El Chapo and Drug Prohibition

Here is the Sean Penn interview with Sinaloa cartel chief Guzmán that I mentioned in lecture. The Mexican drug wars have received extensive coverage, including excellent material from actual journalists and investigative organizations like ProPublica.  See David Epstein's long piece, "How DEA Agents Took Down Mexico's Most Vicoius Drug Cartel,' on how you can win battles in the drug wars, like (again) arresting a kingpin like Guzmán, and still lose the war.  Here's Epstein on El Chapo at Propublica.  On the pointlessness of the drug war, see the exchange on Democracy Now.  This interview and the one that follows covers the connection between the drug wars and the state of Mexican government and society. The noir era starts with Prohibition (of alcohol) in the United States in 1920 via constitutional amendment.  Drug prohibition has been near-universal global policy ever since, with effects that many people, including conservative Latin American policymakers, now consider to be unacceptable. Is there a connection between the war on drugs, social underdevelopment and the  massacre of students in the state of Iguala in 2014? More on this as the course unfolds.

Prohibition Continuing

There are lots of stories like this one about the Sinaloa cartel using Chicago as a major distribution hub for heroin and other drugs--and it could have been written anytime in the last few years, or in the early 1980s for that matter, though it would have been about Columbia rather than Mexico, and Miami rather than Chicago.  Change a few names, but the drug wars story remains the same.

A couple of course members brought up Portugal's own post-war-on-drugs policies. If you subscribe to the New Yorker, you can read a good piece from October 2011. A free introduction that summarizes current policy is here. Also last year, Forbes had a very short summary of the positive results.  A paper from the UC Berkeley economics department finds a positive correlation between decriminalization in Portugal and both homicide and drug mortality rates relative to other European Union countries." One small sign of a growing left-right consensus against the war on drugs is a  study of the effects of Portugal's decriminalization policy for the Cato Institute--a right-wing think tank--by left-wing civil liberties blogger Glenn Greenwald.  One of the stronger criticisms of the studies of decriminalization, including of Greenwald's, can be found on Barack Obama's White House website.