Narco-Deforestation Accelerates Loss of Biodiversity

In Central America, drug policies become conservation policies.

The Central American isthmus exploded into prominence as a drug trafficking corridor in 2006, when pressure on Mexican cartels pushed smuggling operations to the south and into the remote forest frontiers of Honduras, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. Since then, vigorous interdiction programs have pushed traffickers into ever more remote zones, back and forth from country to country, bringing money, manpower, and greater opportunities for deforestation.

Kendra McSweeney of the Department of Geography at Ohio State University and co-workers dug into the recent comprehensive report by the Organization of American States (OAS), titled The Drug Problem in the Americas, and wrote up their findings in a recent contribution to Science's Policy Forum. They found that “mounting evidence suggests that the trafficking of drugs (principally cocaine) has become a crucial—and overlooked—accelerant of forest loss in the isthmus.” (See graph above, representing forest clearings in Eastern Honduras.)

In the Caribbean lowlands area known as the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor, and in protected rural regions like Laguna del Tigre National Park in Guatemala and the Rio Platano Biosphere Reserve in Honduras (now listed as “in danger” by UNESCO due to forest loss), there is no shortage of reasons why deforestation in Central American is increasing. Among the causes are weak or corrupt government agencies, climate change, poverty, illegal logging, ill-advised development, and rampant agribusiness expansion. However, what has been called the “compounding pressure” of drug trafficking on biodiverse forestlands and associated rural communities is making things worse. The report in Science documented that an unprecedented flow of cocaine into Central America “coincided with a period of extensive forest loss” as narco-traffickers purchase large ranches in “contested rural landscapes.”

What are the active causal connections between drug trafficking and deforestation? The researchers identified three interrelated mechanisms “by which forest loss follows the establishment of a drug transit hub.”

1. Drug traffickers cut down forests to establish secret roads and aircraft landing strips.

2. Drug money amps up the pressure on weakly governed frontier areas, resulting in “narco-capitalized” land speculators and timber harvesting operations. In the process, local small landowners get priced out, even though the conversion of forests to farmlands is illegal in protected areas.

3. Drug trafficking organizations are themselves drawn into local forest-to-agriculture development plans like pastures and oil-palm plantations. Buying up and developing land is a preferred method of laundering drug money. These vague “narco-estates” monopolize land use in some territories and serve as cover for expanded smuggling operations.

What could mitigate this form of additional pressure on tropical deforestation? The researchers suggest that the heart of the problem is the traditional emphasis on supply-side policies, such as interdiction and crop eradication on foreign soil. “Analysts have long noted that eradication policies often push coca (and opium poppy and marijuana) growers into ever more ecologically sensitive zones, with substantial environmental impacts.”

The authors of the Science article view all of this as something to be added to “the long list of negative unintended consequences borne by poor countries as a result of the overwhelming emphasis on supply-side drug reduction policies…. Recognizing the ecological costs of drug trafficking in transit countries would improve full-cost pricing analyses of the drug policy scenarios explored by the OAS.”

McSweeney K., Nielsen E.A., Taylor M.J., Wrathall D.J., Pearson Z., Wang O. & Plumb S.T. (2014). Drug Policy as Conservation Policy: Narco-Deforestation, Science, 343 (6170) 489-490. DOI: 10.1126/science.1244082

What Would a Genuine Drug War Look Like?

An essay on biomedicine and the body politic.

Millions of addicts in America want effective treatment, and cannot get it. Funds for research and treatment are still scarce, compared to money for interdiction and law enforcement. What would happen if we took the billions spent on interdiction and let it flow into addiction research and treatment? What would happen if we gave people truthful, accurate information about drugs, and trusted them to make intelligent decisions more often than stupid ones? Can it end up any worse that the present state of affairs?

Susan Sontag’s warnings about the danger of disease as metaphor still ring true. In modern American society, heart disease, cancer, AIDS, alcoholism, and cigarette addiction account for millions of deaths. They are all disease entities with strong psychological and behavioral components—complicated, multicellular, multi-organ disorders. But they have all been associated, at one time or another, with negative personality traits and moral flaws. The less we know about the mechanics of a human disorder, the more likely we are to view its external symptoms as signs of laziness, or neuralgia of the spirit, or as a form of damage caused by specific kinds of thoughts and emotions. Without a doubt, all kinds of flaws are sometimes expressed in the behavior of people who have these disorders. Yet none of these flaws can be considered the root cause of the diseases.

The genuine drug war is being fought in the arena of biomedicine. Addiction is being added to the roster of physical disorders once thought to be symptoms of insanity, but which are now seen to be physiological disease entities with mental components. The real crisis is the indisputable fact that there exists today an appalling shortage of funds for biomedical research. The cause of the dilemma is a fundamental misunderstanding among politicians and the public about how diseases can be understood and conquered. Research into the viral mechanisms of the common cold may ultimately yield more insights into AIDS then all of the directed research now underway. In biomedicine, there is no guarantee that goals can be reached through the front door, by a systematic assault akin to an engineering project. We cannot, for example, hope to cure addiction, or even the common cold, by means of the same methods we used to put a man on the moon.

There are, however, certain things we can do immediately, if we are serious about drug abuse. To begin with, we can attend to the staggering number of drug-related deaths, injuries, and hospitalizations caused by the abuse of prescription medications. The government itself has proven the case for this contention in numerous reports issued by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and other official bodies. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, older Americans account for more than half of all deaths from drug reactions, leading one to suspect that the majority of drug fatalities in this country stem from accidentally fatal overdoses by heavily medicated senior citizens. Our national fixation on illegal drugs has blinded us to the verifiable facts about prescription drug abuse.

We also need to recognize the problem of underprescribing morphine and other addictive painkillers for children and adults in hospital settings. One of the great scandals to come out of the drug war is the growing understanding that potent painkillers are not being offered in sufficient amounts to patients suffering intractable and agonizing pain.

“There’s a certain amount of hysteria about narcotics among doctors,” maintains one researcher.

At least half of all cancer patients seen in routine practice report inadequate pain relief, according to the American College of Physicians. For cancer patients in pain, adequate relief is quite literally a flip of the coin.

A September 10 New York Times report highlights studies by the World Health Organization which amply document the ongoing scandal in pain management. At least 6 million cancer and AIDS patients currently receive no appropriate pain treatment of any kind. In addition, WHO estimates that four out of five patients dying of cancer are also suffering severe pain. The numbers of untreated patients suffering intractable, unrelieved pain from nerve damage, burns, gunshots, sickle cell anemia, and a host of other medical conditions can only be guessed at. Typically, non-addicted patients take morphine therapeutically for pain at doses in the 5 to 10 mg. range. But experienced morphine addicts regularly take several hundred milligrams a day—a huge difference. In many cases, pain relief is the one thing doctors can offer their patients, and the one thing they withhold

These outcomes, rather than flashy cocaine seizures at the border, represent the lasting fruits of the drug war.

Photo Credit: www.foreignpolicyjournal.com

America’s Top Drug Cities

And the winner is.... Espanola, N.M.?

Forbes Magazine, in an  article by Nathan Vardi last year, listed what it calls “The Drug Capitals of America.”

Using data from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the Substance Abuse & Mental Health Services Administration (SAMSHA)--two not-always-terribly-reliable federal agencies--Forbes announced that the small agricultural community of Española, with a population of about 10,000 Hispanics and a high poverty rate, consistently leads the nation in drug overdoses per capita. “Española recorded 42.5 drug-related deaths per 100,000, compared with a national average of 7.3,” Forbes reports.

Not unaware of the problem, the New Mexico state government has begun a program of distributing Narcan, the overdose-reversing drug, and now grants immunity from prosecution for those who seek help for an overdose victim, Forbes reports.

Coming in for special consideration this year is Missoula, Montana, which SAMSHA claims has the highest rate of illicit drug use in the nation. According to the survey, “averages taken in 2004, 2005 and 2006 showed 13.8% of households polled in the Missoula region reported using illicit drugs in the last month.” The state has recently been in the throes of a mammoth methedrine epidemic, say the drug agencies, with as many as 50 per cent of the state’s prisoners now incarcerated for meth-related crimes.

Washington, D.C. held on to its well-earned reputation as a cocaine hub, with SAMSHA reporting that the 2nd Ward in the nation’s capital “had the highest rate of cocaine use of any area it polled in the nation.” The city racked up 75 cocaine overdoses in 2006.

Baltimore, for its part, has run up staggering numbers of heroin-related overdoses. "Baltimore is home to higher numbers of heroin addicts and heroin-related crime than almost any other city in the nation," says the Drug Enforcement Administration.

New Orleans, now leading the nation in murder rates, has seen new drug turf wars. Says Forbes: “At 95 murders per 100,000 people, New Orleans led the nation in killings by a wide margin in 2007.”

And finally, let us not forget San Francisco, home of the highest rate of illegal drug-related emergency room visits in the nation. SAMSHA’s survey estimated that there were 809 illicit drug-related emergency room visits per 100,000 in the San Francisco area. “Heroin remains the No. 1 abused drug in San Francisco, while heroin and crack cocaine continue to impact Oakland, says the DEA.”

As a footnote, look for Atlanta to score heavily in next year’s survey. Drug-related crimes are on the increase, and Forbes suggests that “Atlanta has become the East Coast distribution hub of the violent Mexican cartels that now dominate the drug trade.”