While the U.S. has failed to reduce the supply of cocaine and heroin entering its borders, it has, however, succeeded in generating widespread, often profoundly damaging, consequences on democracy and human rights in Latin America and the Caribbean.

If illicit drug trafficking is a global problem, why won't other nations comply with the drug control agenda of the United States? NarcoDiplomacy departs from traditional responses to this question, which have held that compliance with the American agenda has been beyond the capacity of key countries. By focusing on Germany and Japan, touted as two of the strongest allies of the United States in drug control efforts, H. Richard Friman exposes the flaws in capacity arguments and the policies based on them. Drawing on sources ranging from previously unknown Imperial German archives to interviews with policy makers and law enforcement officials, Friman offers a thorough analysis of bilateral and multilateral relations. He traces their evolution from international opium control efforts of the early 1900s through disputes over cocaine and money laundering during the Reagan and Bush antidrug campaigns. His work reveals that, although the internal logic of the U.S. posture was sound, American policy makers failed to recognize the nature of German and Japanese cooperation and defection, or to identify which aspects of capacity were at issue. The resulting policy, Friman contends, actually undermined German and Japanese compliance with the American agenda. Extending this analysis to Latin America, NarcoDiplomacy explores the ramifications of Friman's findings for the future of U.S. drug control policy.

This book explores the increasingly broad terrain of drugs in American society with an emphasis on politics. It begins with the War on Drugs initiated by President Richard Nixon in the early 1970s and extends to the current day with the vast power of the pharmaceutical industry (Big Pharma), expansion of global criminal syndicates, militarization of the drug war, and struggles between states and federal government over the legalization of marijuana. From the beginning, the drug war produced increasing authoritarian tendencies in American politics, visible not only in swollen national bureaucracies and burgeoning police functions, but in the rise of the largest prison-industrial complex in the world, a surveillance state, and the weakening of personal privacy and freedoms. At the same time, the legal drug system with some of the most profitable business operations anywhere has expanded to create a huge medical edifice, affecting the delivery of health care, development of modern psychology, evolution of the treatment industry, and many other areas of contemporary life, including the world of sports and recreation. Although prohibitionism remains very much alive, targeting a wide range of illicit drugs, today it is the hundreds of widely-marketed chemical substances sold by Big Pharma that result in some of the most serious health problems affecting society. This book explores the long historical trajectory of both the War on Drugs and the growth of Big Pharma, focusing on social outcomes and political consequences in the US and beyond.

Research Paper (undergraduate) from the year 2012 in the subject Politics - International Politics - Region: Middle- and South America, grade: 1,0, University of Economics, Prague, language: English, abstract: Since president Felipe Calderón started his policy of "mano dura" against the drug cartels in 2006, Mexico has seen unprecedented internal violence - with the total number of casualties having exceeded 45.000 in 2011. Assuming that the Mexican conflict is a war, subsequent questions can be asked with respect to a classic of political theory. Alexis de Tocqueville observed the natural tendency of central governments to reach out for more power in times of war. He further specified this statement by claiming that particularly the executive branch gains power in such situations. A democratic nation would be subject to this behavior, because it perceives the central executive as "the only power which appears to be intrinsically sufficiently strong, enlightened, and secure, to protect [it] from anarchy." Here, the Mexican case provides the analyst with further particularities. Not only follows the country's executive the logic of presidential system, but also is it still on the democratic recovery from a long-term authoritarian one-party-rule. This paper briefly examines the drug war's impact on the Mexican constitutional reality and thus aims at answering the question: What effect does the conflict have on the power endowment of the Mexican executive? In order to validate the hypothesis, that the president's power is gradually strengthened, the author chose a rather linear approach. After first introducing key data about the Mexican drug war, the institutional legacies of more than 70 years of one-party-rule are discussed. With the president's power having been on decline since a process of democratization gathered pace in 2000, various aspects of today's situation are understandable only by scrutinizing the consequences of previous "arrangements"

Challenging the U.S.-Led War on Drugs explores the cases that have resisted the U.S. pressure to adopt a militarized approach to fight against drug trafficking in Latin America and the Caribbean. Through a sweeping narrative history from the recovery of democracy in 1983 to the present, Cutrona applies international relations and comparative politics theories to understand Argentina’s different trajectory vis-à-vis the rest of the region. The author demonstrates that in broad questions of vulnerability to U.S. pressure, external factors often play a secondary role in explaining either balancing/resistance or bandwagoning/acceptance of the U.S. security agenda in the Americas. Emphasizing the role of domestic-level politics, Cutrona identifies the subordination of the military to civilian oversight, the transition outcome, the system of check and balances, and the role of civil society actors such as social movements, epistemic communities, and norm entrepreneurs as Argentina’s most relevant sources explaining defection from Washington’s main dictates to combat drug trafficking.

Democracy and Displacement in Colombia’s Civil War is one of few books available in English to provide an overview of the Colombian civil war and drug war. Abbey Steele draws on her own original field research as well as on Colombian scholars’ work in Spanish to provide an expansive view of the country’s political conflicts. Steele shows how political reforms in the context of Colombia’s ongoing civil war produced unexpected, dramatic consequences: democratic elections revealed Colombian citizens’ political loyalties and allowed counterinsurgent armed groups to implement political cleansing against civilians perceived as loyal to insurgents. Combining evidence collected from remote archives, more than two hundred interviews, and quantitative data from the government’s displacement registry, Steele connects Colombia’s political development and the course of its civil war to purposeful displacement. By introducing the concepts of collective targeting and political cleansing, Steele extends what we already know about patterns of ethnic cleansing to cases where expulsion of civilians from their communities is based on nonethnic traits.

Most policymakers see counterinsurgency and counternarcotics policy as two sides of the same coin. Stop the flow of drug money, the logic goes, and the insurgency will wither away. But the conventional wisdom is dangerously wrongheaded, as Vanda Felbab-Brown argues in Shooting Up. Counternarcotics campaigns, particularly those focused on eradication, typically fail to bankrupt belligerent groups that rely on the drug trade for financing. Worse, they actually strengthen insurgents by increasing their legitimacy and popular support. Felbab-Brown, a leading expert on drug interdiction efforts and counterinsurgency, draws on interviews and fieldwork in some of the world's most dangerous regions to explain how belligerent groups have become involved in drug trafficking and related activities, including kidnapping, extortion, and smuggling. Shooting Up shows vividly how powerful guerrilla and terrorist organizations — including Peru's Shining Path, the FARC and the paramilitaries in Colombia, and the Taliban in Afghanistan — have learned to exploit illicit markets. In addition, the author explores the interaction between insurgent groups and illicit economies in frequently overlooked settings, such as Northern Ireland, Turkey, and Burma. While aggressive efforts to suppress the drug trade typically backfire, Shooting Up shows that a laissez-faire policy toward illicit crop cultivation can reduce support for the belligerents and, critically, increase cooperation with government intelligence gathering. When combined with interdiction targeting major traffickers, this strategy gives policymakers a better chance of winning both the war against the insurgents and the war on drugs.

In this balanced and thought-provoking study, Russell Crandall examines the American decision to intervene militarily in three key episodes in American foreign policy: the Dominican Republic, Grenada, and Panama. Drawing upon previously classified intelligence sources and interviews with policymakers, Crandall analyzes the complex deliberations and motives behind each intervention and shows how the decision to intervene was driven by a perceived threat to American national security. By bringing together three important cases, Gunboat Democracy makes it possible to interpret and compare these examples and study the political systems left in the wake of intervention. Particularly salient in today's foreign policy arena, this work holds important lessons for questions of regime change and democracy by force.