Experts say it’s not the drug war, U.S. just has less buying power

Republican presidential candidate John McCain skipped a planned fundraiser in Grand Rapids yesterday to travel to Colombia and proclaim victory in the War on Drugs.

“The strategy is working,” McCain said, according to my colleague Matthew Delong at The Washington Independent. “The cost of an ounce of cocaine on the street in America has significantly increased.”

The trip was dubbed an opportunity for McCain to burnish his foreign policy credentials and focus on a success, and it’s certainly understandable why he’d prefer to do that over hanging out in Michigan. He’s shown difficulty engaging here, first claiming that auto industry jobs were gone for good, then writing an op-ed in the Detroit Free Press defending NAFTA .

But calling the tens of billions of dollars spent on the drug war an example of effective foreign policy seemed like something of a stretch to me, and I wondered where McCain was getting his information about cocaine. So I called John Walsh, senior associate at the Washington Office on Latin America, and asked about McCain’s claim that the drug war has reduced availability of cocaine in the U.S.

Continued –  “The White House has been claiming for several months that they have data showing a spike in cocaine prices and a decline in purity, but they have refused to reveal their methodology,” Walsh said, “and overall cocaine prices have fallen by 80 percent since the early 80s.”

It’s likely that there were disruptions in the cocaine trade in 2007, he said, but these are more likely because the declining value of the U.S. dollar has made the European market more attractive, plus more cocaine is being consumed in Latin America.

Bill Piper, director of national affairs at the Drug Policy Alliance, agreed that the weak dollar was the key to higher cocaine prices.

“The price of everything has gone up,” he said. “And saying we are hurting drug traffickers because cocaine prices are higher is like saying we are hurting oil companies because gas is expensive.”

The Department of Justice and the Government Accountability Office have both concluded that the supply is rebounding, he said, and the Washington Post fact checker has published  this chart debunking many White House claims.

Plus, Piper said, higher drug prices are associated with increased crime by those who break the law to fund their habits.

This is perhaps something for cash-strapped Michigan to consider. The state prison system here costs about $2 billion per year to run, involves a third of state workers, and according to the Department of Corrections (via spokesman Russ Marlin), though state statistics don’t account for the role drugs play in other crimes, 17 percent of Michigan prison inmates are incarcerated on drug convictions.