a collective decision, he said.
Equally troublesome as the use of the term "war" is the common assertion that Colombia is the home of narcoterrorism, Tree said.
Though Andreas said that "the politics of the war on drugs and the war on terror overlap tremendously," Tree said that narcoterrorism "is a terminology that doesn't help us understand either phenomenon."
Ricardo Luna, a visiting professor in Latin American studies, moderated the discussion. Luna formerly served as Peru's ambassador, first to the United Nations and then to the United States.
Audience members generally seemed pleased with the quality of the discussion, although Tania Albin '08 said that "the way that they explained the problem but didn't say any solutions to it" bothered her.
When another audience member asked the panelists what type of crops could replace illegal substances to ensure that farmers continue to make a living, Andreas held up a case of Colombian coca tea, which is a mild, legal stimulant that could be produced in place of cocaine.
"I really liked the question about alternative crops. There's never going to be a change unless there is a change in livelihood," said Dan MacCombie '08, treasurer of Students for Sensible Drug Policy, which co-sponsored the event with Amnesty International, Latin American Students Organiza-tion, Oxfam at Brown and Unicef at Brown.
Though participants debated the root of the problem, all agreed the current state of the war on drugs is unsatisfactory. "What was really interesting was the hypocrisy of the drug war, which is an unwinnable war," said Alex Schrobenhauser '08.
