Amid Multiple Heinous Suggestions, Trump Tosses Off a Valid Idea to Manage the Opioid Crisis
Massive Free Trade Agreements Come with Costs, Some of Which Go Unrecognized & Demand Redress
While in the process of obtaining Powerpoint presentations from the government of Singapore explaining how a government can commit egregious human rights violations by killing drug dealers, and otherwise busying itself with undermining the Affordable Care Act and the insurance mechanisms so many use to pay for Substance Use Disorder treatment, the Trump Administration put forward a sorely neglected proposal to manage the opioid crisis from a most unlikely source: Donald Trump himself.
In a series of tweets last week, the president warned Mexico and Canada that successful North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) renegotiations would rest in part on Canada’s willingness to “treat our farmers better,” and Mexico’s ability to “do much more on stopping drugs from pouring into the U.S.” The latter might strike many Americans as an inappropriate burden to place on NAFTA renegotiations, already well underway, when so much of the bilateral relationship with Mexico is devoted to law enforcement and military collaboration on this very subject.
But it is not strange to include illicit drug traffic in a larger discussion of trade; it is strange that it is not.
Drugs derived from the poppy plant, including illegal ones, are by definition a trade. It is a matter of longstanding US policy to reject the domestic cultivation of poppy plants, from which most opioids are derived. As I argue in my history of the drug war, anything that enhances the movement of people or goods — commercial airline growth and tourism, an expanding network of military bases — will likewise result in more illicit drugs reaching the United States.
Nothing has been more illustrative in this regard than NAFTA. Trucks and trains — not to mention people — move across the southern border at a sharp clip. In 1996, just two years after NAFTA, a total of 780 trains and 556,000 trucks crossed the border at El Paso. In 2017, almost 1500 trains and 780,000 crossed at the same point. Steeper increases are notable throughout Texas and New Mexico border crossings; San Ysidro, close to San Diego, California, is the busiest land border-crossing in the Western Hemisphere.
Drug cartels might risk cheap product, like marijuana, on above-ground illegal border hops, of the sort President Trump’s fanciful wall is intended to obstruct. But for heroin, the cartels rely on underground tunnels and packages smuggled through legal crossings.
Today the overwhelming majority of heroin (95%) comes to the United States from Mexico, including the heroin adulterated with potent opioid analogues like fentanyl or carfentanil. However abrupt or flippant, Donald Trump’s suggestion that promoters of low-barrier trade networks reckon with some of their unintended costs is not only logical, it is long overdue.
In fact, the proposal to control illicit flows of drugs using trade penalties (or threatening them) should be seized upon by drug reformers as the most significant paradigm shift since legalization. This not a flippant idea born from Trump’s tweeting habits. On the contrary, using trade penalties as a method to control illicit drugs flows would return US international drug policy to its former footing, prior to drug prohibition and the international treaties crafted to implement it.
Needless to say, the world is very different today. In the early twentieth century, governments did not convene trade discussions; they held tariff talks. Far easier to impose another duty in a world accustomed to heavy protectionism — and all the more so, given that production quotas for drug manufacturers, or tariffs tied to their goods, addressed the very parties most responsible for diversion of licit drugs to illicit channels. An appropriate analogy, albeit a hypothetical one, would be if today, another country grew concerned about the diversion of the opioid painkiller Oxycontin, and its government decided to impose a tariff on the importation of that drug in response.
But that is not the world we live in, and we cannot ignore the fact that the prohibition of heroin has driven its production and distribution underground. The genie of underground, illicit drug production and distribution is well and truly out of the bottle. What were once direct instruments wielded to discipline drug manufacturers would be, in today’s world, indirect incentives — tariffs levied across the board, or penalties targeted in some fashion — designed to cajole powerful people to support change from within their own country. This approach has none of the clean comfort of a sanctions regime, punishing the guilty. We must settle instead for insisting on the public obligations that accompany affluence.
Judged against this approach, the drug war may sound appealing. The US government lulls us into a sleepy assent to the drug war’s ostensible purpose: the gun and the badge chase the bad guys. But the record this radical policy experiment has compiled belies its promise: the price, volume, and potency of drugs all trend in the wrong direction, and criminal traffickers have grown richer, and more capable of violence and corrupting government. The drug war not only falls short of its stated aims, it fails to “fail well.” The only thing its practitioners show any ability to modify in their desired direction is the political behavior of other nation-states — and even then, only in mostly performative ways that prove meaningless in affecting the flow of illicit drugs.
It’s worth noting that this preference for clean causal theory at the expense of on-the-ground realities has a faint echo in the discrete economic modeling on the effects of tariffs, generally restricted — for the sake of measurement — to a given industry exposed to them, and the jobs and productivity created or lost as the result, especially measured against automation or other competitive pressures. Without disputing the validity of this approach, it should be clear that the expansion of trade channels carries effects in and of itself. Right now, only what economists regard as salutary among these — the ease with which capital and labor flows across borders — attract sustained analytical attention. The abundant supply of illicit heroin in the United States should instruct us, however, that globalization facilitates undeniably pernicious traffic as well.
Because there will always be demand for illicit drugs, there will always be a market to supply them. Rather than deny this discomfiting reality, we should be asking how best to grapple with and mitigate it. Recognizing this fact, most drug reformers focus their energy on where it will have the greatest effect: prevention and treatment. Unfortunately, this cedes the debate over how to govern illicit drug traffic to the failed and the flaky: the prohibitionists, whose crusade has made illicit drug production and distribution far worse, and supporters of legalization, who downplay the risks of dangerous drugs and seem nonchalant in the face of the appalling misbehavior of Big Pharma.
Reaching back into history for inspiration, the outlines of another approach become clear: through the International Narcotics Control Board, we can continue to monitor the legal trade in opium, and based upon their findings of illicit traffic, the international community, or select trading partners, can adopt trade-based carrots and sticks (like tariffs, or the reduction of them), to reduce the flow of illicit heroin.
Naturally leaders in Mexico would be more than justified if they directed their trade representatives to add the issue of illicit gun traffic from the United States to NAFTA renegotiation. According to the Government Accountability Office, 73,000 — roughly 70% — of all firearms seized in Mexico originate in this country. Border traffic flows in both directions, and our own refusal to implement meaningful gun control fuels a death toll in Mexico on par with overdose deaths attributable to heroin in the United States.
These mounting body counts of unfettered trade, exacting the steepest price from among the least powerful, strain political coalitions, even government legitimacy itself. If supporters want sweeping trade agreements to survive, their negotiators need to take a more encompassing view of who qualifies as a stakeholder, and what counts as a cost. Instead of focusing only on crowning the winners of globalization — or ameliorating those, like organized labor, with an established place at the table — trade representatives should factor in the interests of the incidental victims of globalization, those who have no real ambassadors, but very real grievances.
We have seen over the twenty years of NAFTA that the dislocations of trade have fallen heavily on the dispossessed. It remains an open question whether the principle of safeguarding the public interest can make an appearance in a discussion devoted to making money, let alone result in meaningful changes to it. In this way, the renegotiation of NAFTA mirrors a larger dilemma shaping our world: does a political establishment accustomed to serving entrenched interests retain the capacity to penalize them, and can it craft a mechanism to decide disputes that litigates merit, not status?
