Much has been made about the alleged
flooding of the Kenyan coast with illegal drugs. President Uhuru Kenyatta has
vowed to stop them and to prosecute all involved in the trade. But like his “war” on alcohol, his stance against illicit drugs is informed less by reasoning and
evidence but rather by hysteria.
Kenya is not on the brink of a drugs
epidemic. As Kalundi Serumaga puts it in an article in The Elephant’s edition on drugs, “ordinary Africans simply do not have enough numerical strength to make
up the necessary aggregated monetary demand, and rich Africans are simply too
few to consume the volumes necessary to make fixed supply lines to them
worthwhile.”
In fact, across the world, the criminalization
of drugs like heroin, cocaine and marijuana has had little to do with public
health concerns. Heroin was created at the close of the 19th Century
by the German company Bayer, and marketed alongside aspirin as a remedy for
coughs, colds and ‘irritation’ in children. Its criminalization in the US, along with opium from which it is
manufactured, grew from resentment of Chinese workers and racist hysteria over
accounts of white women being lured into opium dens. Cocaine, first isolated in
1859 and marketed as remedy for toothaches in children and as an ingredient in
Coca-Cola, was similarly criminalized for due to US whites’ fear of economic
competition from freed slaves. The banning of marijuana was a reaction to the
influx of low-wage Mexican immigrants in the 1920s, sparked in part by the
Mexican revolution.
The rest of the world has blindly followed
the US lead with disastrous results. Not only has the drugs war failed to stop,
or even significantly slow, their production, trafficking and consumption, it
has destroyed countries and communities and made some of the most unscrupulous
and ruthless people on the planet fabulously wealthy and immensely powerful.
The specific aim of the war was to destroy
and inhibit the international drug trade — making drugs scarcer and costlier,
and thus unaffordable. That has only been partially achieved.
Prohibition has prevented some drug abuse
by making forbidden substances less readily accessible and vastly more
expensive than similar agricultural-based stimulants like coffee or tea but, despite
this, the price of most illegal drugs has actually plummeted. The cocaine sold
on the streets may be more expensive than coffee but it is much less expensive
and much more potent than it was two decades ago.
A small part of this can be attributed to
stagnating demand in the West. The 2016 UN World Drugs Report cautiously
concluded that “the global cocaine market has … been shrinking,” and attributed
this changing consumption patterns. Yet, perversely, it is on the producer and
transit countries such as Kenya, that the war on drugs is focused. In fact, it amounts to
a transfer of the economic, political, social and environmental costs of
prohibition from rich consumer countries to them.
To paraphrase a thought
experiment related by Daniel Mejia and Pascual Restrepo in their essay, Why Is Strict Prohibition Collapsing?: “Suppose all cocaine consumption in the US goes to
Canada. Would the US authorities be willing to confront drug trafficking
networks at the cost of seeing the homicide rate in cities such as Seattle go
up by 3000% in order to prevent cocaine shipments from reaching Vancouver? If
your answer to this question is ‘perhaps not,’ well… this is exactly what
Colombia, Mexico and other Latin American countries have been doing over the
past 20 years.”
As their coffers swell up, narco-traffickers
are able to corrupt governments and law-enforcement agencies and purchase
political power across the global south. In Kenya, at least two County
Governors, a Senator as well as members of the National Assembly have been
implicated in the drug trade. Further, drug traffickers launder approximately
$100 million a year through the country’s financial system, much of which ends
up in the country’s real estate, inflating prices and making decent and safe
housing unaffordable for the vast majority of the urban population.
By regurgitating the tough talk from the
West’s failed war on drugs, President Kenyatta is essentially selling the
country down the river. He would be better advised to adopt an approach more
informed by the evidence of what has happened in the last century as well as by
the interests of the people of Kenya.
A version of this article was first published in The Elephant
