# 12

Alternative Crop Subsidies

The United States DEA and Department of State, as well as other agencies, have acknowledged the crop production of harmful substances destined for US citizens and they have attempted to reduce - while not seeking eradication - various crops in far-off lands.  For example, farmers in Mexico can have a financial "carrot" dangled in front of them if they will discontinue cultivation of poppy and convert to corn.  Poppy growers in Turkey can be provided a similar incentive but the crop may be peanuts or soy beans.

Alternative development continues to be recognized by Member States as a fundamental pillar of a comprehensive drug control strategy and plays an important role as a development oriented drug control approach. […] Let us not forget that behind the policies, we have hundreds of thousands of farmers affected by poverty, food insecurity, lack of land, instability who as a result engage in illicit drug cultivation. It is our common responsibility to continue addressing the livelihood of these people, despite the challenges that the international community is faced with today, including the financial constraints.
Yury Fedotov at the opening of the side-event "Outreach to new Stakeholders in the Field of Alternative Development"57 th CND, 2014

One of their slogans reads:  Coffee instead of Coca.

Strangely, our U.S. government recognizes that cocaine produced in South America from a natural plant is what was brought into America and is the substance which caused the death of Basketball star Len Bias...however, the government does not seek absolute eradication of the plant.  Our government seeks a reduction of the availability of the substance while they recognize that limitations on availability will drive-up costs and fuel an increase in crime.  All of this has been captured in Nobel Economist Milton Friedman's

Prohibition and Drugs

by Milton Friedman

From Newsweek, May 1, 1972

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"The reign of tears is over. The slums will soon be only a memory. We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses and corncribs. Men will walk upright now, women will smile, and the children will laugh. Hell will be forever for rent."
That is how Billy Sunday, the noted evangelist and leading crusader against Demon Rum, greeted the onset of Prohibition in early 1920. We know now how tragically his hopes were doomed. New prisons and jails had to be built to house the criminals spawned by converting the drinking of spirits into a crime against the state. Prohibition undermined respect for the law, corrupted the minions of the law, created a decadent moral climate-but did not stop the consumption of alcohol.
Despite this tragic object lesson, we seem bent on repeating precisely the same mistake in the handling of drugs.
ETHICS AND EXPEDIENCY
On ethical grounds, do we have the right to use the machinery of government to prevent an individual from becoming an alcoholic or a drug addict? For children, almost everyone would answer at least a qualified yes. But for responsible adults, I, for one, Would answer no. Reason with the potential addict, yes. Tell him the consequences, yes. Pray for and with him, yes. But I believe that we have no right to use force, directly or indirectly, to prevent a fellow man from committing suicide, let alone from drinking alcohol or taking drugs.
I readily grant that the ethical issue is difficult and that men of goodwill may well disagree. Fortunately, we need not resolve the ethical issue to agree on policy. Prohibition is an attempted cure that makes matters worse-for both the addict and the rest of us. Hence, even if you regard present policy toward drugs as ethically justified, considerations of expediency make that policy most unwise.
Consider first the addict. Legalizing drugs might increase the number of addicts, but it is not clear that it would. Forbidden fruit is attractive, particularly to the young. More important, many drug addicts are deliberately made by pushers, who give likely prospects their first few doses free. It pays the pusher to do so because, once hooked, the addict is a captive customer. If drugs were legally available, any possible profit from such inhumane activity would disappear, since the addict could buy from the cheapest source.
Whatever happens to the number of addicts, the individual addict would clearly be far better off if drugs were legal. Today, drugs are box incredibly expensive and highly uncertain in quality. Addicts are driven to associate with criminals to get the drugs, become criminals themselves to finance the habit, and risk constant danger of death and disease.
Consider next the test of us. Here the situation is crystal clear.  The harm to us from the addiction of others arises almost wholly from the fact that drugs are illegal. A recent committee of the American Bar Association estimated that addicts commit one-third to one-half of all street crime in the U.S. Legalize drugs, and street crime would drop dramatically. Moreover, addicts and pushers are not the only ones corrupted. Immense sums are at stake. It is inevitable that some relatively low-paid police and other government officials-and some high-paid ones as well-will succumb to the temptation to pick up easy money.
LAW AND ORDER
Legalizing drugs would simultaneously reduce the amount of crime and raise the quality of law enforcement. Can you conceive of any other measure that would accomplish so much to promote law and order?
But, you may say, must we accept defeat? Why not simply end the drug traffic? That is where experience under Prohibition is most relevant. We cannot end the drug traffic. We may be able to cut off opium from Turkey but there are  innumerable other places where the opium poppy grows. With French cooperation, we may be able to make Marseilles an unhealthy place to manufacture heroin but there are innumerable other places where the simple manufacturing operations involved can be carried out. So long as large sums of money are involved-and they are bound to be if drugs are illegal-it is literally hopeless to expect to end the traffic or even to reduce seriously its scope. In drugs, as in other areas, persuasion and example are likely to be far more effective than the use of force to shape others in our image.

Why control (as the UN suggests), why not eradicate?