For the cops on the front lines of the War on Drugs, the federal government's fixation with marijuana was deeply perplexing. As they saw it, the problem wasn't pot but the drug-related violence that accompanied cocaine and other hard drugs. After the crack epidemic in the late 1980s, police commissioners around the country, like Lee Brown in Houston, began adding more officers and developing computer mapping to target neighborhoods where crime was on the rise. The crime rate dropped. But by the mid-1990s, police in some cities were beginning to realize there was a certain level that they couldn't get crime below. Mass jailings weren't doing the trick: Only fifteen percent of those convicted of federal drug crimes were actual traffickers; the rest were nothing but street-level dealers and mules, who could always be replaced.
Police in Boston, concerned about violence between youth drug gangs, turned for assistance to a group of academics. Among them was a Harvard criminologist named David Kennedy. Working together, the academics and members of the department's anti-gang unit came up with what Kennedy calls a "quirky" strategy and convinced senior police commanders to give it a try. The result, which began in 1995, was the Boston Gun Project, a collaborative effort among ministers and community leaders and the police to try to break the link between the drug trade and violent crime. First, the project tracked a particular drug-dealing gang, mapping out its membership and operations in detail. Then, in an effort called Operation Ceasefire, the dealers were called into a meeting with preachers and parents and social-service providers, and offered a deal: Stop the violence, or the police will crack down with a vengeance. "We know the seventeen guys you run with," the gangbangers were told. "If anyone in your group shoots somebody, we'll arrest every last one of you." The project also extended drug treatment and other assistance to anyone who wanted it.
The effort worked: The rates of homicide and violence among young men in Boston dropped by two-thirds. Drug dealing didn't stop - "people continued what they were doing," Kennedy concedes, "but they put their guns down."
As Kennedy reflected on the success of the Boston project, which ran for five years, he wondered if he had discovered a deeper truth about drug-related violence. If the murders weren't a necessary component of the drug trade - if it was possible to separate the two - perhaps cities could find a way to reduce the violence, even if they could do nothing about the drugs.
In 2001, Kennedy got a call from the mayor of San Francisco that gave him a chance to examine his theories in a new setting. The city had experienced a recent spike in its murder rate, much of it caused by an ongoing feud between two drug-dealing gangs - Big Block and West Mob - that had resulted in dozens of murders over the years. Could Kennedy, the mayor asked, help police figure out how to stop the killings?
Kennedy flew out to San Francisco and met with police. But as he researched the history of the violence, it seemed to confirm his findings in Boston. Though both Big Block and West Mob were involved in dealing drugs, the shootings were not really drug-related - the two groups occupied different territories and were not battling over turf. "The feud had started over who would perform next at a neighborhood rap event," says Kennedy, now a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. "They had been killing each other ever since."
Such evidence suggested that drug enforcement needed to focus more narrowly on those responsible for the violence. "Seventy percent of the violence in these hot neighborhoods comes back to drugs," Kennedy says. "But one of the profound myths is that these homicides are about the drug trade. The violence is driven by these crews - but they're not killing each other over business." The real spark igniting the murders, he realized, was peer pressure, a kind of primordial male goad that drove young gang members to kill each other even in instances when they weren't sure they wanted to.
Given that police departments had already locked up every drug dealer in sight and were still having problems with violence, Kennedy thought a new approach was worth a try. "There's a difference between saying, 'I'm watching this, and you should stop,' and putting someone in federal lockup," he says. "The violence is not about the drug business - but that's a very hard thing for people to understand."
But in the early days of the Bush administration, police departments were in no hurry to experiment with an approach that focused on drug-related murders and mostly ignored users who weren't committing violence. Kennedy's efforts proved to be yet another missed opportunity in the War on Drugs - an experience that made clear how difficult it is for science to influence the nation's drug policy.
"If ten years ago the medical community had figured out a way to reduce the deaths from breast cancer by two-thirds, every cancer clinic in the country would have been using those techniques a year later," Kennedy says. "But when it comes to drugs and violence, there's been nothing like that."
Instead of pursuing the Boston Gun Project and other innovative approaches to fighting drug violence, the federal government decided to escalate its military response in Colombia. For the past decade and a half, cooperation from officials in Bogotá had been halfhearted, sporadic and deeply corrupt. But by 1999, the country, it seemed, was on the verge of collapsing into civil war. The drug money that had flowed into Colombia had found its way into the hands of the rebel militia - the FARC - which had been laying siege to the Colombian government. The Clinton foreign-policy team, having spent the previous few years dealing with the consequences of failed states in Somalia and the Balkans, was deeply concerned about the possibility of a failed narcostate in America's own back yard.
One afternoon in June 1999, a dozen senior Clinton officials filed into the National Security Council's situation room, summoned by Sandy Berger, the president's national security adviser. Even though Bogotá had ceded control of vast swaths of the country to the left-wing rebels, they were told, recent peace talks had collapsed. "The FARC had basically always been jungle campesinos - they were a pretty austere bunch," says Brian Sheridan, who was in charge of the Pentagon's counternarcotics effort at the time and attended the meeting. "All of a sudden, they were leveling these attacks that had gotten more and more audacious." When FARC rebels had emerged from the jungle for a round of peace talks the previous fall, they had brandished brand-new AK-47s and Dragunovs, as if on military parade. One U.S. official observed at the time that the weaponry was "far beyond" what the Colombian army had - in a pitched battle, the Clinton administration worried, the Colombian government could plausibly collapse.
The White House advisers weren't the only officials in Washington concerned about Colombia. Earlier that day, two men who attended the briefing - Rand Beers of the State Department and Charlie Wilhelm of the Defense Department - had gotten a call from the Republican caucus on the Hill. Dennis Hastert, who had been elevated to Speaker of the House six months earlier, wanted to see them right away. "It was kind of unusual," Beers recalls - but when Hastert called, you came.
When Beers and Wilhelm arrived, Rep. Porter Goss, then the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, handed them a piece of paper. It was a copy of a supplemental spending authorization that the Republicans planned to offer immediately. Crafted by Bobby Charles, Hastert's longtime aide, the bill would have more than doubled military aid to Colombia to take on the rebels and narcotraffickers -to a staggering $1.2 billion a year. But it was the politics of the situation that worried Beers as much as the money. "It occurred to me that if the administration was going to do anything on Colombia, it better do it soon," he says now, "or the Republicans would once again outflank what they perceived as the I-never-inhaled Clinton administration." Beers told the Republicans he would take a look, and then hurried to Berger's meeting.
Throughout much of the Clinton administration, the hope had been that the United States would be able to reduce its military aid to the Andes as the cocaine epidemic waned. Now, as Berger's group heard from intelligence agents, that hope seemed to be fading. Narcotraffickers were paying off the FARC so they could grow coca in the jungles of Colombia. The FARC were then turning around and using the money to buy weapons to stage attacks on the Colombian government.
Berger decided to act. Rather than oppose the Republican plan, he agreed to negotiate on an assistance package to bail out the Colombian government. The result was Plan Colombia - nearly $1.6 billion to escalate the War on Drugs in the Andes. The new program would arm the military and police in their fight against the FARC, launch an ambitious effort to spray herbicide on coca crops from the air and provide economic assistance to poor farmers in rural villages. The initial aid, officials decided, would be heavily concentrated in Putumayo, a rebel-run province in the jungle.
No one is sure what convinced President Clinton to approve such an ambitious escalation in the War on Drugs. But some observers at the time speculated that the critical factor was a conversation with Sen. Christopher Dodd, the Connecticut Democrat, whose state is home to the helicopter manufacturer Sikorsky Aircraft. In early 2000, Clinton unveiled Plan Colombia - and Sikorksy promptly received an order for eighteen of its Blackhawk helicopters at a cost of $15 million each. "Much has been made of the notion that this was Dodd looking to sell Blackhawks to Colombia," Beers tells me. He pauses before adding, "I am not in a position to tell you it didn't happen."
Plan Colombia would be the Clinton administration's primary and most costly contribution to the War on Drugs, the major counternarcotics program it bequeathed to the Bush administration. But as with so many other aspects of American drug policy, the plan had an unintended consequence: As it evolved, the emphasis on supplying arms to the Colombian government ended up having less to do with drugs and more to do with helping Bogotá fight its enemies. Colombia used the military aid to target the left-wing FARC - even though many believed that right-wing paramilitaries, who were allies of the government, were more directly involved in narcotrafficking. "It wasn't really first and foremost a counternarcotics program at all," says a senior Pentagon official involved in the creation of Plan Colombia. "It was mostly a political stabilization program."
9. THE TEMPLE OF HOPE In July of 1999, Gov. George W. Bush of Texas traveled to Cincinnati to visit Hope Temple, a former crack house that had been turned into a church. It was an almost unbearably hot day. Bush was on a tour through the Midwest during which he was testing out his philosophy of compassionate conservatism, trying to see if its rhetoric and principles could sustain a winning presidential run. "The American dream is vivid," Bush told audiences, "but too many feel, 'This dream is not meant for me.' " John Bridgeland, the congressional aide who had helped steer federal funding to Hope Temple, says Bush was "overwhelmed" by his visit to the church that day, and stayed the whole afternoon. That evening, Bush spoke about the fervent religiosity of the place and the rough joys of the addict's redemptions. "These," he said, "are the armies of compassion."
This was a strange moment in the politics of the drug war: Just as the Clinton administration was toughening its rhetoric, influential Republicans were going all soft and gentle. John DiIulio, a political scientist from the University of Pennsylvania who would become a key Bush adviser, was disgusted by the "perverse consequences" of harsh sentencing laws that had put millions of young Americans in prison, disbelieved the "sweeping scientific claims" made about the dangers of medical marijuana and wanted to expand "meaningful drug-treatment opportunities in urban areas." DiIulio and his contemporaries were troubled, too, by the racial imbalances of the War on Drugs: Blacks, who comprised only fourteen percent of drug users, made up seventy-four percent of those in prison for drug possession. It was not as if the Republican Party had suddenly taken up a position on the far left of the drug war. But it did seem, for a moment during the 2000 campaign, as if some moderation were possible.
Three months later, when the Bush campaign released its drug policy, even the most experienced drug warriors were impressed. The platform balanced spending between demand- and supply-side programs, stressed treatment and doubled the number of community anti-drug coalitions. When Bush won the White House and DiIulio became the director of the Office of Faith-Based Programs, they raided the team of compassionate conservatives surrounding Hastert: Bridgeland became director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, and Charles became assistant secretary of state for narcotics control. The new administration, DiIulio believed, would take the lead in "reforming drug-related sentencing policies that research had shown were having perverse consequences."
"If you look back at that campaign document, it really is pretty impressive," says Carnevale, who ended up heading the drug office's transition team for the Bush administration. "Which is kind of remarkable, given what happened next. They've appointed a drug czar who ran like hell from a very sensible policy."
It took Bush nearly a year to pick his drug czar, and almost no one felt encouraged by his choice: John Walters, a laconic Midwesterner who had served as Bill Bennett's chief of staff during the administration of George H.W. Bush. "We all knew who Walters was," one longtime drug warrior tells me, "but he wasn't what you would call an inspiring figure, even to conservatives." When Walters submitted his first National Drug Control Strategy to Bush in February 2002, it became clear that the administration's focus had narrowed: Walters was devoted to Plan Colombia and to a prevention campaign that would keep kids from trying drugs for the first time, aimed particularly at marijuana - even though the number of first-time pot smokers had been flat for half a decade. Longtime drug warriors like Carnevale were stunned. "We were going back to an Eighties-style drug policy," he says - one that emphasized the kind of military and law-and-order programs that had been proven not to work, while ignoring programs, particularly treatment, that did.
Walters also had a complaint with the ads that the Partnership for a Drug-Free America had created for the drug czar's office under McCaffrey. They were, he said, too soft. He had a point. The ads, which ran under the slogan "The Anti-Drug," had been designed by a committee of academics who apparently believed that kids needed to be shown that not doing drugs could be fun too. In one characteristic spot, a pen draws an animated landscape, with a cartoon boy avoiding the advances of cartoon dealers before driving off into the distance with a cartoon dragon on a cartoon motorcycle. "My name is Brandon, and drawing is my anti-drug," the narrator says sweetly. The commercials made abstinence seem so lame they could have been designed by the cartels. "A lot of the ads that were produced were really boring," admits Philip Palmgreen, a University of Kentucky communications professor who served on the ad committee. Walters not only wanted harder-hitting messages - he also wanted the focus "to narrow around marijuana," according to one staffer at the Partnership who asked not to be identified. "Very candidly, the Partnership pushed back against that because the problems associated with marijuana are not very dire." But Walters disagreed, the staffer adds, "and we lost."
Walters refused to be interviewed for this story, but his office did make available one of his top advisers, David Murray. I asked him why his boss had narrowed the focus to marijuana, even though studies had disproved the causal link between marijuana and hard drugs. "If you're going to have a national office of drug-control policy, you look at the most prevalent drug in the society that's readily available - you don't go after meth first thing," he says. "You think about it like an epidemiologist, and you go for the vector that's most likely to spread, and that's teen marijuana users."
The new ads took a counterintuitive approach. "We wanted to make sure we were getting through to the thrill-seekers - those teenagers who are much more likely to use drugs - and convince them that it was more exciting not to do drugs," says Palmgreen. In a heralded spot called "Pete's Couch," the teenage narrator says, "I smoked weed and nobody died. I didn't get into a car accident. I didn't OD on heroin the next day. Nothing happened. We sat on Pete's couch for eleven hours." Then the camera shifts to show other teenagers, presumably those who haven't smoked weed, doing fun things - biking, playing basketball, flirting with girls. "You have a better shot at dying out in the real world," the narrator says, "but I'll take my chances out there." The advertising community was impressed with the spot: "Finally, an admission that smoking pot isn't calamitous," cheered Slate's advertising columnist, Seth Stevenson. Said Palmgreen: "Really good spots. The focus groups of thrill-seekers gave them great grades."
But the reality is that such ads - no matter how persuasive - do little if anything to prevent teens from trying pot. In 2005, a government-commissioned study designed to evaluate the prevention campaign over five years delivered its conclusions: Kids who had been exposed to the campaign ended up with rates of drug use that were roughly the same as those of the control group, who had not seen the ads. Murray loudly challenged the study's methodology, but when Congress asked federal analysts at the Government Accountability Office to assess the findings, the GAO upheld the report. The anti-drug campaign had not worked at all.
There was another problem with the Walters approach: Just as the federal government asserted the dangers of smoking pot, the states - first California, then three others - were permitting doctors to legally prescribe marijuana to relieve the chronic pain that came with cancer, polio and other debilitating long-term diseases. Attorney General John Ashcroft dispatched federal agents to begin raiding the suppliers and purchasers of medical marijuana in California - people who were operating completely within state law. The raids were even more surreal in their theatrics than the ones that had been launched by McCaffrey: In one particularly ludicrous incident, a forty-four-year-old post-polio sufferer named Suzanne Pfeil, who smoked prescription marijuana to relieve her pain, was hauled off to jail by DEA agents who pointed automatic rifles at her head and handcuffed her to her wheelchair. The rhetoric reached the level of crusade: Walters called citizens who plant and tend marijuana gardens "terrorists who wouldn't hesitate to help other terrorists get into the country with the aim of causing mass casualties."
What was striking to many veteran drug warriors was how fully the drug czar's office had bet on the youth marijuana initiative. For all Ashcroft's bluff talk about wanting to "escalate the War on Drugs," only a very small portion of it was being escalated. Funding for drug courts, which channel nonviolent drug offenders through treatment programs rather than prison, was zeroed out, and funding for local police was gutted. Carnevale, who quit his job after overseeing the transition in 2000, began to feel he was in a time warp. "This White House is walking away from prevention funding and treatment," he says now. "They haven't supported the community anti-drug coalitions, which actually work pretty well, and domestic law enforcement is flat or declining. To have a successful drug policy, you need all these elements, and what this administration has done is go crazy on exactly the element that doesn't work."
By the summer of 2005, the drug czar's failures were beginning to spill out into the open. For four years, while he focused obsessively on pot, Walters had done virtually nothing about meth, which was rapidly devastating the red states that had elected his boss. Walters struck a strangely discordant note on the growing epidemic, insisting that even as methamphetamine spread from the West Coast to the East, it remained a regional problem, not a national one, and therefore did not place high on his list of priorities. That September, the House's meth caucus asked Walters to come in for a meeting, to see if they could restore some element of dialogue and begin to rebalance the budget. The drug czar, once again downplaying the issue, sent Murray in his place. The congressmen, who had excluded the press to prevent grandstanding, went through the budget in detail and told the drug deputy what they wanted restored to fight meth. But, according to one staffer, Murray just sat there: "He didn't even bother to ask a question."
Incensed, Rep. Mark Souder, a Republican who chairs the House Subcommittee on Drug Policy, walked out of the room and held an angry press conference. Murray's testimony, he said, had been "pathetic" and "an embarrassment," and Walters was not doing his job: "If he does not lead, we need a change of the drug czar." Sen. Grassley, the Iowa Republican, echoed Souder a few days later. "What I've never understood," he said, "is why they took marijuana so much more seriously than methamphetamine, when methamphetamine is a much more serious drug."
By virtually every objective measure, the White House had lost the War on Drugs. Last year, Walters boasted that drug use among teenagers has fallen since 2002 - ignoring the fact that overall drug use remains unchanged. The deeper problem is that the drug czar has stopped measuring anything other than drug use. During the 1990s, at the direction of Gen. McCaffrey, Carnevale had created a comprehensive system to measure whether we were winning the drug war. The system took into account drug price and availability in the United States, how difficult it was for drug smugglers to get their product into the country and the consequences of drug use on public health and crime. But Walters simply tossed out that system of evaluation - as well as the unflattering facts it highlighted. "Had we kept it," Carnevale tells me, "we would see that the Bush administration has not made a positive impact on any of the measures."
Most unexpectedly of all, crime - a problem that seemed to have been licked a decade ago - is beginning to creep back up. In October 2006, the Police Executive Research Forum released a report declaring that violent crime in the country was "accelerating at an alarming pace." Murders were up twenty-seven percent in Boston over the previous year, sixty percent in San Antonio and more than 300 percent in Orlando. Even in the cloistered world of policing, complaints began to build about the numbers and about the cuts in federal funding. "The reality is a lot of police officers are politically conservative folks," says Ron Brooks, the president of the National Narcotics Officers' Association. "But there's been a lack of leadership in this administration on this issue."
10. THE RETURN OF DON BERNA
While the drug czar was cracking down on medical marijuana, the Bush administration was also overseeing a dramatic escalation in its overseas front of the War on Drugs. From the start, the White House had trumpeted Plan Colombia as an essential weapon in its anti-drug arsenal, eliminating inconvenient rules that had gotten in the way of a full military commitment to the project. For "those in the drug business," Walters declared in January 2002, "now is the time to get out." But despite the billions the administration spent on the program, and the new impunity given to the Colombian military, nobody really knew whether it was working. In July 2006, Adam Isacson decided to see for himself.
Isacson, a scholar who runs the Colombia program at the Center for International Policy, flew down to the Andes to construct his own assessment of Plan Colombia. He decided to make two stops - in Medellín, to determine how much the country's security situation had improved, and in Putumayo, to determine the success of the plan to eradicate the drug traffic. Regular assessments compiled by the White House drug office suggested that the crop-eradication program had reduced the acreage under coca cultivation in Colombia, but Isacson was skeptical: The price of cocaine on the American street had not risen, and separate estimates by the United Nations undercut the Bush administration's findings.
The modern Medellín he found looked more like Miami than a front in the drug war. The government and its paramilitary allies had secured the city, and U.S. officials went out of their way to praise the cooperation they were getting from Colombian police and military units - which had been cleansed, they said, of corruption. When Isacson pressed people about why the violence had decreased so dramatically, he was told repeatedly that "the paramilitaries won" - that government-supported forces had simply driven off the left-wing guerrillas and ended civil war in the city.
The paradox for Americans was that paramilitary commanders, such as Don Berna, had also taken control of the cocaine trade and retained enough political clout, according to a study by a Colombian think tank, to alter the composition of the Colombian Senate. When Don Berna was arrested two years ago, the entire bus transportation system of Medellín shut down for a day. "The command came down from the prison phone," says Aldo Civico, a professor of international relations at Columbia University who has done extensive research on drug smugglers and the paramilitaries. Don Berna is now in a jail cell south of Medellín, from which he continues to control his trafficking organization. "It is a signal to everyone that Don Berna is the one who is in power in Medellín," Civico says.
In Putumayo, Isacson found tent cities buried in the thick jungle, migrants living underneath sheets of plastic. Though tens of millions of American dollars had been spent on trying to improve the local economy, the main road that farmers were supposed to use to ferry their legitimate products to market was still unpaved, and a factory American money had built in 2003 was already shut down. Putumayo had been the first target of Plan Colombia's spray-eradication efforts and the site of its initial success: Coca cultivation had been cut by ninety-three percent from 2000 to 2004. But the place Isacson saw only two years later was "depressed." With no real financial incentive to switch to legitimate crops, farmers in the region had once again begun planting coca: Cultivation doubled in 2005. "We didn't see anything to suggest the improvement was sustainable," Isacson tells me.
The problem was that coca had simply moved next door, to the rural province of Nariño, along the country's Pacific Coast. Traffickers were planting strains of coca that could grow from seed to harvest in just six months. "The spray planes eradicated Putumayo," Isacson says, "and then all of a sudden coca cultivation starts in Nariño, and you see the same pattern - coca money means all these nightclubs and stores go up in these nothing towns, the police start reporting a sharp increase in murders, and eventually the provincial government is overwhelmed." The traffickers hopscotched across the country - Putumayo to Nariño, Nariño to Antioquia - always one step ahead of the drug agents and soldiers.
"As a drug-control policy," Isacson says, "it's hard to come to any conclusion other than that Plan Colombia has failed." In June of this year, the CIA released an assessment that confirmed Isacson's conclusion. Admitting that it had previously been undercounting the coca crop, the agency issued revised numbers showing that six years of Plan Colombia, at nearly $1 billion a year, had not cut coca cultivation at all. The effort to stop cocaine at its source had not made a dent.
"We've been working in Colombia for thirty years, and we don't have a hell of a lot to show for it," says Myles Frechette, the American ambassador to Colombia during the Clinton administration. "This is like a cancer. Every year the lesion, if you took a snapshot, would be bigger."
11. THE WATER BALLOON
At night, the population of el Paso, Texas, is 700,000, and that of Ciudad Juárez, just across the border, is 1.4 million. During the day, those numbers shift, as Mexicans stream across the cobblestone bridge over the Rio Grande for legal work in the United States. Every twelve hours, the two cities pass 100,000 people back and forth, squeezing them from end to end like the contents of a water balloon. "Among them," says Tony Payan, the political scientist at the University of Texas-El Paso and an expert in the dynamics of the local drug trade, "you see the spotters, the lingerers, mostly young men who are just standing there, watching out for when the coast is clear or when an American border agent who's been paid off by the cartel comes on duty. Then they tell the people that need to know, so they can make their drug runs across the border into Texas." With the failure of Plan Colombia, a handful of bridges along the Mexican border have become the main front in the War on Drugs.
Cocaine trafficking in Mexico has its own prehistory. For generations, family networks of smugglers had moved marijuana and cheap, black-tar heroin across the border -veteran DEA agents were accustomed to arresting the grandsons of men they had arrested years earlier - and the whole drug traffic in Mexico was small enough, by the mid-1980s, that it was effectively controlled by one man, Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, who ran a violent trafficking organization out of Tijuana. As Colombian groups, chased from the Caribbean by American interdiction efforts, began to look to the southwest border in the early 1990s, Felix Gallardo discovered he could no longer control the traffic himself from prison. "He had a meeting with his lieutenants and divided the Mexican border crossings up among them, creating the modern cartels," Payan says. "His nephews kept Tijuana, and one group got the Sinaloa-Arizona crossing, another got Laredo-Nuevo Laredo, and Amado Carrillo Fuentes got El Paso-Juárez."
Mexican officials along the border, whose PRI party had kept a lock on national power for seventy years, allowed traffickers to move their product in exchange for reduced violence. "In order to coexist, the government looked the other way as long as the cartels didn't wreak havoc in the country," says Armand Peschard-Sverdrup, director of the Mexico Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "It became somewhat of a safety valve in terms of dealing with organized crime, as a way of mitigating the political instability." Though the U.S. government pushed Mexican officials to crack down on corruption, its pleas and threats went largely unheeded. By 1997, Carrillo Fuentes - the Lord of the Skies - was moving tons of cocaine across the border every year and had amassed a fortune worth $25 billion. But that same year, Carrillo Fuentes died on an operating table in Mexico City, where he had been undergoing plastic surgery to change his appearance and avoid detection: In the ghoulish post-mortem photographs, his face is speckled like a snake's skin, two shades of brown and one of pink. Juárez fell into a testy, three-way competition for control of the drug trade, and the murders took on a symbolic vocabulary of their own: Tortured victims piled in oil barrels filled with concrete and buried alive, members of opposing cartels murdered and left to rot in car trunks in their own neighborhoods, snitches killed and left on the side of the road. The violence between cartels is so pervasive, Payan says, "if you move into a home in Juárez, you will never know whether there's a body underneath the floor in your dining room."
At the beginning of the Bush administration, it looked like Mexico might actually begin to bust corrupt cops who did business with drug smugglers. In 2000, when Vicente Fox, the reforming, conservative rancher and friend of George W. Bush, took power, he began prosecuting dirty police officers, throwing tens of thousands of them off the force. "There were unintended consequences," says Peter Andreas, a Brown University professor who has studied drug trafficking along the border. "Many of the corrupt cops went to work in the drug trade" - a shift in power that had the effect of professionalizing the violence. In addition, an estimated 90,000 Mexican soldiers deserted during the Fox administration, many of them signing up with the cartels.
In Juárez, the effect was devastating. Free to operate as they pleased, the cartels began to split, with capos challenging one another openly for control of the drug corridors. Local and state police killed each other over the right to protect the traffic. A new gang called the Zetas, made up of Mexican soldiers who had quit their day jobs to take over the drug trade, waged war in Juárez and killed 100 people in the corridor around Nuevo Laredo in the summer of 2005. The gaudy theatrics of the murders have only intensified as drug gangs seek to guarantee that their killings send a message by getting media attention: Last year, gunslingers wearing military uniforms walked into a popular nightclub in Uruapan and dumped the severed heads of five rivals on the dance floor, like soccer balls. Over the past year, drug-related murders in Mexico's border states have doubled, driven primarily by the booming trade. "What we're seeing is the Colombianization of Mexico," says Andreas.
For those who have studied American drug policy, the catastrophe along the border looks like a final reckoning for overseas interdiction. "It's like a balloon effect - we've never succeeded in cutting off the traffic, we've just pushed it around," says Payan. "We cut off supply in the Caribbean, and it came here. We cracked down on the Colombian traffickers, and it just meant the Mexicans traffickers got wealthier, and the violence came here." Like many DEA agents and border experts, Payan was consumed last summer by the story of Zhenli Ye Gon, a Chinese pharmaceutical executive whose house Mexican police raided, suspecting him of diverting meth components from China for illegal use. Inside they found $206 million in cash -final evidence of just how far the meth epidemic has spiraled out of control since pharmaceutical lobbyists prevented Gene Haislip from forestalling it with a simple federal regulation. Payan believes, as do many in the DEA, that Ye Gon is a harbinger of the next frontier in the War on Drugs.
"Even if somehow we could manage to get the drug trade away from the Mexican border, it will come through Asia next," he says. "Instead of fighting a border war, we'll be fighting it in containers. But unless we can reduce demand, it's a zero-sum game."
12. THE PRIVATEERS Even by conservative estimates, the War on Drugs now costs the United States $50 billion each year and has overcrowded prisons to the breaking point - all with little discernible impact on the drug trade. A report by the Government Accountability Office released at the end of September estimated that ninety percent of the cocaine moving into the United States now arrives through Mexico, up from sixty-six percent in 2000. Even Walters acknowledges that for all of the efforts the Bush administration has devoted to overseas drug enforcement, the price of cocaine has dropped while its purity has risen. More than forty percent of Americans support legalizing marijuana, yet the government continues to target pot smokers. In October, the administration announced it was planning a new military offensive, dubbed Plan Mexico, with a price tag of $1.4 billion. Things look so bleak that Walters was recently moved to describe a momentary upward blip in drug prices as "historic progress."
There are a handful of battles in the War on Drugs that have actually been won, times when fresh thinking prevailed over politics - but they are not the kind of victories that the Bush administration is eager to trumpet. In the summer of 2003, the police department in High Point, North Carolina, held its annual command-staff retreat in a small conference center themed to look like the log cabins of the pioneers who settled the region. One topic dominated the conversation: an increase in violent crime that was concentrated in three drug-dealing neighborhoods in the city. "The place we were at was that all the traditional enforcement was making no difference," says the department's deputy chief, Marty Sumner. "We agreed we weren't going to be able to eliminate drug use. We weren't even going to try to go after drug use. We wanted to change the marketing of the drug."
Sumner's department called in the Harvard criminologist David Kennedy. The High Point police had worked with Kennedy before, adopting the Boston Gun Project's policy of trying to break the link between drugs and crime. Now the criminologist told them that he had a new kind of project to propose, one that went beyond the Boston experiment. Kennedy's pitch was simple: The trick, he said, wasn't to focus on eliminating drugs but rather to shut down the most "overt" drug markets, the ones operating so openly that they attracted prostitution and violent crime. "Instead of looking at it as a drug problem, we decided to think of it as a drug-market problem," Sumner says. "What the public really couldn't stand was the violence associated with public drug markets." Dealers operating in the open are targets for stickup men and other would-be robbers, and the public swagger and turf consciousness of street slingers can cradle violent, simmering beefs.
High Point police began in the West End neighborhood, one of the city's three overt drug markets. A team of officers staked out the site, videotaping hundreds of hand-to-hand sales and mapping out a complete anthropology of the West End drug market. They found it was strikingly small: Sumner had expected as many as fifty dealers working there, but it turned out there were only sixteen. Before long, the officers had enough evidence to put away each of the sixteen dealers for good. But they didn't. Instead, Sumner and Kennedy called them in for a meeting. They showed each of them the portfolio of evidence against them and said that unless they stopped dealing drugs, the whole file would be handed over to the prosecutors and they'd be in jail for years. Family members were brought in to urge the dealers to stop, and social-service providers pledged assistance with food, housing and job training.
"We didn't think it would work," Sumner tells me, "but the drug markets have disappeared."
For five years before the program went into effect, the number of drug-related murders in High Point had stayed steady, around fifteen a year. In 2007, in the program's fourth year, it has plummeted to two. Violent crime in the West End has declined by thirty-five percent. "The use of drugs isn't something we could affect," says Kennedy. "But the violence was." His logic has an appealing clarity for overworked police departments: There are now more than sixty cities in the United States that use some version of Kennedy's program, edging away from thirty-five years of punitive measures that have turned the United States into the world's leading jailer to a social-work model that encourages communities and cops to engage the problem on a more human level. The real radicals of the War on Drugs are not the legalization advocates, earnestly preaching from the fringes, but the bureaucrats -the cops and judges and federal agents who are forced into a growing acceptance that rendering a popular commodity illegal, and punishing those who sell it and use it, has simply overwhelmed the capacity of government.
In 2000, voters in California, whose prisons now hold nearly twice as many inmates as they were designed to incarcerate, passed a referendum called Proposition 36, which has since sent more than 150,000 nonviolent drug offenders to treatment instead of prison. The program is not perfect: Though the outcomes for those who make it through treatment are surprisingly strong, many convicts simply skip the sessions, and there are few enforcement mechanisms to compel them to attend. But the program, according to a study conducted by researchers at UCLA, still saves taxpayers $2.50 for every dollar put in. And a pilot program in Honolulu which requires near-constant drug tests of those on probation and provides incremental punishments for each extra failed test - suggests an effective model for treating hardcore addicts, says Angela Hawken of UCLA and Pepperdine University. "It offers the promise that we might really be able to solve this problem."
In recent years, there have been flickers of political progress that suggest America's drug policy is ready for a historic shift. Democrats in both the House and Senate have voted to cut proposed funding for Plan Colombia and have pushed for hearings on sentencing reform. As the politics of crime and drugs have lost their power to move votes, some conservatives, including Republican senators Jeff Sessions and Sam Brownback, have begun to question the logic of mandatory-minimum sentences. "There is a more promising environment for drug-policy reform than at any time since the Carter administration," says Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance and one of the country's foremost critics of the drug war.
But despite their evident success, the most forward-looking programs remain buried at the fringes of drug policy, featured not in the president's budgets but in academic journals and water-cooler talk in cities like High Point. Experimentation at the community level is more imaginative than programs that are federally sanctioned. "We haven't had the kind of national leadership that blesses this and encourages it," says Caulkins, the RAND researcher from Carnegie Mellon. "So this kind of innovation stays below the radar." Thirty-five years after Richard Nixon launched the War on Drugs, the most promising programs continue to be shunted aside by Washington's unswerving emphasis on law and order.
The drug war, in the end, has been undone in no small part by the sweeping and inflexible nature of its own metaphor. At the beginning, in the days of Escobar, the campaign was a war as seen from the situation room, a complicated assault that spanned multiple fronts, but one which had identifiable enemies and a goal. Today, the government's anti-drug effort resembles a war as seen from the trenches, an eternal slog, where victory seems not only unattainable but somehow beside the point. For the drug agents and veterans who busted Escobar, the last decade and a half have been a slow, agonizing history of defeat after defeat, the enemy shifting but never retreating. "You get frustrated," Joe Toft, a former DEA country attache in Colombia, tells me. "We've never had a true effort where the U.S. as a whole says, 'We're never going to crack this problem without a real demand-reduction program.' That's something that's just never happened."
Toft, now a private security consultant, thinks back to the heady days after the fall of Escobar, the days when winning the War on Drugs seemed only a matter of dispatching more American helicopters to the Andes. "The first couple years, I had this very naive idea that I was really going to make a huge impact," he says. "But after a while, you start realizing that without a concerted effort to reduce demand, it's not going to happen. Over the years, I came to see my job as basically keeping the lid on the garbage can trying to sit on that lid and prevent that garbage can from overflowing. If you talk to a hundred agents, that's what almost all of them would say. We're just being realistic."
For an interview with Rolling Stone contributing editor Ben Wallace-Wells on the reporting of this feature, click here.
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To that end, the self-serving myths are starting to fly so thick and fast that the staff here at CAF has been working full-time to keep ahead of them. Here's some of what they're flinging in this latest B.S. storm—and what you need to know to fire back.
Conservative talk show host and documentary filmmaker John Ziegler is 
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