Who Profits?
While bearing the brunt of prohibition-related violence, most Colombians have not benefited much from black market profits. The U.N. estimates that the drug trade may account for as little as 1 percent of the country's GDP, placing it below oil. The product itself is cheap until it arrives in the U.S.; most of the profits are made outside of Colombia.
Francisco Thoumi, an economics professor at Bogota's Rosario University who has published a number of books on the cocaine industry, says Colombia's economy has suffered as a result of the drug trade. "In the 1980s," he says, "the rate of homicides skyrocketed, and that made investments too risky for many companies." The attitudes encouraged by the drug trade also have hurt the economy. "It becomes impossible to do business because everyone distrusts everyone else," says Thoumi, "so everyone is playing defensive and not willing to take any sort of risk."
Colombians have an ambivalent attitude toward the drug industry. In the old cocaine centers of Cali and Medellin, billions of inflowing dollars funded a boom that lined everyone's pockets during the 1980s and '90s. Tellingly, when the Cali drug lords were arrested the city's construction industry virtually ground to a halt. In Medellin during the '80s, a popular way for otherwise law-abiding people to make almost guaranteed profits was to buy a stake in a shipment of cocaine from drug lords seeking to spread the risk of seizure.
Even today, drug money and drug traffickers hang at the edges of legitimate society. Although members of the upper classes are not above profiting from the cocaine trade, they look down on the narcos in the same way that wealthy people the world over disdain the nouveau riche. The narcos' propensity for gold-plated toilets, bejeweled prostitutes, and loud parties has not endeared them to their neighbors in the fashionable districts.
Among many of Colombia's poor, by contrast, drugs are seen as a way to earn money in an economy where more than 60 percent of the population lives on or below the poverty line. The Medellin cartel's Pablo Escobar, after all, started out stealing gravestones before entering the cocaine trade and becoming one of the world's richest men. Admiration for the industry is reflected in a genre of music popular in Colombia's poorer neighborhoods that features songs with titles like "I Prefer a Tomb in Colombia (to a Jail in the U.S.)" and "The Cartels Are Still Alive."
Surveys indicate that public support for legalization has grown since Legalization Now was founded five years ago, when it hovered around 7 percent. A poll taken in July 2003 by Invamer-Gallup showed 22 percent national support for "the legalization of production and consumption of drugs." What was more interesting was how the figures broke down. In the capital, 27 percent of people were in favor, while in the historic centers of the cocaine cartels, Medellin and Cali, the numbers were 16 percent and 13 percent, respectively. Responses also varied by class, with nearly 40 percent of Colombia's upper classes supporting legalization, compared to 16 percent of Colombia's lowest social strata.
"We have found that it's an educational difference," says Legalization Now's Lozano. "Poorer neighborhoods often are more against this because they believe that as soon as we legalize everyone will immediately become addicts. We've got to educate these people that the current approach is not working and if you really want to protect your children, you must help legalize drugs."
Colombia has changed from a producing country where drug use was frowned upon and drugs were a gringo problem, to a producing and consuming country. Authorities say that in recent years the cartels noticed the virgin market at home and started a drive for greater sales in Colombia. Studies show that Colombian children are starting drugs younger, and a trip to any of the country's city centers finds homeless children passed out midday with a bag of bazuco, a cheap drug made from the remnants of cocaine production. Legalization Now estimates that of Colombia's 45 million inhabitants, some 5 million are regular drug users.
Unexpected Reformers
Proponents of drug legalization are often accused of being in the pay of the drug lords, a testament to the power the narcos wielded in the past, especially in Colombia's Congress. (One former president became synonymous with corruption after it was found that the Cali cartel helped bankroll his campaign.) President Uribe recently ripped open the debate again, accusing M-19, a now defunct guerrilla group, of working with the drug traffickers. In the scandal that erupted, prominent congressmen who had belonged to M-19 and had in the past spoken favorably of legalization said they would no longer talk about the issue for fear of further being associated with the drug traffickers.
�"I've been calling for legalization for 20 years, and I can't remember the [number] of times I've been called in the pockets of the drug lords," says Antonio Caballero, one of Colombia's most famous columnists, who writes for the country's largest news magazine, Semana. "Of course, it doesn't make any sense, because it's the drug lords who will be out of business if there is legalization, but it does help shut down the discussion."
When Gustavo de Grieff, then Colombia's prosecutor general, started criticizing the War on Drugs in the 1990s, he likewise was tarred as a tool of the traffickers, even though he had led the successful effort to shut down Escobar's murderous Medellin cartel. In 1994 Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) wrote a Washington Post op-ed piece in which he said De Grieff's "positions are nearly identical with those of the [Cali] cartel itself. As such, they demonstrate the degree to which the Cali cartel has already gained influence in the very offices of Colombian law enforcement that are supposed to protect society against the cartel."
But as the suffering of Colombia continues in this brutal War on Drugs, an irreproachable group is stepping forward to call for a review of the country's drug policies. Colombia's Conservative Party is very conservative indeed. Founded in 1849, it earned a reputation for ferocious religious violence during Colombia's various civil wars between the conservatives and liberals. A poster in party headquarters listing its goals and policies ends with the highlighted words "a party that believes in God and seeks to insert him into life." More than half of Colombia's presidents have come from the Conservative Party, which in many eyes is associated with landowners, the church, and the oligarchy. Yet this bastion of conservatism is now mulling the decriminalization of drugs.
Enrique Gomez Hurtado comes from an illustrious political dynasty. His brother was assassinated while running for president on a right-wing ticket. In his congres-sional office sits a bust of his father, a president in the middle of the last century. Gomez Hurtado belongs to a class of Colombians who resemble English gentlemen of the Victorian era. On the wall of his office hangs a copy of the Ten Commandments. He is proposing the decriminalization of drugs as a way of dealing with Colombia's problems as both a drug-producing and a drug-consuming nation.
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