What do a traditional Jamaican tea, a leafy cash crop that flourishes in Bolivia, another plant grown in and around the Horn of Africa, and an Indian scorpion have in common? They are all indigenous life forms that locals use to achieve varying degrees of intoxication.

Ganja, also called cannabis, hemp or marijuana, is smoked by some Jamaicans but is also used as the main ingredient in a tea popular with most islanders, even those opposed to the smoking of ganja.

Bolivian laborers, truck drivers, and others seeking to maintain alertness while working in the oxygen-poor high altitude of the country chew the revitalizing leaves of the coca plant. Africans in Somalia, Ethiopia, and Kenya and Arabs in Yemen likewise chew khat, an indigenous plant leaf, for its qualities as a stimulant. Meanwhile, the newest recreational drug craze in Gujarat, India, 200 miles north of Mumbai on the Indian Ocean, is paying a vendor for the pleasure of receiving a sting to one's palm from a live scorpion.

According to Ananova.com, a British web portal, "scorpion venom contains a variety of compounds, neurotoxins, histamine, seratonin, enzymes, [and] enzyme inhibitors that provide the high."

These examples of the use of indigenous plants and animals as foods, stimulants, and intoxicants, spread across diverse peoples, cultures, oceans and continents, illustrate the ubiquitous use in the developing world of what critics of drug use in developed nations like the United States consider to be harmful substances whose prohibition, stigmatization and destruction is imperative.

Worldwide, though, a growing number of economists, researchers, and experts on topics as varied as the environment, human rights and development believe these naturally occurring plant and animal by-products to be vital cogs in the rapidly globalizing world economy. Just how does the issue of drug farming, production, sale, and use fit within a paradigm of globalization, the discussion of which is usually reserved for topics like genetically modified food, free trade, indigenous rights, environmental degradation, sweatshops, property rights, privatization, Western chain restaurants, and corporate greed?

Illegal Drugs have Always been Popular, Though not Illegal
Consider that cannabis, mankind's second most widely used drug, trailing only alcohol, has been farmed worldwide and used as a food, intoxicant, clothing, and textile for several millennia. According to a report by the United Nations' Office of Drug Control, cannabis "was one of the first – if not the first – non-food industrial plants to be used by man."

The worldwide availability of cocaine, processed from the leaves of the coca plant, which is grown almost exclusively by subsistence farmers in the developing world, has increased markedly over the last thirty years, though the finished product is mainly produced for export and is rarely used in countries like Bolivia or Colombia where it is produced. Khat continues to be grown and used almost exclusively in northeast Africa and Yemen, though it is gaining in popularity in the developed world as more and more people emigrate from the region.

One day, perhaps, given time, scorpion stings will be a growth industry in the developed world, too.

Though these intoxicants are to varying degrees popular and common in their countries of origin, their growth, sale and use are by no means formally sanctioned by their respective national governments. Ganja is illegal in Jamaica, though it is tolerated due to its status as "the most important pillar" of the country's economy, according to Tim Boekhout van Solinge of CEDRO, a Dutch drug-policy research center.

Coca farming, centered chiefly in Latin America, prevails even as farms are targeted for eradication by anti-drug forces, though recent popular actions to grant rights to the owners of longstanding coca farms in Peru could have widespread impact in the region.

Few believe, though, that the United States, the kingpin of the region's eradication efforts, will allow these poor subsistence farmers the right to legally farm coca. The United States, after all, has its hand in virtually every anti-drug effort around the globe.

How did the United States, the world's leading drug consumer, become involved in enforcing the laws of other countries, in effect globalizing its prohibition of certain drugs? And what is the nature of its involvement in worldwide anti-drug efforts?

It may be helpful to first take a brief look at the history of U.S. anti-drug policy.

The use of indigenous plants and animals as foods, stimulants, and intoxicants is spread across diverse peoples, cultures, oceans and continents.

The Evolution of Anti-drug Policies
Since 1914, when it passed the Harrison Act, the United States has had a formal policy of opposing the production, sale and use of drugs. For many years, these laws, though on the books, were not vigorously enforced. Soon after passing the Harrison Act, the United States enacted Prohibition, effectively outlawing the production, sale, and use of alcohol. Prohibition was imposed with the full backing of an expanding police force and vigorous prosecution of alcohol scofflaws.

Due to the high risk involved in producing, selling and using alcohol, new criminal networks emerged. Bootlegging, the illegal production of alcoholic beverages, and speakeasies, the back-alley bars in which this alcohol was sold, became commonplace.

According to Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman, in On Liberty and Drugs, Prohibition failed to dent the "readily available" supply of alcohol.

To combat smuggling from abroad, the U.S. tightened port control and increased monitoring of its borders with Canada and Mexico. Liquor, less popular before Prohibition, became the drink of choice because of both its higher strength and greater bang for the buck.

Criminal enterprises of a scale never before seen, like that run by Chicago gangster Al "Scarface" Capone, took control of the production, distribution and sale of alcohol and earned for themselves massive, tax-free fortunes.

Prohibition, having failed to stamp out alcohol supply or consumption while creating an unprecedented increase in criminal activities, was repealed in 1933. Soon after, authorities shifted their attention to stamping out drug use.

Until President Richard Nixon began to apply the Harrison Act in 1972, little had been done to combat drugs at home. Ten years later, President Ronald Reagan declared war on drugs and expanded the fight to the supply side – farms, factories and traffickers in the developing world. Involving nearly every branch of government, Reagan and each successive president has escalated and globalized this war.

The costs associated with the War on Drugs are staggering. In 1998, the late best-selling author Peter McWilliams, in his Ain't Nobody's Business if I Do: The Absurdity of Consensual Crimes in a Free Society, estimated the annual cost of the War on Drugs to be at least $40 billion.

And what does this multi-billion dollar policy buy? According to official U.S. government data, like that contained in the National Data Tables: Drug Use for the year ending 2001, increased U.S. funding for anti-drug policies has had little if any perceivable effect on drug consumption within its borders.

In addition to its aim to reduce drug consumption in the United States, the government, through its Office of National Drug Control Policy, claims that its efforts combat purported harm that drugs cause the environment in their countries of origin, aid poor and subsistence farmers' transition to alternative crops, and impede drug profits that are funneled to terrorists.

Critics, though, lambaste these claims.

Cannabis, mankind's second most widely used drug, trailing only alcohol, has been farmed worldwide and used as a food, intoxicant, clothing, and textile for several millennia.

Illegal Drugs and the Global Environment
The most expensive ongoing anti-drug effort carried out by the United States is in Colombia, for many years the chief supplier of cocaine to the U.S. and the rest of the world. Plan Colombia, the U.S. effort costing over $1.3 billion per year, commits U.S. military forces and equipment to a country rife with terrorist elements and teetering on the brink of civil war.

Perhaps just as ambitious as the military commitment, though, is the massive crop-spraying campaign that is an integral part of Plan Colombia. Crop spraying in Colombia is carried out by a fleet of single-engine crop dusting planes. Because the planes must fly low over the crops, they are plated on their undersides with armor, so as to withstand gunfire from farmers attempting to protect their crops. Still, several pilots have been shot down, captured by rebels, or killed.

Spraying begins in an area when American surveillance aircraft or satellites locate a coca plant farm. The planes spray glyphosate, a poison, over the coca field. The poison dries out and kills the coca plants. Proponents claim that spraying has led to a marked decrease in coca production in the areas in which it has been carried out.

Critics of spraying mourn the immeasurable harms it causes people and the environment. Nelson Fredy Padilla Castro, an investigative reporter and correspondent based in Latin America, citing information provided by doctors, scientists, villagers, and Acción Andina, an environmental group, writes that glyphosate causes "[s]kin and gastro-intestinal problems, fevers, headaches, nausea, colds and vomiting" in people and similar problems in animals.

Padilla Castro describes the health and environmental problems as so serious that whole villages affected by spraying have been abandoned by their residents.

Another serious environmental problem that results from spraying is the haphazard effect it can have on legal food crops like corn, yucca and rice, and also on textile crops. Francisco Thumi, in a report prepared for the U.S. government, writes that spraying is an "indiscriminate weapon … of doubtful worth in Colombia … that can impact non-targeted crops." Further, writes Thumi, in areas where soil is too poor to farm any crop but hardy coca, farmers would have found it "technologically impossible to harvest sustained agricultural production different from coca."

The U.S. government, at one of its many anti-drug websites, counters that some practices associated with coca cultivation and cocaine processing harm the environment. For instance, the government points out, farmers often clear cut trees to create more farmable land and also utilize toxic chemicals in the production of cocaine. Padilla Castro quotes a Colombian government minister as claiming that coca farmers cut vast areas of "jungle and forest land and use 75 chemicals more poisonous than glyphosate."

Critics argue, though, that little if any incentive exists for farmers to clean up their act.

Because the crop they grow and the products it yields are under constant attack, farmers must continuously cut down trees in order to replace land ruined by spraying. Farmers are also forced to use the harmful chemicals they have at hand in order to produce cocaine, as cheaply and covertly as possible, for export.

If farmers were legally permitted to cultivate coca and other drugs, the harmful effects of processing these drugs could be moved from the fragile jungle ecosystems and brought to factories in developed countries, creating new jobs in both the developed and developing world while lessening the environmental harm done in far-off lands due to primitive and toxic methods of drug processing.

How did the United States, the world's leading drug consumer, become involved in enforcing the laws of other countries -- in effect globalizing its prohibition of certain drugs?

Illegal Drugs, Crop Substitution, and Terrorism
Crop substitution is a scheme, backed principally by money from the United States and United Nations, whereby farmers of illegal drugs in developing countries are paid to transition to the farming of legal crops. On its own and through the U.N., the United States cooperates with myriad nations to implement crop substitution plans as a means of eradicating illegal drugs.

In spite of many short-term successes, critics argue that crop substitution is not a feasible or successful long-term strategy for eradicating drug farming because the plan often fails, either when new crops fail to take root or when farmers cannot subsist on their new crops.

Critics of crop substitution also point out that the U.S. has been willing to climb into bed with just about any sinister and repressive willing to join the War on Drugs.

In recent years, the Clinton and Bush administrations partnered in poppy crop eradication efforts with Afghanistan, even as that country's government willingly hosted international terrorists within its borders. This cooperation with the Taliban yielded, in some cases, significant reduction in drug production.

In fact, in August 2001, only a month before the September 11th terrorist attacks carried out against the United States by al Qaeda, the group harbored by the Taliban, Assistant U.S. Secretary of State for South Asia Christina Rocca issued a formal statement lauding the Taliban's poppy eradication efforts, stating, "We welcome the Taliban's enforcement of the ban, and hope it will be sustained."

With this declaration came a pledge of $1.5 million to aid further poppy eradication and alternative crop development efforts. In fact, according to Rocca, the U.S. gave more than $140 million in humanitarian aid during January-August 2001 to promote alternative crop production in Afghanistan alone.

Critics hammer the U.S. government's claims that "drugs aid terrorism," calling them disingenuous in light of the State Department's continued collaboration with the Taliban in funding anti-drug efforts right up until the al Qaeda attacks.

While poppy eradication efforts were initially successful in Afghanistan, parallel alternative development efforts were not. As a recent CBS Evening News report highlighted, many Afghan farmers who were unsuccessful in transitioning to farming other crops, given their arid and rocky soil, quickly returned to poppy farming.

The few farmers who did adopt new crops saw their incomes fall drastically. Further, Hamshahri, a daily paper in neighboring Iran, quoted a spokesman with Iran's Ministry of Agricultural Jihad – honestly! – who claimed that Afghan farmers forced to give up poppy were instead turning to the plunder of indigenous Iranian saffron, a valuable food spice.

In another case of failed crop substitution, Peru recently reversed its support for an American-led crop plan, casting a harsh light on a program that had been viewed as a success. According to The Miami Herald, coca acreage is increasing while "the programs designed to stop it are flopping." The Herald said that farmers protesting coca eradication forced the Peruvian government to reverse its support for the U.S. plan, claiming that they "had been duped by U.S. promises of alternative crops."

Even critics of globalization and drug legalization have recognized the shortcomings of crop substitution policies.

Joseph Stiglitz, author of Globalization and its Discontents and a critic of what he calls globalization's shortcomings, declares his empathy for Bolivian coca farmers who, he says, followed the wishes of the world community and transitioned from coca production to alternate crops, even though coca "provided a higher income to its already poor farmers than any alternative," only to find their new crop choices the object of trade barriers and other prohibitive tariffs.

"[W]hen farmers changed crops," writes Stiglitz, "the United States responded by keeping its markets closed to the alternative agriculture products, like sugar, that Bolivian farmers might have produced for export – had American markets been open to them."

Globally, there exists a demand for a variety of drugs farmed in the developing world.

Anti-drug Efforts are Harming Subsistence Farmers
Critics believe that overwhelming evidence exists that current approaches to drug eradication like spraying, interdiction, military intervention, and crop substitution are not working. Some believe that doing more to combat drugs is the answer. But is there another way? Is anyone offering alternative solutions to these serious problems?

Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto, in The Mystery of Capital, proposes a methodology for formally deeding public property to the citizens who live on that land.

Right now, as de Soto points out, the poor have billions and billions of dollars of dead capital – or unusable wealth – locked up in their ownership of untitled property. The poor, lacking a property title for which a bank loan can be acquired, are forced to pass up credit that might otherwise help them improve their property by purchasing seeds, irrigation equipment or livestock.

With regard to coca farmers, though de Soto does not specifically mention support for titling coca farms in The Mystery of Capital, as Peru's drug czar in the 1990s he did act to legitimize small coca farms.

The strategies suggested by Szasz and de Soto are gaining traction in the developing world, most notably in de Soto's native Peru, which recently reversed coca eradication and crop substitution policies to instead recognize the rights of coca farmers of long standing.

Illegal Drugs: Legalize and Globalize?
Proponents of the free market, champions of the environment, and people concerned about improving the lives of subsistence farmers in poor countries find themselves agreeing that the United States and other developed countries should open their markets to goods from the developing world. The goods referred to might include coffee, handcrafted pottery, diamonds or anything for which a demand exists in the developed world.

Globally, there exists a demand for a variety of drugs farmed in the developing world. Unfortunately for the growers and producers of these drugs, who are located chiefly in the developing world, the exportation of their crops is currently prohibited by the policies of prohibition that exist in the majority of developed nations.

But does the exchange of goods extend so far as to include farmed drugs like coca, poppy, and cannabis?

In order to improve the lives of poor workers and farmers, lessen environmental degradation, and combat terrorism, allowing subsistence farmers to cultivate and export cannabis, coca and poppy may be the facet of globalization that best matches the supply of the developing world with the demand of the developed world – the great equalizer that rapidly increases the wealth of poor and rich people in all nations.

Let's hope, though, that the scorpion-venom sellers of Gujarat don't get their hopes – or their customers – too high.






Contributed by Baylen J. Linnekin, a freelance writer who specializes on the global effects of U.S. drug policy. Reprinted with permission from A World Connected.

To read another Global Envision article on trade, see Trading up Global Trade Talks.