Drugs, Race, and Political Autocracy
Introduction
In March, 2008, a plane crashed in Yucatan, not far from Cancun. It was found to be carrying over 4 tons of cocaine. The plane itself became the scandal, because it was a plane that was known to fly in and out of the US base at Guantanamo. In other words, it had US government connections.
It was only the latest in a long list. US government connections with drug transportation and drug trafficking is not new. During the Vietnam War, Air America, a small airline owned and operated by the CIA, was known to be bring heroin into the US from southeast Asia. Richard McCoy and Peter Dale Scott have both written extensively about US government involvement in drug transportation from both Asia and South America into the US. Celerino Castillo has written about his experiences working for the DEA in Central America, and encountering one druglord after another who was immune from arrest or prosecution because of CIA protection. Gary Webb has told the story of the connection between the Nicaraguan contras and cocaine trafficking into Los Angeles, both protected by the US government. It was at that time that crack cocaine was invented, and gang wars started over who would handle the drugs, which were pushed extensively in black and brown communities.
Let us look briefly at two stories which mark out the endpoints or boundaries of government involvement in drug trafficking. One is about a teenager in Brooklyn, and the other is about Afghanistan.
Larry Davis (aka Adam Hakim) was a black teenager in Brooklyn, still in high school, when he and a friend were conscripted (under threat) by precinct police officers to distribute drugs in their neighborhood. They were instructed only to return a certain amount of money each month to those officers. When Davis sought to quit, he was threatened with death by these police officers. When he quit anyway, the police (unofficially) raided the apartment he was staying in, and opened fire when they found him. Davis returned fire, panicking the police, since the raid was unofficial. They retreated, firing wildly. One of their bullets smashed the lock on the rear fire-escape, allowing Davis to escape. A massive man-hunt ensued, accompanied by a shrill media campaign labelling Davis the most dangerous man in the city. Entire blocks were shut down while police ransacked apartments, one by one, in scenes (in news and documentary footage of the raids) reminiscent of WWII movies of the Nazi occupation of Europe. Through his lawyers, Davis finally agreed to surrender to the FBI, and was arrested on a number of false charges. Within a year, he was paralysed from the waist down, his spine broken in one of the beatings he received from the guards in jail.
Davis's story marks the domestic, streetcorner end of the drug story. Afghanistan reveals its other, global end.
In 2000, the Taliban in Afghanistan succeeded in eliminating all production of heroin in that country. Prior to that, Afghanistan produced around 45% of the world's heroin. The Taliban's accomplishment (it took them 4 years to do this to avoid creating an economic crisis among Afghani farmers) put a serious greatly impacted drug trafficking throughout the world.
Summer of 2000 also marked the beginning of a stock market decline in the US. Its first victim was the so-called dot-com industry. A large number of dot-com companies went out of existence. The dot-com industry was especially vulnerable to turbulence in the market, since it was composed of enterprises based on promise and debt, and operated in the absence of concrete assets. As companies collapsed, and capital values evaporated, the rest of the stock market also went into decline. By September, 2000, the economy had dipped into real recession.
Behind the scenes, an odd story unfolded. During the G8 meetings in Milan during May, 2001 (which were marked by huge demonstrations against corporate globalization), the US met secretly with representatives of the Taliban, and tried to convince them to restore heroin production. Millions of dollars were offered by the US government; the Taliban refused. The story the US made public was that the Taliban refused allow an oil pipeline through Afghanistan; but that was just a cover, and it was not true. Today, years after the US invaded Afghanistan and destroyed the Taliban regime, the pipeline still has not been built, but Afghanistan has once again become the world leader in heroin production.
In point of fact, the US began preparations to attack Afghanistan in July, 2001, two months before 911. As Stan Goff (a Green Beret instructor with decades of experience in the military) has stated, the mere logistics of the US invasion would have taken at least 3 months to prepare. In other words, the events of Sept. 11, 2001, were not the reason for the invasion, though they did exacerbate the recession that had started the year before, pushing the stock market into further decline. Once the US had occupied Afghanistan, hwoever, and heroin production restored, the US economy stabilized, and by January, 2002, the stock market began to return to former levels. Articles also appeared in newspapers in the US reporting on poppy cultivation, and stating that finally, after all those years under Taliban rule, the Afghani farmers could once again plant a "cash crop."
Between the police forcing drug distribution in poor neighborhoods of the US on one hand, and the US government forcing drug production in poor countries far away on the other, a strange picture develops. And a few uncomfortable questions present themselves. For instance, what is the relation between drug trafficking and the stock market, or to the economy as a whole? What is the interest of the police in pushing drugs? And what is the real relation between drug use and poverty, or impoverishment (the systemic production of poverty)? That is, the issues raised in relation of drugs are nothing less than economic stability, police power and police politics, and the reorganization of the social order. Let us examine each of these domains in turn.
Drugs and the stock market
The story of Afghanistan implies an essential connection between drug trafficking and the stability of the stock market. And the stock market is not a marginal aspect of the economy. It is where corporate asset values are determined. And asset values are the very measure of capital. Stock values become both the appraisal of production, and a financial arena that governs and determines economic activity. The stock market can drive healthy industries into economic decline, and bestow growth upon industries empty of concrete assets (as it had with the dot-com industry). It functions at the center of the economy.
Drug trafficking accounts for roughly 10% of the GDP (Gross Domestic Product) in the US. That is a vast and significant pool of capital. Any capitalist would want to get their hands on a part of it. The problem with it is that it is illegal money. It has to be laundered so that it appears as legitimate money, with a clean paper trail.
In the old days, to launder drug money, it had to be taken physically outside the US, and brought back under different auspices. Now, owing to computerized banking, this can be done inside the country. The cash has simply to be dropped off at a corporate enterprise that handles a lot of cash, such as a bank, a fast food chain, or a retail chain. The enterprise that agrees to handle the money then integrates it into its total corporate receipts. The cash gets listed under the corporation's daily earnings, and shifted to a different account. The shifts are simply numbers changing in computer databases. Eventually it is drawn upon directly or through a discounted check, with the laundering corporation taking its cut. With the computerization of banking, cash is transformed digitally, out of sight, and some of it turns up in corporate financial reports, in the earnings column.
Because the cash shows up in the earnings column of corporate accounts, it has an effect on the stock market. An elevated earnings account reduces a corporation's price-earnings ratio (P/E) below normal, and often below the average P/E (usually between 14 and 16). When the price-earnings ratio drops, many investors see the stock as underpriced, and they tend to buy it, thus boosting the stock price until the P/E ratio returns to the average. By these means, stock prices tend to get artificially elevated above real asset values, constituting a bubble since the increment in the earnings column is not based on the company's real economic activity. Catherine Fitts estimates that the real value of corporate assets in the US should set the stock index to around 3500 or 4000, instead of the 12,000 it is now running. And roughly a third of that discrepancy, according to Fitts, is an effect of drug money laundering. That is, drugs produce an essential and profitable bubble on the stock market, the other two being double-book accounting (remember Enron and Anderson?) and the creation of derivative securities (for instance, those made out of sub-prime mortgages).
In other words, by laundering drug money, major corporations have not only made available to themselves this pool of cash created by drug trafficking, but they have artificially augmented stock prices on the stock market, as an additional source of monetary gain. Neither form of gain adds to production, but in contributing to economic profitability, it has served to stabilize the economy, overriding to a degree its usual cyclicity. In other words, when the US had demanded that the Taliban return to poppy and opium production, it had been in the name of corporate profitability, and at the expense of the people's social and physical health. It marks a form of corruption that transcends the usual economic sense of that term, requiring the destruction of persons at the hands of drug addiction for its own economic stability and well-being.
The centralization of executive power and control
Corruption is, of course, the first thing that comes to mind with respect to police involvement in drug trafficking. But corruption is actually only a small part of that picture. There are four factors at work.
The first is obviously economic gain. The police get money out of it; the kickbacks and payoffs from traffickers on the ground is endless. The second factor is that drug trafficking provides the police with a free informer network. If they know all the pushers in an area, when something happens on which they need information, they get it from the pushers, holding the threat of prosecution over them. If they decide they want to frame someone, for whatever reason or to get him out of the way, they can use the pushers to give false evidence. In other words, their involvement in crime makes their job a lot easier, while making it seem as if they are doing a better job stopping crime.
The third factor is a political one. The 60s and 70s were times of great movement activity, which produced many highly politicized communities, mostly those of colonized peoples (black, Latino, Native American, etc.). These communities sought to resist their social exclusion and oppression, and function as participants in society, for which autonomy and a sense of community self-determination were necessary. But these qualities undermined the control of people that the ruling class required to maintain is exploitation of them. One of the political tasks of the police is to repress that autonomy, to keep these communites in a condition of dependence and subservience. They have used disruptive tactics such as harassment, violence, torture, and even terror. The introduction of drugs serves to depoliticize these communities by creating an addicted, stoned out, and desparate part of its people. It is a tactic inherited from 19th century colonialism; the British use of opium to control the Chinese, for instance. In effect, the drugs are used as a way of recolonizing communities of color through the political fragmentations and impoverishment that accompanies it.
The fourth reason for police involvement in drug trafficking is perhaps the most important. With a lot of drugs on the street creating an addicted and ultimately desparate population, with different groups or gangs fighting for control of the drug markets, street crime becomes a real problem. Gary Webb has described how it developed into full-fledged gang warfare in Los Angeles. Faced with this crime problem, the police go to the state legislatures, and demand higher appropriations in order to deal with it (with a problem they have themselves contributed to significantly). With increased appropriations, they hire more police, which maintains or augments drug presence on the street, causing more crime, for which the police demand further funding. By these means, police departments have become the most powerful political forces in the cities of the US. They have used drug trafficking to create a form of police rule.
Police rule is the kernal of executive power; it is what underlies a "strong" executive branch of government. And the institution of urban police rule has not been simply a local process. It received national coordination in 1973 with the passage of the Law Enforcement Assistance Act (LEAA). This provided advanced training, new technologies (developed in the Vietnam War), and the militarization of local police departments. Policing and intelligence gathering at the federal level have been similarly enhanced, as the basis on which the executive branch has assumed new overarching powers of governance. In effect, the present assumption of greater power by the executive branch has one of its roots in drug trafficking.
Police rule, or the political power assumed by the police in urban areas, translates as a form of autonomy, or impunity in police operations. These take the form of SWAT team tactics, militarization of technology, and the use of greater surveillence techniques (which resemble stormtrooper operations, armed occupations, and invasions of privacy, respectively). If this looks like a form of fascism, it escapes the notice of those who study the rise of fascism on the European model from the 1920s and 1930s. Fascism in Europe was brought about through a right-wing seizure of power from outside the structures of governance by a demogogue at the head of a populist movement deploying multiple forms of extreme chauvinism and racism. Its purposes were to repress the labor movement, and thereby to resolve an economic crisis. On this model, the rise of urban police rule is not fascist because it emerges from within the structures of governance, without a sudden seizure of power, and without the necessity to repress a labor movement.
But in the US, the labor movement is not the problem of crisis. The labor movement does not have to be controlled or repressed since it already does that to itself through its abject obeisance to the contract system, and its irrepressible linkages to the Democratic Party, despite the fact that that Party has traditionally shown itself to be anti-labor. The crisis that police rule resolves is a crisis in colonialist control of communities of color, and the reconstitution of the coherence of white supremacy, which had been fractured and undermined by the civil rights movements of the 60s and 70s. Those who focus on the European model are looking in the wrong direction. In the US, fascism has arisen not from outside the political structure but from within, through the gradual enhancement of police power.
The reracialization of US society
Thus, in addition to being a stabilizing bubble in the economy, and a source of executive power and urban police rule, drugs also play a role in a return of a former social order through their use in reracializing US society. A racialized society (in its contemporary EuroAmerican sense) is one whose fundamental social framework is constructed as a hierarchy of races, with whites dominant and supremacist over other peoples they racialize as non-white and "other." White supremacy as a social ethos depends on white society having the power to racialize and inferiorize other people as non-white, as they means be which whites create their social identity as white.
The first framework of racialization was the institution of slavery, codified during the colonial period, and preserved in the Constitution through its failure to reject or abjure what slavery represented. In its wake, the system of social categorization continually reproduced by structures of "racialization" has become part of the tradition and culture of the US; in particular, Jim Crow with its segregation, debt servitude imposed on black agricultural workers, chain gangs, and black disenfranchisement. (The term "racialization" refers to "race" as a verb, "to racialize," as something that one supremacist group does to others, rather than as a noun -- "race" -- implying a pre-existing condition)
Though the Jim Crow system was dismantled by the civil rights movements, it is being reconstituted today through various means, among which are the racial profiling practices of the police and the construction of a prison industry that is the largest in the world. Today, the US prison system houses 2.3 million people, 80% of whom are people of color. Since people of color, comprising roughly a quarter of the US population, do not commit 80% of the crime in the US, the prison industry signifies something other than criminality. And that something else is related to the presence of drugs.
Let us begin with police racial profiling. Racial profiling is a system of "noticing" by which the police decide who is a suspect and who is not. It is a self-generating system insofar as racial profiling produces arrest patterns and records that the police can then use as a foundation for "profiling" people racially. Arrest records that result from racial profiling are transformed into the source for such profiling. In that sense, racial profiling is the inverse of law enforcement. In law enforcement, a crime is committed, and the police look for a suspect; in racial profiling, the police commit an act of suspicion, and then look for a crime for their suspect to have committed. Thus, profiling removes policing from the realm of law enforcement and places it in a different social role.
What gives police profiling its power is a vast system of victimless crime laws, of which drug possession is the most commonly used. Victimless crime laws permit the police to apprehend and detain people without recourse to a complainant. Obviating the complainant allows an officer to operate autonomously, to harass, search or arrest persons through arbitrary use of "probable cause." To diminish responsibility to due process is to render police operations autocratic.
Ultimately, the police have the power to criminalize any person at will. The main way this is done is through enhanced obedience statutes. "Disobeying an officer" is a crime. Should the officer give a command that would be humiliating to a person, any defense of that individual's sense of dignity or self-respect will constitute disobedience, and thus resistance. Resisting an officer leads to criminal charges, arrest, and violence. Though police manuals describe the proper uses of force, it is left to the officer to determine the level of obedience desired from a detainee, for which force is then authorized.
Thus, by provoking resistance through disrespect or humiliation, the officer has the power to criminalize dignity or self-respect. Since the criminalization of persons is the domain of the judiciary, this power renders police officers judicial, that is, a law unto themselves. And a police department that arrogates legitimizes that form of power has in effect instituted a form of despotic governance. The ability to be a law unto oneself and criminalize whoever they want is the essence of police impunity.
Operating through racial profiling, police impunity is itself racialized; and its racialization has generally received judicial approval and legitimization through biased prosecutorial procedures. Black and brown people are routinely charged with felonies where white people would be charged with misdemeanors. Black men are incarcerated at 6.5 times the rate of white men, and people of color get longer sentences for identical convictions -- 49% higher for federal drug offenses. Cocaine laws are the most overt example; the sentence for possession of 100 grams of powder cocaine (used mostly in white communities) is 5 years; that for 5 grams of crack cocaine (used mainly in black and brown communities) is 20 years.
Ultimately, police impunity becomes a force that divides civil society into two groups, those racially profiled and those not racially profiled (whites); that is, those whose humanity will be discounted and criminalized, and those whose humanity will be respected. In other words, it amounts to a process of segregation, different in form from that of Jim Crow, but with the same content. Though it escapes the charge of "racism" by pretending to be dealing with crime while operating under the umbrella of "colorblindness," what it has effectively accomplished is the criminalization of race (color). And this criminalization of race (through profiling, impunity, and biased prosecution) has funneled masses of people of color into the ultimate segregation of prison. In effect, the police serve to racialize white society as white by racializing black and brown communities through their criminalization.
The social effects of this process are catastrophic, yet familiar. Not only does felonization of a population insure massive unemployment (a general tendency not to hire people with a record), but routine felony charges amount to systematic disenfranchisement (14% of black people had thus been disenfrachised by 1998). Recent studies indicate that one out of every three black men under the age of 30 has been through the judicial system in the last 25 years. To continually remove a sizable number of people from a community in this way constitutes a massive disruption of its social coherence. Like Jim Crow, police impunity and profiling recreate a social ethos of segregation, impoverishment, disenfranchisement, and dehumanization of people of color.
Like the cycle of profiling and arrest patterns, the prison population inflated through drug laws and police impunity becomes an argument for further drug laws and greater police impunity. What is significant about this is that it is not perceived by white society at large as an extant injustice. Instead, more prisons are called for and accepted, with a sense of familiarity ("how else are we going to deal with crime?"). Of course, to the extent that this despotic system of racialization finds its reflection in a security ideology imposed by police rule on white society in defense against a social threat that it (police rule) has created, this new system of segregation augments the power of centralized executive over white people as well, for which police rule, with its militarized operations and its impunity, has provided the foundation.
In sum, the trafficking in illegal drugs in the US is a socio-economic process upon which US society now depends for its economic stability, its move toward a strengthened and more autocratic executive, and the reconstitution of a white supremacist social framework in the wake of the civil rights movements.
The question this poses for US society is what it means that its economic stability and its mode of governance depend upon illicit drug trade, racialization, and massive imprisonment. Surely, these are not the signs of a healthy economy nor a healthy society. Indeed, they imply that US society has never escaped the legacy of slavery, which is more properly understood as a form of prison labor with absolute impunity granted a white supremacist social framework. The conditions of people are not those of slavery, but a morality that can coexist with the current corruption and injustice is the same.
The confluence of drugs and police are only the latest forms of an anti-democratic corruption that operates on three planes: corporate rule of the economy through the stock market, police rule of urban society, and white supremacist rule of US cultural values. This amounts to a form of corruption beyond the small personal or bureaucratic level of bribes or favoritism. It is even beyond the corruption generally associated with ward politics, corporate welfare, corporate regulatory agencies and backroom contracts. It is a double corruption, because overlaid with a meta-corruption, which is the corruption of conscience that can consider a society founded upon drug trade, and police rule, and racialization both normal and ethical.
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