Is being hooked a choice?

A new book argues that all addictions are a matter of free will, even heroin and coffee.

By Andy Dehnart

Topics:Drugs, Coffee and tea, Psychology, Books

By simply titling his new book “Addiction is a Choice,” Jeffrey Schaler guarantees controversy.

In a society that’s addicted to identifying addictions, some — “Internet addiction,” for instance — are obvious targets for valid criticism. But identifying drug addiction as a choice? It seems ridiculous,
even blasphemous; isn’t it scientific fact that drug addiction is an
involuntary medical disease? According to the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, it is: “Chronic, hardcore drug use is a disease, and anyone suffering from a disease needs treatment.”

Not according to Schaler. A psychologist and professor of justice, law and society at American University, he argues that drug addiction is not a disease. Instead, he says it’s a scapegoated behavior that has been incorrectly identified as a physical or mental illness, a victim of bad science and misguided policy. Schaler writes that — like homosexuality, masturbation and other behaviors once thought to be physical or mental illnesses — the idea that drug addiction is an uncontrollable affliction can and should be “swiftly discredited.”

Schaler admits that these aren’t new ideas, but he’s arguably the first to put them into an easily accessible form. The book reads like a combination of an academic journal article and a commentary from a local newspaper. While he’s certain to have his critics,
Schaler presents a coherent rebuttal to an argument many people accept without a second thought.

If addiction is a choice, what is it not?

It is not a disease. And it is not involuntary. And it is not a thing that causes people to engage in certain behaviors. The conventional wisdom is that the availability of drugs causes people to use them. That’s one of the big arguments that is used to support what I call “the war on people,” “the war on drugs.” And the conventional wisdom is also that if you use “addicting drugs,” you will not be able to moderate your use of those drugs
[or] stop using those drugs.

The conventional wisdom is that there is some power in the
drug that makes people keep using the drug. Another part of that argument is that once you use the drug, something changes in your body. And that change — which has never been identified, only hypothesized — causes you to keep using the drug. What I have argued is that people use drugs as a way of avoiding and coping with certain existential experiences. They don’t want to do
what is necessary to change their experience. I’m not saying that’s not difficult — it can be very difficult. For example, Native Americans — who are the victims of literal and metaphorical genocide — have major problems they have to contend with; I’m not saying that those are small by any means. But instead of doing what they need to do to change their experience, they may tend to rely on drugs as a way of making themselves feel better so they don’t have to cope with those problems.

Back to the power you mentioned earlier — the power that people say drugs have over bodies. Don’t drugs have significant physiological effects on people?

Yes, and this is a point that serves as a red herring for people who maintain that drugs are dangerous. There are two ways of looking at this. We can say, “Do drugs have a certain effect on the body?” Of course they do, and the people on my side who go against the grain [admit that]. However, drug use and addiction doesn’t have to do with what drugs do to the body, but how drugs get into the body.

If you take a drug like cocaine, obviously something changes
in your body. Every time you think any thought, your body changes. There’s always a physiological change associated with whatever you do. Now the question is, “Does that physiological change make you do what you’re doing, or do you choose to do that?” If you have epilepsy, and you have a seizure, of course there’s a physical change in your body that makes you go into convulsions. I’m not saying that you have a choice as to whether you convulse or not — that’s clearly not a volitional act. But whether you’re going to reach for another cigarette or not is a volitional act; it’s not the same thing as an epileptic seizure.

But if you take heroin — and even if that’s a conscious choice at the beginning — once you get “addicted” to it, there’s a point at which you might die from the effects if you go off of it; you could have a seizure and die. Does that not prove that the drug actually has a sort of control over your body?

No, but you’re right — there are situations in which you may
need to be medically detoxified. And by that same reasoning, we could say that “crack babies” aren’t really born addicted in
the way we talk about addiction, but they’ve been poisoned. The mother has been taking the drug, and it’s obviously caused something physiological in the infant, and that infant may need some care to antidote the toxic effects of that drug. The same thing with heroin, the same thing with alcohol.

There’s lots of evidence that shows that people who have been
“addicted” to heroin for a long time give up heroin once their environments change. That’s one point, which I show in the [book with the] Vietnam veterans study that was published in 1973. Aside from those who needed to be detoxed because of the physiological effects — of course, many of those people who are detoxed go back to drug use — if you ask anyone who’s been a
long-time drug user how they stopped, they’ll reflect for a moment. And they’ll say, “Well, I made a decision; it was time for me to do it.”

The act and the behavior of using or consuming a drug — regardless of what it is — is a choice, and people engage in
those kinds of behaviors for reasons. There isn’t some power in the drug or in their physiology that causes them to do it. Because by that reasoning, if people committed crimes while they were on drugs, then we’d have to exculpate them; we’d have to say they weren’t responsible for their behavior because they were under the influence of drugs, and that isn’t the way the law works.

Why do you think our society is so obsessed with identifying everything from Internet use to gambling to, like you say, drugs, as addictive?

This isn’t my original idea, but I think that people have always had an investment in scapegoating some group or thing as a way of easing their existential anxiety and as a way of boosting
their self-esteem. So to persecute people for using illegal drugs is like persecuting any minority — blacks, Jews or gays –
because they’ve been blamed for the problems that the majority experiences. People have always done it; they’ll always do it.

What’s different is that, in the past, people had a clearer
sense that they were scapegoating blacks, or scapegoating Jews, or
scapegoating homosexuals for their problems. But today, under this charade of science and medicine, we’re “not” scapegoating drug users and addictions for our problems — we’re instilling
public health.

Who’s to blame for that? Is it doctors or politicians or addicts
themselves?

I don’t think it’s the addicts. I think that it’s human nature to
try to find some blame as a way of easing anxiety. If people don’t look to religion, then they look to persecute a minority or a substance.

Who benefits from persecuting people for being addicts or who benefits from persecuting illegal drug users? I think it’s clear: The drug enforcement agents benefit because they earn a living doing that. Politicians benefit because they look like they’re getting rid of or getting a control on evil in our society. But I think there’s a subtle group that people don’t really want to pay attention to — those who build prisons to house lots of people for consensual crimes. Of course, the others that have a deep
ideological and economic investment in the “disease model” of addiction are the treatment providers because they make money treating a mythical disease.

In the book you take issue with treatment providers, especially AA, which you compare to a cult and/or a religion. Even if it is a cult or a quasi-religion, they still do help some people get off drugs. Is there anything wrong with that?

I think that AA should be free to exist just the way any religious group should be free to exist. My concern is that it has become a tool of the state. The state arrests people for drunk driving and orders them into Alcoholics Anonymous. That to me is a violation of the First Amendment, and the separation of church and state.

I’m all for people who want to go to AA. I think it’s great — they should be able to go to any group just like they should be able
to go any church, synagogue or Islamic temple. What I object to is people are being misled that AA has the truth about addiction, which is absolutely false. It would be like saying that Judaism has the truth about addiction or Christianity does or Catholicism does.

What concerns me about what AA teaches is that it goes against scientific research that has focused on the concept known as
self-efficacy. That is, if you believe you can do something, you’re more likely to try to do it.

What AA and similar disease-model groups say is that you can’t control your behavior; you can’t control your addiction. I think what we should be doing is teaching people that they can control their addiction. It’s a choice. And then they’re more
likely to prove that to be true. And that idea has really been supported by psychological research; the AA idea has not.

So the best form of treatment then would be to help people realize they’re actually making a conscious choice to engage in that behavior?

Yes. One, I think it’s supported by scientific research; two, it is a common sense approach. But let me qualify one thing you said: You said, “Is this the best approach to treatment?” Well, yes and no. It’s the best approach to helping people who want help with they’re addiction or their behavior. However, I think we have to be careful and not call it treatment, because it becomes a euphemism for moral management. It’s not the same thing as treating someone for cancer or diabetes or AIDS. There’s no moral element there; you don’t say to the person, “If you just have the right attitude, then you’ll get better.”

What about those who are too far gone, those who can’t really realize that for themselves or are too overwhelmed by the effects of drugs to make that decision? What about those people?

I don’t think they should ever be coerced into anything one might call “treatment.” I don’t think that’s the right way; I think it’s unconstitutional; I think people have the right to destroy themselves, as upsetting as that may be. That doesn’t mean that
private groups — myself included — might not try to talk these people into getting some help or talk them out of destroying themselves. But ultimately the choice rests with the individual, and I don’t think we are ever justified in a civilized society that values freedom in coercing people into any kind of program, whether it’s called treatment or conversation or
psychotherapy, against the person’s will.

What about the fact that their behavior because of those drugs can affect other people? As the saying goes, there are no fights at ice cream parlors, just at bars.

I think that people should be held responsible for any harm that they do to anyone else, and I don’t think that we should excuse them because they’re using drugs. One of the problems we get into here is what constitutes harm? It gets kind of fuzzy. If you engage in a behavior that upsets me, is that harm?

You have a right to engage in behaviors of your choice as long as you don’t infringe upon my freedom. I think the libertarian dictum that one should be free to do whatever one wants as long as it’s not at the expense of someone else is one we should abide by. My right to swing my fist ends precisely at my neighbor’s nose; whether I’m using drugs or alcohol is essentially irrelevant. If some family member or friend is self-destructing using
drugs, does that cause you harm? It causes you psychological and emotional harm, it’s upsetting to you. But is that the same thing as some kind of criminal act? I don’t think it is. I think that’s part of the price we have to pay in a free society.

Based on your libertarian beliefs, would you be for legalization of drugs?

I don’t think they should be legalized — I think we should repeal, in total, drug prohibition. “Legalize” connotates government regulation, and I think that people have a right to drugs as property as guaranteed by the constitution. I don’t think they should have a right to marijuana, for example, because it qualifies as medicine — certainly, they should be able to use the drugs for any purposes that they want, whether it’s medical or recreational.

Finally, are you addicted to anything?

It depends on what we mean by “addicted.” The point that I try to drive home in the book is that addictions can be good or bad, positive or negative, and they could be to experiences, or activities, or substances. The answer is yes: I’m addicted to any number of activities and substances, like coffee. But does that mean that I can’t control my behavior? No.

: Andy Dehnart is a writer living in Chicago. More Andy Dehnart

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How Americans really feel about drugs

A NYT op-ed uses "moderate" double-speak to deny the truth: Most people want marijuana legalized

By David Sirota

Marijuana activist Carrie Sandoval at a protest in Denver on Wednesday, Sept 22, 2010 (Credit: AP/Kristen Wyatt)

Topics:Media Criticism, Drugs

Almost exactly eight years ago, I wrote an essay for the Nation magazine looking at how terms such as “centrism” and “moderate” were beginning to be deftly manipulated to shape the parameters of America’s political discourse. In almost every policy debate, these words were being used in with-us-or-against-us fashion to delineate what was — and what was not — acceptable. Through such linguistic propaganda over the last decade, America was gradually taught that anything called “centrist” or “moderate” was Good and Serious because it supposedly represented “mainstream” thinking in America — even as “centrism” was being used to describe policies and politicians that, based on empirical data, increasingly diverged from the actual center of our nation’s public opinion. By contrast, anything positioned in opposition to that branding was wild-eyed “leftist,” “extremist,” “ideological,” “fringe” — and most of all, Evil and Unserious.

As dishonest as this kind of agitprop is, it unfortunately — but predictably — continues unabated. This is, after all, the golden era of agitprop — a moment in which wars are no longer wars, corporations are people, and top New York Times scribes are given a national platform to declare that a key architect of the Republican Party’s infamous K Street Project “is not a representative of the corporate or financial wing of the party.” And so when it comes to who is a “centrist” or “moderate,” the distortions persist without so much as a peep of editorial protest.

The latest example of this insidious framing comes in the form of a Monday New York Times Op-Ed. The piece is written by Kevin Sabet, formerly one of President Obama’s top drug policy officials. Titled “Overdosing on Extremism,” he employs the “centrist” and “moderate” code words to criticize those pressing for reforms that, for purposes of law enforcement, would treat currently outlawed drugs such as marijuana just like far more dangerous yet legal drugs such as alcohol. With the possibility of these reform proposals roiling the presidential race and appearing on statewide ballots in 2012, a breathless and hysterical Sabet sounds an old fear-mongering alarm, writing (emphasis added):

Unless we change the tone of the debate to give drug-policy centrists a voice, America’s drug problem will only get worse.

Indeed, moderates have historically been key contributors to both the debate and the practice of effective drug policy. In 1914, Representative Francis B. Harrison, a New York Democrat, worked with Republicans and President Woodrow Wilson to pass the first major piece of federal anti-drug legislation, in response to a surge in heroin and cocaine use.

Other moderates, from Theodore Roosevelt to John F. Kennedy, made drug policy an important part of their domestic agendas. President Bill Clinton worked closely with Bob Dole, the Republican Senate majority leader, on sensible measures like drug courts and community policing…

So where are the moderates now? … A few tough-on-crime conservatives and die-hard libertarians dominate news coverage and make it appear as if legalizing drugs and “enforcement only” strategies were the only options, despite the fact that the public supports neither …

There is no magic bullet for America’s drug problem. The magnitude and complexity of our drug problem require us to constantly refine and improve our policies through thoughtful analysis, innovation and discussion.

Moderates should lead that conversation. To remain silent not only betrays widely shared values of compassion and justice for the most vulnerable. It also leaves policy in the hands of extremists who would relegate a very serious and consequential discussion to frivolous and dangerous quarters.

If ever a college taught a class in how modern political propaganda works — and how it proceeds without any connection to a shred of fact — this article should be required reading because it is such a pure example.

Mere weeks after Gallup’s new poll showed a majority of Americans support full legalization of marijuana, Sabet insists that it’s a “fact” that the public doesn’t support legalization. And mind you, it’s not just Gallup’s surveys that show public support for legalization — in state-based polls in politically diverse states like Massachusetts and Colorado, it’s essentially the same thing: widespread public support for pot legalization.

This, of course, says nothing of the fact that the very man Sabet earned his official government title from, Barack Obama, was elected to the Senate promoting marijuana decriminalization and then overwhelmingly elected to the White House after a campaign in which he pledged to respect states’ decisions to reform their drug laws. It also says nothing of the rise of Ron Paul, an oft-ignored candidate who has been able to overcome media scorn to wage an unexpectedly spirited race for the Republican presidential nomination thanks, in part, to his push to end the Drug War.

None of these facts about public opinion and the drug war are all that surprising; after all, in a recent national television ad campaign, Sabet’s own Office of National Drug Control Policy has deemed marijuana “the safest thing in the world.” Yet, Sabet says it’s a “fact” that the public doesn’t support any form of legalization.

How, you ask, can he justify such an assertion? How can he defend his claims considering those poll numbers, the results of the 2008 presidential election, or the rise of anti-drug warrior Paul in the traditionally “just say no” party’s presidential primary? He can’t, but he doesn’t need to in an era where facts no longer matter.

Instead, he (and the New York Times editors and headline writers who published his piece) wholly ignores the indisputable facts and simply deems the millions of Americans in this pro-legalization majority as “extremists” — that is, he pretends that the position in the actual center of public opinion is on the extreme edge of that public opinion. He then asserts that true “centrists” and “moderates” are those who do not support legalization — even though those voices are empirically the extremists whose positions put them far away from the mainstream center of public opinion. And, just for good measure, he employs a bit of ad hominem, suggesting it’s just “a few … die-hard libertarians” who support legalization — ignoring not only the American majority, but the scores of top law enforcement officials who are fighting to end the drug war.

Taken together, Sabet’s goal in his Op-Ed is obvious: He’s a committed drug warrior with a vested (and, based on his Times billing as a “drug policy consultant,” possibly financial) interest in marginalizing those trying to end the drug war. To do that, he’s employed the most tried and true instruments of marginalization — the newly redefined notions of “centrism” and “moderate” policymaking. And he’s employed them even though the actual facts show that, in comparison to the mass public, he’s the fringe extremist.

Now sure, it’s certainly true that polls showing strong — and growing — support for legalizing marijuana cannot be fully equated to Americans’ views of policies for all drugs. However, marijuana-themed polls and election results are also hardly wholly unrelated to that conversation — and at the very least, those polls and election results should mean that the burden of proof is on someone like Sabet when he declares that being for legalization is the definition of “extremism” and the opposite of “centrism.”

But that burden of proof is nowhere to be found because in the 21st century, “centrism” and “moderate” still have nothing to do with the center of any political debate, or the moderate middle of any policy discussion. They remain political weapons deployed by attention-seeking fabulists against the real centrists and moderates in the American majority.

: David Sirota is a best-selling author of the new book "Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live In Now." He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com. More David Sirota

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Adventures in drug war logic

Laundering money for cartels: Good! Arguing for legalization: A fireable offense

By Alex Pareene

A U.S. Border Patrol agent walks along the U.S./Mexico border fence near San Diego. (Credit: AP/Lenny Ignelzi)

Topics:Drugs, Mexican Drug War, Mexico

It’s time for an important lesson in proper, civilized behavior. Drug war soldier Gallant launders vast sums of money for the Mexican drug cartels. Drug war soldier Goofus expresses skepticism at the size and scope of this expensive and deadly boondoggle. Goofus gets canned. Gallant is the Drug Enforcement Agency.

Sorry, what’s our DEA doing this time?

Today, in operations supervised by the Justice Department and orchestrated to get around sovereignty restrictions, the United States is running numerous undercover laundering investigations against Mexico’s most powerful cartels. One D.E.A. official said it was not unusual for American agents to pick up two or three loads of Mexican drug money each week. A second official said that as Mexican cartels extended their operations from Latin America to Africa, Europe and the Middle East, the reach of the operations had grown as well. When asked how much money had been laundered as a part of the operations, the official would only say, “A lot.”

“If you’re going to get into the business of laundering money,” the official added, “then you have to be able to launder money.”

Yes, but how do the feds decide which cartels to launder money for? Should the government really be picking “winners and losers” when it comes to Mexican drug cartels?

An expensive boondoggle like the ongoing war on drugs has its own nutty logic that may not make much sense to outsiders. Outsiders, for example, might think that laundering “a lot” of money for cartels in order to eventually follow that money to someone in a position of authority is a huge waste of time and resources that only makes the deadly gangs even stronger. But the agencies waging the war don’t seem to have a lot of tolerance for opinions along those lines.

When Border Patrol agent Bryan Gonzalez told a colleague that legalizing marijuana would probably lessen violence in Mexico, his colleague reported Gonzalez to their bosses, and Gonzalez was fired.

Those remarks, along with others expressing sympathy for illegal immigrants from Mexico, were passed along to the Border Patrol headquarters in Washington. After an investigation, a termination letter arrived that said Mr. Gonzalez held “personal views that were contrary to core characteristics of Border Patrol Agents, which are patriotism, dedication and esprit de corps.”

Gonzalez is now with Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, and the ACLU has filed a suit on his behalf.

But LEAP’s membership drives are slightly handicapped by the fact that law enforcement agencies see any sort of skepticism regarding the efficacy and morality of the drug war as dangerous and, apparently, unpatriotic. “We all know the drug war is a bad joke,” an unidentified police officer told the Times. “But we also know that you’ll never get promoted if you’re seen as soft on drugs”

Its this institutional unwillingness to question the mission that leads to the DEA “combating” drug cartels by laundering their money and selling them weapons. Drug war logic means rural ~~Oregon~~ Washington needs a million dollars in federal grants going to a a “task force” that busts small-time dealers and raids houses of medicinal marijuana users with paramilitary weaponry and tactics. Does that seems extreme and wasteful? What are you, some kind of unpatriotic hippie?

: Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon. Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene

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On “Weed Wars,” drug clichés go up in smoke

A new reality show depicts an Oakland, Calif., medical marijuana clinic as just another small business

By Matt Zoller Seitz

Small businessman Steve D'Angelo, executive director of Oakland's Harborside Health Center, samples his product in "Weed Wars." (Credit: Discovery)

Topics:Drugs, Documentaries, TV

“I run a family business, and the business is cannabis,” says Steve D’Angelo, a central character in Discovery’s new series “Weed Wars” and the co-founder and executive director of Oakland’s Harborside Health Center, which distributes medical marijuana to almost 100,000 customers. D’Angelo’s matter-of-fact statement sums up the tone of this series, which treats the Harborside Heath Center as just another family-owned (albeit nonprofit) business, ultimately not too different from a veterinary clinic, a hair salon or a tattoo parlor.

Well, OK, there is one major difference: Although the clinic’s main product can be sold legally to any California resident with a medical permit to buy it, the federal government still considers marijuana a Schedule 1 narcotic, as dangerous to the republic as crack cocaine. That means that in addition to the usual entrepreneurial headaches, D’Angelo and his brother Andrew, the clinic’s general manager, live in fear of a massive bust by the DEA on whatever pretext — a catastrophe that would wipe out everything they’ve built.

And there are other hassles, most of which could be grouped under the umbrella heading of, “The government fears and loathes us, but is happy to use us as a cash machine.” The pilot — which premieres Thursday night at 10 p.m./9 Central — finds the D’Angelos sweating a $1.1. million tax bill suddenly levied by the city. The bill came about because Oakland voters passed an ordinance drastically raising the city’s “cannabis tax” and stipulating that the entire bill for a given fiscal year be paid in advance. Although the clinic grosses about $20 million a year, it’s a nonprofit that plows any income beyond costs back into the business. They don’t have a million dollars lying around.

If you’re repelled by the prospect of watching a series whose premiere revolves around a tax bill, “Weed Wars” isn’t for you. The details of legal marijuana distribution are intriguing, and many of the show’s characters are agreeably eccentric — the business’s co-founder and treasurer is a “pagan wizard” known as Dave Wedding Dress, who has a giant beard and wears a purple tie-died sundress — but there’s ultimately nothing glamorous, or even all that funny, about the events depicted on this show. The D’Angelos and their employees work hard and spend most of their days dealing with tedious but necessary chores. The clinic’s display floor, which features varieties of cannabis behind glass, might as well be a deli counter. The flavors have pungent names such as Julius Caesar, Deep Purple and Jack the Ripper, but they’re just clumps of bud in plastic jars and bags, visually indistinguishable from each other to anyone who’s not an expert. One of the clinic’s employees, Terryn, is raising his own crop in his basement help from an expert grower named Jon, but it’s not the easy-money sidelight he imagined when he got into it. In the pilot we watch Terryn lose part of a crop to an aphid infestation and grouse that when you decide to grow marijuana, you’re deciding to become a small farmer, and that it’s a 60-hour-a-week job.

The very existence of “Weed Wars” is more remarkable than the show itself. Marijuana is still mostly illegal in this country, but public perception (and opinion polls) have shifted plenty over the past two decades, to the point where Showtime’s “Weeds” can run for eight seasons, stoner comedy can become a mainstream movie subgenre, and politicians can feel emboldened to answer the question “Have you ever smoked it?” with a simple “yes” instead of “I experimented with it.” Proposition 215 legalized medical marijuana in California 15 years ago, but it’s hard to imagine any major cable channel circa 1996 — or even 2006 — chronicling the day-to-day operations of a clinic in the no-fuss manner of “Weed Wars.” (MTV’s “Real Life” ran a series last summer titled “I’m In the Marijuana Business,” but it was more along the lines of “Jersey Shore” with weed, if that’s not redundant.) The series is sympathetic to the D’Angelos and their enterprise, treating them as underdogs in a war of perception that they and their allies will ultimately win, if the day-to-day b.s. doesn’t grind them down first. “I believe in this plant,” Steve D’Angelo says. “I believe in what it can do for people.”

: More Matt Zoller Seitz

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Newt Gingrich talks about inventive new ways to punish drug users

The GOP front-runner continues to tour America's bookstores, babbling away

By Alex Pareene

Newt Gingrich (Credit: AP)

Topics:Newt Gingrich, 2012 Elections, Republican Party, Drugs

The thing reporters always loved about Newt Gingrich — and the thing that led many of them to mistake his free-associative rambling for intellect — is that he will just babble, at length, on any given topic, to any reporter who’ll listen. So Yahoo’s Chris Moody chatted with the unlikely GOP nomination front-runner at a Books-a-Million in Florida, and Moody got Gingrich to go on for a while about drugs, for some reason, which I’m guessing is not at the top of the Gingrich campaign’s list of issues to hit in interviews. (At the top of that list is actually “The Battle of the Crater,” a powerful Civil War historical novel by Gingrich and William F. Forstchen, available now at fine booksellers everywhere.)

: Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon. Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene

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“El Narco”: The drug war next door

An in-depth look at the Mexican cartels that have killed thousands and threaten the government itself

By Laura Miller

Suspects are lined up as weapons are displayed to the media by the Mexican Navy in Mexico City June 9, 2011.

Rifles, guns, hand grenades, uniforms of the Mexican navy and the U.S. Army, cartridges and cocaine were seized in an operation against the Zetas drug cartel in Coahuila and Nuevo Leon in the north of Mexico. (Credit: Jorge Lopez / Reuters)

Topics:Mexican Drug War, Mexico, Books, Our Picks: Books, Drugs

Among the many striking facts that journalist Ioan Grillo recounts in his new book, “El Narco: Inside Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency,” is that the Mexican city of Juarez became the murder capital of the world last year, beating out Mogadishu and Cape Town, South Africa, for per-capita homicides. Some 3,000 people were killed in Juarez in 2010, yet in El Paso, Texas, the U.S. city right across the river — almost a literal stone’s throw away — there were only five murders.

Some would say this proves that better law enforcement is all Mexico needs to end the drug-cartel violence currently drenching its northern states in blood. Or maybe, as Grillo suggests, it merely shows that when the cartels and their associates want to kill someone in El Paso, they first take their victim across the border where, chances are, the murder will never be properly investigated.

Whatever the case, the contrast suggests why the rampant carnage in Mexico’s border states seldom makes the front page in the U.S.; it seems far away, despite being right next door. However, cables made available by WikiLeaks indicate that American officials — including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — are worried that the cartels are taking on aspects of an “insurgency,” which could make them a threat to the Mexican government. Narco tactics now include car bombs, videotaped executions, the deliberate targeting of civilians and many, many attacks on policemen, soldiers, federal officials and elected leaders (one mayor was stoned to death on the main street of his own town) — all startlingly reminiscent of militant and terrorist campaigns prosecuted elsewhere on the planet.

Grillo is a Briton living in Mexico City who has been reporting on Latin America for a decade. “El Narco” lays out the history of drug smuggling in the region over the past 100 years or so, and then homes in on the rise of the Northern Mexican cartels during the 2000s. This flourishing was partly a result of U.S.-aided crackdowns on the Colombian cocaine industry, a phenomenon described by the “balloon theory”: If you squeeze the drug trade in one area, it pops up someplace else. But Grillo also believes that the fall in 2000 of the PRI (the Institutional Revolutionary Party, a one-party oligarchy that ruled Mexico for over 70 years) led to the kind of organized-crime free-for-all that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Drug smuggling is so lucrative and Mexican police and soldiers are so poorly paid that corruption has always been a feature of the landscape. But there’s stable corruption — where everyone knows who’s in charge and who must be paid — and unstable corruption, in which the power structure becomes uncertain and ambitious criminals see the opportunity to increase their slice of the action. The cartel violence in Mexico centers around clashes between rival syndicates (each with its own set of bought officials), who vie for key cross-border routes, called “plazas,” while fighting off the relatively weak efforts of law enforcement to crack down. The result is a crazy, upside-down world that often sees state police (on the local cartel’s payroll) battling federal officers (who may or may not belong to another mob).

In the late 1990s, an ambitious drug lord in the town of Nuevo Laredo hired a former special-forces commander to assemble a militia of men with similar experience. They became the Zetas, a brutal, but well-organized team of enforcers for the Gulf Cartel. The cartel leader, Osiel Cárdenas, then felt powerful enough to take the unusual step of fighting back when the federal government came to arrest him, becoming, as Grillo puts it, “the first narco insurgent.” Cárdenas lost, but not before what was once a cops-and-robbers conflict had become militarized. The cartels now have automatic weapons, grenade launchers and explosives, and no compunction about using them when innocent bystanders are around. It’s estimated that the current drug wars have claimed 35,000 lives.

The cartels have also spawned their own culture: the famous narcocorridos (ballads about gangsters and their exploits, often commissioned by the subject himself for a handsome fee), a low-budget video industry cranking out titles like “Me Chingaron Los Gringos” (“The Gringos Fucked Me”) and a clothing style called “buchones,” which, Grillo writes, “mixes urban and rural, traditional and modern. Buchones like cowboy hats and ostrich-skin boots, but also sneakers and brightly colored baseball caps.”

The narcos even have their own flavors of quasi-Catholic folk religion, with such patron saints as Santa Muerte, a cross between the Grim Reaper and the Virgin Mary, and a possibly apocryphal early-20th-century outlaw named Jesus Malverde. (In one of the book’s rare funny moments, Jesus Malverde’s shrine keeper asks Grillo if his country has a similar Robin Hood figure, and Grillo explains that, actually, they have Robin Hood.) Strangest of all, the La Familia cartel embraced as its bible a book on “muscular Christianity” titled “Wild at Heart” (by an American writer once described as “the Robert Bly of evangelicalism”) — until, that is, the cartel’s leader wrote his own spiritual guidebook.

The strength of “El Narco” lies in its shoe-leather reporting; Grillo interviews everyone from a former cartel assassin to DEA agents to grieving families, snitches, pot and poppy farmers, illegal immigrants and gangbangers. He’s the sort of journalist who’ll pop into a plastic surgery clinic or taqueria if it turns up on a list of cartel-linked businesses, just to see what he can see. Writers this knowledgeable about the subject and with no particular ax to grind are rare because covering the cartels can be dangerous. Last fall, the main newspaper in Juarez, El Diario, published an open letter to cartel leaders (“the de facto authorities in this city”), titled “What Do You Want From Us?” in an effort to figure out whatever it was that caused several of their staffers to be killed. Lately, the Zetas have taken to hanging corpses labeled “Internet snitches” from railway overpasses.

So, perhaps top-notch writing is too much to hope for as well, though there are times when you want to shout, “Raise your hands and step away from the thesaurus!” Grillo’s many references to “severed craniums” had me baffled (do cartel thugs pack bone saws?) until I realized that he means “heads,” and unless Mexico is brimming with cheerful drug dealers, he’s got the word “sanguine” confused with “sanguinary.” At times, though, Grillo’s malaprops can be grimly amusing, as when he describes a gang who makes a practice of “devouring bodies in acid.” Not just narco killers, but cannibals with cast-iron stomachs!

Nevertheless, these are minor glitches, and a solid, comprehensive popular book on the current drug wars is much needed. Americans ought to be better informed about the cartels who are challenging Mexico’s government for supremacy in the border states. American citizens buy the drugs that fund the cartels’ reign of terror and American gun shops sell them the outrageously lethal weapons they use to enforce it. So far, the slaughter has barely lapped our own border, but it is nevertheless of our making. If more of us acknowledge this truth, then there’s a better (though still slim) chance that we can replace the failed War on Drugs with a more realistic and humane drug policy — and do it before that lapping becomes a flood.

: Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com. More Laura Miller