This podcast was recorded for my Drug Politics course, and it discusses US policy towards Latin America as it relates to drugs and drug trafficking. I also dive into the history and changes in US drug policy.
Transcript:
Hello everyone, thanks for stopping by, how you doing, how you doing?
Thank you for tuning into the Christian Vanhoek experience.
I’m, as always, Christian Vanhoek, a senior at the University of Mary Washington political science department.
And today we’re going to be talking about something that I think is very pertinent in American
society and just politics in general today.
And this will be drug politics.
And what I mean by that is just the politics and policies that surround drugs and drug trafficking.
And as we are most familiar with it here in the US of a, the war on drugs.
So, we’re going to be going over some common concerns that Americans have surrounding
drugs in Latin America and both here domestically.
And how some of these concerns, while the drug policies will seemingly address this in the actual implementation, it seems to be extremely lacking.
So, we’re going to delve a little bit into that.
Now, it applies you all to state tune if you want to hear about some of this interesting
theory that we have coming up.
The American concerns surrounding drugs, what are they?
What are people in the United States concerned about?
What is their common belief or fears surrounding drugs?
Well, a predominant belief in the United States is that rapid and availability of drugs leads
to high rates of addiction, fatalities.
You see this a lot in the media.
You do any Google search about drugs or substance abuse.
A lot of the things you see is things about drugs becoming a growing threat in the United States.
Or fatalities, particularly surrounding nowadays with things like fentanyl.
But in the past, it was surrounding things like possession of marijuana, cocaine, crack, heroin. You name it.
It’s been in the media.
Just doing a quick Google search here.
One of the first news media sites that comes up is FoxNews.com, which is known for their sensationalist headlines.
And one of the articles here, one of the first ones was from three days ago, Gast station
heroin is a growing threat in New Jersey, health officials warn, dangerous and addictive.
I think that kind of sums it up, really, is that there’s a big concern about drugs
being available, people getting addicted to them.
A lot of it has to do with children.
And these are very pertinent concerns.
I don’t think anybody can blame them for being concerned about things like that.
But beyond the addiction aspects of it, there’s a concern with violence that presumably
accompanies drugs and drug trafficking.
You see this particularly with a lot of the news media stories that showcase gang violence.
A lot of that is linked to drugs or drug dealing.
And this also extends internationally beyond the US’s borders, particularly two places like
Mexico is a big one in headlines with cartel violence.
Cartels, they’re pretty much synonymous with drug trafficking and drug dealing in the United States, at least in the popular vernacular and greater culture here.
And a lot of that just kind of goes back to just the fact that drugs are linked with immorality.
Whether that’s based on the Christian religion that’s extremely common, multiple denominations,
believe that drugs or other types of inhibitors are immoral.
And generally, this immorality leads to people who use them, use drugs or sell drugs as being immoral and deserving of punishment.
And as a result, a lot of media, I have an article here by Julian Mercell, the media entertainment industry in the War on Drugs in Mexico, which really popularized.
I talked about how the War on Drugs has been popularized in US popular culture.
There’s a lot of cop shows, TV shows, movies, video games where its cops taking on drug dealers,
punishing them or portraying drug dealers as criminals, something like Grand Theft Auto comes to mind where there’s missions where you sell drugs, you deal drugs, and it’s portrayed as something very serious and morally reprehensible.
And generally, these issues come up in politics a lot, but how they’re implemented is very different, or how these issues are tackled, and these policies are implemented is different than what people’s concerns are really about.
And we’re going to get a little bit into that with particularly what is American policy focus regarding drugs.
So, we’ve established that American concerns lie largely with violence and addiction.
How does American governmental policy play into that?
Well, a lot of the time politicians will sell the American public on, oh, this is a big problem in Latin America.
There’s violence that stems from these drug trafficking organizations and these cartels,
and it spills over across our border into the United States.
And the drugs that come across cause people to be addicted.
However, US strategy doesn’t really address any of this.
US strategy primarily does focus on stopping drugs from coming across the border with
interdiction from law enforcement and military.
So, to seize drugs being brought over by drug traffickers and arresting and incarcerating those people that operate that industry.
But overseas in countries in Latin America, you see a lot of targeting of the supply of drugs or forcing countries to classify certain substances.
One thing comes to mind is the coca leaf where it is a traditional plant that was chewed
in Bolivia but is also a main ingredient in cocaine.
And so, the US essentially forced Bolivia to target that as an illicit substance and to regulate it very heavily, making very big penalties for those who would grow it without proper authorization. And they would also in countries like Colombia arrest the heads of drug trafficking organizations and have them extradited to the United States for trial for facilitating and being in a leadership role for the trafficking of drugs.
And this was sort of targeted approach, which a lot of the countries would use this their advantage as a way to strike at political opponents or to fund opposition to challenges to their power.
And in capitalism, globalism in the US drug war, which we read in Professor Martinez’s drug politics class is that there was significant attention put on racist and economic motivations towards drug policy.
So, a big example is that in the early 1900s, we had an influx of Chinese immigrants emigrating to the United States.
Because of this and racist ideology, they would outlaw the use of opium and smoking opium, which was popular among Chinese immigrants, not for any sort of health reasons or anything, but because they wanted to target those people and have a reason to arrest them.
You can see this again in the 1960s where the crackdown in recreational marijuana was due to the fact that it was popular within the hippie subculture and the African American population.
A big other interest in lobbying was the pharmaceutical industry, which held a lot of sway over drug policy.
Their economic interests really lent themselves to the pharmaceutical industry controlling medicinal drug use and the importation and export of illicit drugs.
And so, a lot of it was targeted on Latin America’s agricultural industry, which grew a lot of the crops that were used in manufacturing, medicinal and recreational drugs.
And so, it was really just a different targeted approach.
It was sold to the public as being, oh, we have to stop addiction and the violence to companies’ drugs.
However, it was really done to either target specific groups of people or to benefit pharmaceutical industries and those who are connected to it.
You don’t really see any kind of treatment, addiction treatment or rehabilitation for those who are addicted to drugs.
Instead, they were thrown into prison with something like 94% of federal prisoners being held on nonviolent offenses, which the vast, over-human majority of those were based on drug-related offenses.
So, it really was an emphasis on punishment and using the overall threat of drugs as a way to push political and other racial motivations, economic ones as well, versus actually solving the root issues of things like addiction and violence, which is what the main concerns the United States really are focused on.
Credit/Attribution:
Music in podcast is “on repeat” by Marcus P. downloaded via bensound.