Janine Jackson interviewed Ethan Nadelmann about John Kelly’s nomination as head of Homeland Security for the December 16, 2016, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Ethan Nadelmann: “Kelly was notable for…making sensationalist claims about the vulnerability of our borders.” (cc photo: Gage Skidmore)
Janine Jackson: They were hard-won and a long time coming, but there were clear signs of hope that the punitive, racist, violent and ineffective war on drugs was not just fading away, but maybe being consciously reconsidered. And however cynical you want to be about motives, nascent bipartisan moves around over-incarceration and sentencing disparities looked set to change the lives of real people.
But our next guest says Donald Trump seems amped to relaunch a war on drugs that could be even worse than before. One indicator: the appointment of John Kelly as head of Homeland Security, veteran drug warrior as the former head of the US Southern Command. Ethan Nadelmann is executive director of Drug Policy Alliance. He joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Ethan Nadelmann.
Ethan Nadelmann: Well, thanks a lot. It’s good to be on.
JJ: I want to take a look at John Kelly, but certainly not because his appointment is the only indication of what a Trump White House could mean for drug policy. The media coverage of Kelly, at least initially, was fairly glowing. “A seasoned commander with personal experience of the costs of war” was the New York Times’ lead. Every account noted that he was the first Marine in decades to be promoted to four stars while on active duty, that his son was killed in Afghanistan. Obviously these things are true, but what else is important to know about John Kelly and about SOUTHCOM?
EN: Well, I should say Kelly’s just one of the worrisome nominations by Trump. The one that we’ve been most focused on is Jeff Sessions, the Alabama senator, who’s been one of the most strident drug war advocates for decades, and has said things, done terrible things, blocked all sorts of important legislation involving marijuana reform and sentencing reform.
When it comes to John Kelly and Homeland Security, what concerns me is SOUTHCOM, the position he held before, overseeing US military activities and strategy in Latin America. You know, it has a lot to do with the drug war, and you really count on an element of realism there. And there have been past SOUTHCOM commanders who have really stepped back to assess, objectively, what did we accomplish with all our interdiction efforts, what negative consequences are stemming from our drug policies in Latin America, and so on.
And Kelly was probably, among the various folks who’ve been at SOUTHCOM—and that includes Barry McCaffrey, former SOUTHCOM commander in the ’90s, who became Bill Clinton’s drug czar—Kelly was notable for being fairly strident, for making sensationalist claims about the vulnerability of our borders, and also, when asked about what to do on drug policy, he’s the one whose answer was, well, yes, you have to reduce demand; his thought was, we just need a massive advertising campaign, which we know from abundant evidence is the last thing that works in terms of reducing the demand for illicit drugs in this country.
So my hope is that in Homeland Security, he’ll have to deal with very hard questions and hard issues, and understand the futility of throwing billions of dollars down the drain on border control and interdiction efforts that have no impact on drug problems in the US. But we’ll see.
JJ: While it’s true that the SOUTHCOM did much of this work before John Kelly got there, it’s strange to read media accounts that say—one said that they had “a reputation for emphasizing ‘soft power’ over hard military might.” You might tell that to the victims of Plan Colombia, where SOUTHCOM involved arming paramilitaries, or in Honduras, where it involved supporting the coup. And John Kelly, on the board of what was known as School of the Americas, very recently he wrote an op-ed for the Miami Herald talking about Plan Colombia as a big success of SOUTHCOM, as leading the way forward. And of course, it was devastating for that country.
EN: General McCaffrey was really the architect of Plan Colombia. And what he basically saw was, as drug czar, he had nothing to do with helping the Colombian government oppose the FARC and, you know, both the leftist insurgency and the right-wing paramilitaries. But he realized that the only way to sell a counterinsurgency program to the American public and Congress in the 1990s was to frame it as a drug war campaign. And there I think Plan Colombia was very much a case, and a rare case I think, but of basically using the drug war rhetoric and justifications to fund and advance a campaign that was focused on FARC, and to some extent paramilitaries.
Now you’re right, some of this money went in the wrong places, it went to support the paramilitaries. On the other hand, I look at somebody like President Juan Manuel Santos, who just won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to bring a peace agreement, finally, to that country, and who’s been probably the boldest of all the Latin American leaders in calling for a fundamental change in drug policy. In fact, he even became the first person ever to raise that issue while receiving a Nobel Peace Prize.
And, I don’t know, when I look at what some of our, relatively speaking, allies have said about Plan Colombia, it becomes more nuanced. But I think in the end, ending the civil war in Colombia and doing so in the way that appears to be happening now, is in the interest of the vast majority of Colombians and in the US interest.
NATO burning hashish in Afghanistan (photo: DEA)
My bigger concern about Kelly is whether or not he’s truly going to be strategic. The United States federal government has spent tens of billions of dollars on futile interdiction efforts and crop eradication efforts that do nothing to address drug abuse problems in America, and simply shift the markets around—knock out one trafficking group, replace it with another—have devastating consequences to the environment, undermine human rights, and we don’t need more of that.
Nor do we need the pretense that somehow building a wall on the border with Mexico is going to be the answer to America’s domestic opioid problems, which is what Donald Trump suggested during the campaign. So those are the bigger reasons I’m concerned about Kelly and Trump and those appointments.
JJ: Well, you mentioned it, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos is—he’s hardly a big softie, you know. But he was just awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on the peace deal, since rejected. And when you look for stories on that prize, you can find a number of them, but you find very few mentioning his remarks about the drug war, which I found interesting, because they were in a way the most newsworthy or surprising part of what he said.
EN: I agree! You know, we put out a press release on that. I was frustrated by that. It was striking that he did that. Also notable that he did it in Stockholm, Sweden, because although people see Sweden as being quite liberal, when it comes to the drug issue, they’ve typically been more like Singapore in Europe, and they’ve had a highly moralistic, punitive policy, where they don’t lock up people the way we do in America, but they really have done some terrible things vis-a-vis people who use drugs in that country. And within Europe, they’re among the worst on specific drug policies, even as they’re beginning to come more in line with the rest.
But I think that Santos—I really admired his stepping out on this issue. He did it early in his first term. Initially, he did it mostly outside the country. Then he began talking about it inside the country. And I think the fact that he was willing to do this, in the midst of taking on the negotiations with FARC, while having to deal with his predecessor, Uribe, throwing rocks at his head at every turn, on both the negotiations and on the drug issue, I have to say that the man really does deserve credit.
JJ: You noted that the peace accords themselves actually include challenges to the war on drugs, and they’re substantive things. They look like what it looks like if you want to take this on.
EN: I think that’s right. Although I’ll tell you what worries me, which is that there’s a long tradition of this sort of carrot-and-stick approach. You know, let’s help the campesinos with development in these areas, and that will encourage them to grow alternative crops. But in fact, when you consider the fact that the illicit drug markets are really global commodities markets, and that so long as there is a demand for the cocaine or heroin or other things coming out of Colombia or Mexico or elsewhere in Latin America or parts of Asia or you name it, so long as there’s a demand, there’s going to be a supply.
And therefore, while I think that the US and the UN supporting economic development in these regions is in itself a very good thing, the notion that doing that sort of economic development will actually help reduce the drug problem in America or other countries, I think is a fantasy. I think any economist would just say, look, if you have a demand, you can do huge economic development in this part of Colombia, and another part of Colombia, or Peru or Bolivia, will just start supplying this. And the best example of that is, there are few countries as developed as the United States, but the United States is now one of the world’s biggest producers of marijuana, and we produce other illicit drugs.
So I think we just need to be realistic about what can be accomplished. And I think part of what went into that agreement with the FARC in terms of drug control was politically necessary, but I hope that there’s some hard thinking about what’s really going to make a difference. Because in the end, we need to find ways to move in the direction of both reducing the harms associated with illicit drug markets and, secondly, finding ways to move some of those markets from a prohibitionist frame into a regulatory frame, in the way that we’ve begun to do with marijuana in the United States and Uruguay, and hopefully next year Canada.
JJ: I was going to ask you: It did seem that the winds were blowing a different way, or a more thoughtful and less punitive way, in terms of drug policy. I’m not sure how real that was. But I wanted to ask you who else is giving you cause for concern; you’ve addressed that—Jeff Sessions, and I know there are others. What gains do you think are most vulnerable right now?
EN: Well, the first thing I should say is that Election Night eve—and just speaking personally—was this bizarre experience for me. Because I, like so many of my friends and allies, was devastated by what happened, with the election of Donald Trump and the Republicans retaining the Senate, which was terrible for the issues I work on, and, speaking personally, more broadly terrible for the nation and the world.
Yet at the same time, marijuana reform was on the ballot in nine states, and we won eight marijuana initiatives out of nine. No other issue was on the ballot in so many states, no other issue won in so many places. We won legalization of marijuana in four blueish states: California, Nevada, Maine and Massachusetts. We won medical marijuana in four reddish to purple states, which were Florida, Arkansas, North Dakota and Montana. And we only lost legalization in a fairly reddish state, Arizona, by a few points.
So it was a monumental victory that’s going to result in a reduction, by tens if not hundreds of thousands, in the number of people being arrested, mostly young men of color, in this country. And that’s going to raise significant tax revenue, which in California will be directed to help mostly people who have struggled with the drug war, and with harsh economic policies. So we had this major breakthrough.
Now, the fact is, on the marijuana front, Donald Trump during the campaign was somewhat reassuring on the medical marijuana issue, but kind of ambivalent on legalization. And now he’s appointed Sessions and a whole host of others—Kelly for Homeland Security, Price for Health and Human Services. I think that progress on marijuana reform, it’s not going to be pushed totally back, but it’s not going to be making the same sort of progress as it was in the last three years of the Obama administration.
Meanwhile, on sentencing reform, Trump criticized all the clemencies that Obama was handing out to nonviolent drug offenders who had served many years in federal prisons. He said that he doesn’t support these sentencing reforms. He’s used a harsh law-and-order rhetoric that we haven’t seen for many years, and that we thought had finally been delegitimized. There’s no indication that the reforms, the civil asset forfeiture laws that had gained traction in a bipartisan way in Congress, and that were winning at the state level, there’s no indication that those are going to move forward.
So I would say that across the board, the Trump administration looks like bad news for almost every element of drug policy reform—from sentencing, to marijuana, to treating drug use and addiction as a health issue, to the international aspects, to you name it.
JJ: Finally, the Drug Policy Alliance’s Jag Davies wrote:
This new administration is not just an attack on sensible drug policies—it’s an attack on civil and human rights, bent on unleashing vast destruction in historically oppressed communities that have long borne the brunt of the drug war.
It seems an important thing to keep in the forefront, particularly as we’re talking to journalists, or looking to media on how they cover this, to keep in mind that the problem with the drug war is not just that it happens, but who it happens to.
EN: Well, that’s right. The war on drugs in this country, and quite a number of others as well, has historically been overwhelmingly focused on poor people and people of color. Right? The origins of drug prohibition in the United States go back to racial discrimination, ethnic discrimination: against Chinese-Americans with opium, against African-Americans with cocaine, against Mexican-Americans and Mexican migrants with marijuana. If you ask why some drugs are criminalized and others not, it has much less to do with the relative risks of these drugs, and much more to do with who uses and who is perceived to use these drugs. So what’s going to happen here is that we’re going to see this brunt of the drug war coming down very heavily on black and brown folks and poor folks.
And at the same time, I should also point out that among the significant progress we’ve had on drug policy reform in the last few years are significant reductions in the number of people, primarily people of color in the cities, being arrested and sent to jail and prison on drug charges.
But meanwhile, the drug war continues to lumber on full force in rural parts of this country. And so you’re seeing this growing number of poor and middle-class white people who are being devastated by opioid addiction, where Donald Trump has offered nothing to help those folks, and you’re also seeing large numbers of those people, not just black and brown but relatively poor white folk, who are being prosecuted as if we have the drug war going full throttle.
So this drug war is disproportionately and overwhelmingly about the persecution of people of color in this country, but at the same time, it’s such a massive drug war that you have millions and millions of poor and other white people who are also getting the hell kicked out of them by this drug war, which Donald Trump seems to want to step up.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance. Find their work online at DrugPolicy.org. Ethan Nadelmann, thank you for joining us today on CounterSpin.
EN: Thank you for having me on.
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