Crespo on Aguilar and Castañeda's Book

José Antonio Crespo has a favorable review of Narco: La Guerra Fallida, the recent book criticizing Calderón's counter-narcotics strategy by Fox administration officials Rubén Aguilar and Jorge Castañeda. Among the points from Crespo:

1) Mexico is one of the nations with the lowest levels of consumption among developed countries and including the biggest nations in Latin America. In total, addicts represent 0.4 percent of the population (600,000), compared to 3 percent of the enormous population of the United States, 2.1 percent in Germany, and 1.8 percent in Holland.

2) It is among adolescents from 12 to 18 where the consumption has grown the least, a marginal increase. Only 5 percent of men, and no women, have obtained drugs for the first time through dealers. The rest have done so through family or friends. It's not, then, that retail drug sale that fosters new consumption. The idea that this war is to avoid "that drugs get to your children" isn't supported, when, furthermore --I add-- the focus should be on making sure that "your children don't look for drugs". Which is to say, prevention, education, anti-drug publicity.

First of all, that second point, that the presence of drug dealers doesn't foster drug use, is flawed. First-time users may not buy directly from street-corner dealers, but if, as a rebellious 14-year-old Mexican kid, all of a sudden six of my older cousins are walking around with drugs, then I too am more likely to try it. Which means that even if I am not buying directly from a dealer my first time, I am still more likely to experiment if there are more drugs around me. In other words, the 5 percent stat doesn't take into account the enormous indirect impact that the presence of drugs can have. Also, the line about adolescent drug use growing more slowly is either flatly incorrect or (more likely) not entirely correct. For instance, adolescent use of marijuana went from 3.5 to 4.4 percent from 2002 to 2008, which is to say, a 25 percent increase in the raw number of teenage weed smokers. Over the same period, the number of drug users as a whole went from 4.6 to 5.5 percent, a comparatively smaller jump.

More broadly, this is not the first time Crespo has made the argument about addiction rates and Calderón's drug strategy, and it strikes me as very weird for two reasons. First of all, the fact that Mexico has low addiction rates is to be lauded, but it also means that there is a very explosive ingredient that hasn't been added (but still could be) to the Mexican cauldron. Many of the most dangerous cities in Mexico --Tijuana, Juárez-- owe their state to a combination of big-time drug traffickers and small-time peddlers working the street corners and fighting over turf. If drug use takes hold in the poorer parts of Mexican cities the way it has in the two above metropolises, or as it did in the US with heroin in the '60s and '70s and crack in the 1980s, Mexico could get a lot worse. I don't believe that the book is arguing the opposite, but Crespo and Castañeda often seem to think that low addiction levels mean that Mexico is somehow not at risk. That strikes me as a pretty narrow and dangerous view of things.

More importantly, drug use and drug trafficking are two related but ultimately very different phenomena. As Spain and Mexico show (though from opposite sides of the coin), one can suffer horribly from one malady, without having to worry much about the other. In Mexico's case, the primary societal problem is drug trafficking, the consequent violence, and the corrupting influence of drug money, not recreational drug use. Calderón's team makes periodic references to his strategy serving to keep drugs away from the children, which is a bit silly, and for which he deserves to be called out. However, no serious analysis of Mexico's crime strategy has lower levels of drug use as a primary goal.