Lessons from the Defeat of Chile's Marijuana Legalization Bill

"I will continue insisting on this change because our current laws, far from contributing to the eradication of drug trafficking, foment it because they obligate a person who smokes marijuana in the privacy of his home - which carries no penalty - to go to the mafias and cartels to procure it."

Senator Avila noted that he sought "to destroy the market for the drug mafias" with his bill, calling the current U.S.-imposed prohibitionist drug policies "profoundly wrong."

The decisión by Senators Alberto Espina, José Antonio Viera Gallo, Andrés Zaldívar and Mario Ríos to recommend the bill's defeat in Congress ought to be cause for reflection - and an adjustment in strategy - for drug policy reformers not only in Chile but across the continent... How is it that while drug policy reforms advance slowly in Brazil, Argentina, and even Venezuela, this movement finds itself in retreat in Chile?

The answer is simple: despite the rhetoric of neo-libertarians, governments and political leaders that claim to favor "free markets" have not walked their talk - paging free-market enthusiasts Vicente Fox, and Jorge Batlle, and their hollow lip-service on behalf of drug legalization, for example - when it comes to freeing the drug markets from prohibitionist government controls.

Sometimes the truth is found in the simplest explanation: Political leaders and movements that do not champion the poor - the first and greatest victims of drug prohibition - have shown zero success in reforming drug laws, whereas, in Latin America, every successful reform to date has come from a political Left that values actions more than mere words.

Most interestingly, in the countries where the cause of drug policy reform advances, the leaders stop short of openly endorsing legalization. They are often inconsistent on the issue, throwing bones to Washington on one "anti-drug" campaign or other (such as interdicting airplanes suspected of transporting illicit drugs), while creating structural changes on others that begin to clear a path for change.

In the lands where a political Left is on the rise, reform marches forward instead of backwards. It is, right now, the only consistent "outcome determinative" factor affecting drug policy: Brazilian President Lula da Silva, for example, hasn't called for legalizing drugs, but has insisted that the "drug war" is a "class war," and surrounded himself with cabinet level appointees that openly favor drug decriminalization. Argentina President Néstor Kirchner has not called for decriminalization, but has appointed a Supreme Court chief that openly does, has embraced the coca leaf as a sacred, legal, plant, and funded many harm reduction programs to lessen the harm caused by use of some drugs under prohibition.

So what gives with Chile? The answer is both obvious and disturbing. The economic policies of the Chilean State have abandoned the poor and working folks in favor of business interests and "free trade." This is particularly disappointing since Chilean President Ricardo Lagos once served in the cabinet of President Salvador Allende, a champion of the poor who was deposed by coup and assassinated for it in 1973. The so-called political Left in Chile has absorbed many of the worst qualities of the authoritarian Right that it once set out to remove from power.

Nations that give too much political power to the mercantile classes, simply put, create a set of political conditions that serve as a block on drug policy reform: When big money and its lobbyists rule a political process - the United States being the best example of this phenomenon - drug policy reform becomes impossible. The system favors the interests of those who can pay. And opponents of drug policy reform, which include banking and pharmaceutical interests, among others, that directly benefit from prohibitionist drug policies, always carry the day under that set of circumstances, where market power equals political power.

This reality is confusing to many "developed world" reformers from the USA to Europe. They get very excited about words but, superficially, not deeds. The attention they lavish upon fellow free-marketers like Mexican President Fox and Uruguay President Batlle - despite the fact that neither so-called "legalizer" has backed up his words with a single concrete policy initiative - towers over the grudging attention they give to, say, a Lula government in Brazil and the exciting, manifold, changes in public attitudes and policy regarding drugs and their users underway there. It is Lula's inconsistencies, rather, that draw their attention rather than their own movement's victories. I've called this phenomenon "the beautiful loser syndrome" in which U.S. activists, in particular, would rather be "right" than win. But there is another factor, related to ideology: United States free-market libertarians say they want drugs legalized, while simultaneously pushing for market conditions that make legalization impossible. And in the superficial United States, words trump deeds.

The time has come for drug policy reformers - good people who really do want to see the drug laws changed - to see through the "free market" snake oil and look at where progress is being made, and why: the reforms in Latin America - despite this latest defeat in Chile - move forward while even in New York state they can't seem to drop the Rockefeller drug laws that everyone claims to agree need overhaul. And where reform is moving forward, its spear is the fight for poor people, to stop imprisoning and criminalizing the poor drug users.

It is an uncomfortable reality for some to see that the market, by its very nature, blocks reform and those unwashed, red-and-black, warriors of class struggle - from the coca grower's cradle in La Paz to the drug addict's grave in Buenos Aires - are today's vanguard in terms of successfully bringing about reform. An uncomfortable reality, but a reality nonetheless: And is not reality discomforting by its very nature?

The events of recent days in Venezuela, where an administration - that of President Hugo Chávez - that stands up to the pressures of Washington and Wall Street has just received a stunning electoral mandate from 59-percent of its citizenry, now pushes the resistance to U.S.-imposed policies to a bold, new, era. Although the words "drug policy reform" were not mentioned by Chávez, or by either side, during that historic campaign, the path is now cleared for the legal system reforms in Venezuela that are decriminalizing the smalltime drug user (paging Human Rights Watch, which gets a large part of its $22 million dollar annual budget from leading drug policy reformer George Soros, and yet has ignored this groundbreaking plank in the judicial reforms underway there even as it rails about other aspects of those reforms).

And beyond Venezuela, that country's victory of democracy-from-below on August 15th now emboldens the effective reformers from Bolivia to Colombia to Argentina and even in Mexico to turn up the volume in the fight for poor people's rights, a political war that is on a collision course with prohibitionist drug policies that have the main effect of crushing the poor while making the wealthy few even wealthier.

The drug war is, indeed, a class war. And the political solution to it lies in embracing and supporting the struggle by the poor against the authoritarian, private sector special interests. Once that fight gains traction, as the hard evidence has demonstrated, the rest, regarding drug policy, works itself out, because that battle undermines the economic and public opinion conditions that serve as the foundation for submission to U.S.-imposed prohibitionist drug policies. Welcome, kind reader, to the new América… the América from below. The ideological map, too, has turned upside-down. The hour has arrived to adapt to the new American reality.