International Law Enforcement: The Futile Quest for Control of Coca and Cocaine at the Source (From Drugs and Drug Use in Society, P 319-329, 1994, Ross Coomber, ed. - See NCJ 159452)

• NCJ Number: 159477
• Author(s): S Wisotsky
• Date Published: 1994
• Length: 11 pages
• Sale Source: Greenwich University Press
• Publication Type: Issue Overview
• Language: English
• Country: United Kingdom

Annotation

This paper argues that United States government efforts to establish crop control in source countries do not have even a palliative effect on the cocaine problem.

Abstract

The overseas drug control policy of the United States operates within a framework of international law, United States foreign assistance legislation, and bilateral agreements with coca-producing countries. However, participating administrative agencies do not have enforcement powers and, absent powers of investigation, inspection, and sanction, they have been historically ineffective. United States efforts at displacing coca cultivation by policies designed to encourage crop substitution, because they ignore the laws of the marketplace, have not worked at all. The economics of coca and cocaine render programs of eradication and crop substitution little more than dreams. Coca enables poor nations to accrue enormous amounts of foreign exchange. Development of a modern socioeconomic infrastructure that would transform living conditions in the coca-producing areas would allow some measure of control of that production. Short of such a transformation, however, neither the United States nor the source countries can realistically expect to achieve significant limitations on the supply of coca for cocaine without resorting to some radical or violent action such as military occupation of the growing areas. Figure