This Is Your Country On Drugs Part 6

"Breathe," she said. The shaking stopped, but whenever I didn't focus on submitting to the ayahuasca, it came back, sometimes gaining strength and moving not just my arms but my entire body. "Jesus," said Elizan. Next to us, Zito started shouting: "Yes!" He was dragged out, wailing incoherently.

In high school and college and shortly after, I'd probably eaten either acid or mushrooms more than fifty times, and some of the experiences had been out-of-this-world powerful. But nothing had prepared me for ayahuasca. I had never been so far from reality. I could get back to the ground, sort of, by finding Elizan. I tried to tell her that I was on another planet, but words were extremely hard to form. "I' m getting more," she said. As best I could, I begged her not to, wondering what would happen if both of us became this lost. She promised not to and got up anyway, but I didn't realize it until hours later.

In the meantime, I was having conversations with people I know. The talks were so real that I didn't even step outside of them to note how strange it was to be hallucinating an entire conversation. I just partic.i.p.ated. Mostly, the people lectured me about my life, telling me about obligations and consequences.

Then it got worse. I started to experience the things I'd been reading and writing about as a political reporter: I was in a firefight in Baghdad, explosions and dead bodies all around. I was swept away by Hurricane Katrina, then trapped in a baking attic as the festering water rose.

The suffering gave way to a conversation on power. I thought back to confrontations that I'd had with people at or near the top of the congressional and administrative ranks and the stories I'd written that had made life difficult for them. This is serious stuff, my unknown interlocutor told me. This is not a game. You' re playing with some of the most powerful people on the planet, and I promise, if you keep this up, they' ll crush you.

All trips lend themselves to melodrama, but for what seemed like an eternity, I felt as if I was being tortured by the power that I'd found myself reporting about, now unquestionably malevolent. Are you really up for this? Are you willing to be ground to pieces by the machine? No, I finally conceded, I' m not. I vowed to switch careers and move to the suburbs if I made it back to D.C., a promise I recanted immediately after the torture ended.

I saw colors and objects and serpentlike demons and prayed to G.o.d that there is actually no G.o.d and no heaven, because the thought of this experience lasting forever seemed unbearable. It was frightening to the bone. I would rather never have lived, I reasoned, than live a full, happy life followed by this in the afterlife. I prayed that when we die, we just die.

And, finally, I was down. I leaned over to Elizan and told her, "I think I've decided I like drugs that are fun."

I didn't have a bad trip. I had an ayahuasca journey-and they' re almost all bad. Elizan and I did feel phenomenal for several days afterward, though.

Charles Grob, a professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at UCLA's School of Medicine, speculates that the antidepressant effect of ayahuasca has to do with the way it relates to serotonin, a chemical crucial to our mood and state of mind. The typical antidepressant works by boosting serotonin, bombarding the brain with happiness. The bombardment can, however, make neural receptors less sensitive to normal levels of serotonin. Grob studied Unio do Vegetal members in Brazil and found that they have a greater sensitivity to lower amounts of serotonin because their nerve cells had created more receptors. In other words, ayahuasca users need less serotonin to be happy. "Ayahuasca is perhaps a far more sophisticated and effective way to treat depression" than Prozac and similar drugs, he concluded.

Despite its potential benefits, ayahuasca is something I haven't had the courage to do again. I have company in my reluctance to experience more psychotherapeutic terrors, including Ann Shulgin, who tried the brew at a ceremony hosted by a friend. "There were all kinds of lights and rattling and a train was barreling right at me. I was afraid for my life," she said. "I consider myself pretty experienced, but holding on and trying not to get hit by that train was not a pleasant experience. . . . A voice said, 'Don't come here again.' " Her husband, she said, had a different but equally bad experience. Sitting next to her, he nodded in agreement, raising his eyebrows to indicate the beating he took.

The next day, said Ann, her friends held another ceremony. Not to be rude, she and Sasha took part again, this time risking only half a dose. "And here came that train again. The voice said, 'Didn't you hear me last time?' I have not taken ayahuasca since, and I' m not going to."

Salvia offers a similar experience-but in a more manageable five- to fifteen-minute version. Search YouTube for "salvia," and you' ll quickly realize why this once obscure member of the mint family might well become the next banned drug in America. In thousands of clips, young people film themselves puffing salvia and then laughing uncontrollably or writhing on the ground in apparent agony. Users report out-of-body experiences and otherworldly hallucinations-not the kinds of things that are typically legal in the United States. The same medium that has spread the word about salvia-the Internet and, specifically, YouTube-will probably be the one that makes it illegal, as recently enlightened politicians inevitably call for a ban. Of course, the plant is exceedingly easy to grow and will likely prove exceedingly difficult to eradicate.

Unlike other hallucinogens, Salvia divinorum, as the plant is properly known, doesn't target serotonin, but rather neurotransmitters known as opioids. An understanding of how salvia works could give insight into how to treat disorders of mood, appet.i.te, and tissue healing, among others, and research toward those ends is now under way at a number of universities. The plant is one of several psychedelics traditionally used by the "Mazatec Indians for ritual divination and healing," according to the DEA.

Salvia's rise as a recreational drug has coincided not only with the shrinking of the LSD market, but also with the growth of the Internet. The plant was barely mentioned in the media before 2000. Then, in 2001, salvia became a blip on the nation's radar screen. A Nexis search turns up 35 mentions of Salvia divinorum that year. By 2005, it pops up 67 times. By 2007, 271.

Salvia extract can be purchased easily and legally online, and a single trip shouldn't cost more than five dollars or so. Head shops and some herbal-remedy establishments tend to carry it, as well, but it was by word of e-mail, blog posts, and Web videos that salvia use spread. Folks began taping themselves and their friends zoned out on the stuff and uploading the videos to YouTube. By the summer of 2008, a search for "salvia" on the site pulled up 3,830 videos, many with hundreds of thousands of views.

"T rippin on Salvia-First Timer-Soo Funny" (507,510 views) and "Crazy a.s.s Salvia Trip" (411,019) are typical of the genre. Young men-though there are plenty of women in the videos, too-smoke salvia extract and go nearly catatonic or laugh hysterically while their friends giggle around them. The user might roll around on the ground or otherwise appear to be having a nervous breakdown. One YouTube video, "Salvia Sandwich," attempts to prove that users wouldn't possibly be "dumb enough to drive a car when they can't even make a sandwich." The video shows a chubby, scruffy-looking guy pulling hits of salvia extract through a device labeled "h.e.l.l Bong."

"This right here is James," says his buddy. "James is going to do some salvia and then attempt to make a peanut b.u.t.ter and jelly sandwich." In front of James are two slices of bread, a knife, and jars of peanut b.u.t.ter and jelly. He stares helplessly at the objects as a friend a.s.sists by opening the jelly. A little more than two minutes in, he drops the knife and leans back on the couch. It's clear that the sandwich will have to wait.

"This is probably the most awful example possible, and may appear to be a reason to schedule this drug," explains the narrator. "I digress, though, and point out that salvia's effects last between five to twenty minutes, depending on the potency, and the hallucinogenic effects are not harmful. Though it's used by idiots today, Salvia divinorum is a shamanistic drug, and has never been the cause of suicide. For longer than a thousand years, people have been smoking and drinking salvia. Then one kid, having had contact with it at some point in his life, kills himself-while taking other medication proven to lead to depression and suicide. Media f.u.c.king frenzy."

That's essentially true. In early 2006, Delaware teenager Brett Chidester committed suicide. His family found an essay in which he wrote that salvia showed him that "earthly humans are nothing" and that "existence in general is pointless." The essay came to be understood by lawmakers and the media as a suicide note-even though Chidester wrote a real note, which his mother hasn't made public. Salvia divinorum was eventually listed by the chief state medical examiner as a contributing cause to Chidester's death-never mind that most users so thoroughly lose control of their bodies for the few minutes of the experience that successfully completing a suicide attempt would be close to impossible.

Still, Delaware pa.s.sed "Brett's Law" in the spring of 2006, banning salvia and attracting national attention. As early as 2002, Representative Joe Baca, a Democrat who represents Pickard's San Bernardino Valley, had introduced a bill to place salvia and its active ingredient, salvinorin A, into Schedule I, meaning that they would become completely illegal, with no legitimate medical use. Researchers would need a difficult-to-obtain license to work with the drug. The bill died in subcommittee, but in December of that year, the DEA listed salvia among its "drugs and chemicals of concern," alongside such unscheduled substances as anabolic steroids, the a.n.a.lgesic tramadol, and Southeast Asian coffee relative Mitragyna speciosa Korth, long used in that region for its psychoactive effects.

The DEA doesn't need congressional authority to move salvia into Schedule I. It can do so immediately with an "emergency scheduling." Rogene Waite, a spokeswoman for the agency, said that the administration is in the process of studying the plant to determine whether to ban it. "Our Office of Diversion Control is looking at the drug, and it would need to gather a significant amount of information before any decision could come forward," she said. "There would have to be an imminent hazard to public safety."

In April 2008, Nebraskan Kenneth Rau, a bottling-plant worker with an interest in herbalism, became the first person arrested for salvia, charged under a new state law with intent to distribute. Police found a stash he had purchased for thirty-two dollars on eBay. The local CBS 12 news story published about the bust appeared directly opposite Google ads for salvia-meaning that CBS itself was guilty of conspiracy to distribute. Rau, who said he had no idea that it was illegal, faced twenty years in prison but refused a plea agreement, vowing to fight the charge.

If the United States does schedule salvia, this nation would join at least nine other countries-Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Italy, Spain, and Sweden-in regulating it. In the meantime, state legislators are moving forward without the feds. In 2005, Louisiana banned the purchase or sale of salvia; Missouri banned it the same year. Tennessee and Oklahoma followed Delaware's pa.s.sage of Brett's Law with their own legislation in 2006. Bills proposing regulatory controls have been introduced in more than a dozen states since, and bans are now in place in Florida, Illinois, Kansas, North Dakota, and Virginia. In July 2008, Florida state representative Mary Brandenburg told U.S. News & World Report that "YouTube seems to have been an influence" on the spread of salvia use. "I guess if you' re foolish, then you might think the videos of people high and doing stupid things is cool."

Of course, old-media coverage has probably helped increase the number of salvia users, too. In its June 2007 issue, GQ ran a feature story on salvia. "Have you tried the new hallucinogen? It's stronger than LSD and it's legal (for now)," advertised the cover. Author Christopher Ketcham wrote:I at first felt nothing and was waiting for the thwack of the drug, pulling bedcovers over my head, when I heard a groan-Dios-and looked up and saw [my guide and translator] Jonas had stripped naked and wrapped himself in sheets of yellowed cotton. Then he crashed to the floor and against the bathroom door and rolled across the room, chirping and clicking, and I thought this was hilarious and went into a fit, until I abruptly remembered the warning of the shaman, who said that the madness of the abuser begins with a foolish laugh. So I shook it off and stood up and went to make sure Jonas was all right. I had come down to the Sierra Mazateca, in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, for an experiment: to see what happens when fatheaded Americans get their hands on a sacred consciousness-altering plant and abuse it.

Ketcham calls salvia "perhaps the most powerful naturally occurring hallucinogen known to man-approaching the potency of the epically powerful lysergic acid diethylamide. Fittingly, the kids in the States had dubbed it the ' legal acid' and smoked it in bongs, chattering about the high afterward on their laptops, how they left their bodies and traveled in time or saw the future or spoke with demons." He also points out how the Internet has taken salvia global, beyond Mexico to "Denmark, Germany, France, Britain, Australia."

Maine state representative Chris Barstow, who auth.o.r.ed a bill to restrict salvia in late 2006, has been complimentary of the piece. "I thought it was a very good article and very timely. I shared it with advocates of my ban," he told me. In committee, Barstow's bill, now law, was amended to prohibit use only among those under eighteen. Adults can still use salvia legally in the state. Barstow claimed that he introduced his legislation to correct the hypocrisy he sees in a federal system that bans marijuana but doesn't regulate salvia, a much more powerful drug. "If you are going to keep salvia legal, we need to examine whether marijuana should be illegal," he said.

Ketcham told me that he knew the piece would provoke some kind of governmental reaction. "Whenever the media reports effectively and honestly, it ultimately leads to the backlash and prohibition," he said. "I knew this was only going to contribute to the hysteria of the dimwits running our country. It may be that our society is not destined to be mature enough to be able to handle a drug like salvia."

Following the GQ story, WJLA, a local news outlet affiliated with Politico, the online publication that I write for, ran an investigation into salvia. The piece's producers asked if I'd be willing to trip on camera. I declined, so they anch.o.r.ed the story to YouTube clips instead.

CHAPTER 10.

Blowback.

The uprising began slowly, with a several-mile march from El Alto to La Paz. It had taken thousands of cocaleros, campesinos, miners, and other protesters about a week to hike to La Paz. The miners had brought their dynamite, which they tossed here and there throughout the day. Occasionally, a bomb of serious weight rocked the city.

I had come to Bolivia to discover the impact on the country of the coca trade and American efforts against it, and I had arrived just as tensions were rising. The specific issue that had galvanized these marchers was control of the country's natural-gas resources. But it was Evo Morales, then the head of a cocalero union, who led the march. Without him and the coca growers, the protest would likely have been nothing more than a marginal demonstration leading to a few speeches and a natural-gas law written by oil companies.

An Aymara, the charismatic Morales is revered among the Indians who make up more than half of Bolivia's population. He's a leftist of the purest man-of-the-people stripe, a coca grower who, like many of his followers, grew up in poverty and imagines a future in which Bolivia's native resources-natural gas, oil, and, yes, coca-will benefit native Bolivians at least as much as they do foreigners. "Since coca is a victim of the United States, as coca growers we are also victims of the United States," Morales told the Observer in 2003, "but then we rise up to question these policies to eradicate coca. Now is the moment to see the defence of coca as the defence of all natural resources."

The day after protesters arrived in La Paz, I accompanied about two thousand Aymara on a smaller march. Along the way, they methodically smashed the windows of stores and cars, often with the pa.s.sengers still inside. "Cabron! [a.s.shole]" shouted one minibus driver as gla.s.s poured over his riders.

The march ended in a standoff with police a block away from the presidential palace. I was with a group of four journalists when a miner tossed what looked to be a stick of dynamite at us. It exploded a foot behind me. The force rocked me forward, but it was all air-just a blasting cap.

Bottles started to fly, followed by rocks. The police raised their riot shields and held their ground. Then another explosive was tossed at the feet of three soldiers, who blocked its effects with their shields. Then they raised their guns, and we ran up the hilly streets to safety, no easy task at 13,000 feet above sea level. I saw tear-gas canisters fly by, but soon there was little visibility. I could hear the hiss of gas as it filled the street. A rubber bullet hit me in the back.

A block away, the police fired tear gas again. There was more running. I snapped a picture of a crowd coming toward me, turned, and was punched hard in the back. I pretended it didn't happen and kept my pace. Surrounded by angry Indians and painfully aware of my whiteness, I ducked down an alley and there managed to avoid any more random blows.

Within a few blocks I became separated from Christian Parenti, a journalist friend with whom I was traveling. I stumbled blindly through the streets.

"Ryan?" said a voice through the haze. "Ryan, are you okay?"

" Lucia?"

"Si. Ven conmigo!" The voice belonged to the secretary of a man Christian and I had met earlier in the day, Senator Antonio Peredo. A leader in Morales's party, he's the younger brother of Inti and Coco Peredo, who with Che Guevara hoped to spark a socialist revolution in Bolivia in the sixties. The CIA chased them around the jungle, ultimately catching and killing Guevara. "I was too young too join them," Antonio had told us in his office, which was decorated with no fewer than three portraits of Che.

Lucia took me to her apartment, where she gave me a cigarette-the first I'd had in thirteen years. On the news the night before, I'd seen a public-service announcement reminding Bolivians that cigarettes waved before the face are the best remedy for tear gas. My eyes and lungs quickly cleared up.

I headed back into the streets and managed to meet up with Christian. In Plaza San Francisco, La Paz's main square, a protester shouted at us: "Gringos se culpa! Gringos se culpa!"

"Si, si, we' re guilty," Christian said, not quieting the man down. A police officer-one in a line of ten-walked our way. The protester turned to the cop and launched a brick-sized rock at him, hitting him in his face mask. The cops raised their weapons, and I heard myself yelling at them not to shoot. A second later, I realized that I wouldn't be able to reason with them. As Christian dove to the ground, I turned and ran as well as I could. The spent tear-gas canisters I'd been collecting weighed me down, and I felt a little absurd securing them in my pocket while fresh ones were flying around us.

A canister rocketed by my left arm, its trail spreading slowly around us. I ducked behind a wall and peered over. All around me, Indian men and women were stoically gushing tears and pa.s.sing a cigarette back and forth. Those who tried to run had canisters and rubber bullets fired their way.

La Paz was designed in the 1500s to withstand attacks from outside, and there are only a few ways to get in. There are also, much to the chagrin of some former heads of state, very few ways to get out. Several thousand protesters can slow the city significantly; tens of thousands, as there were in the spring of 2005, can bring it to its knees.

After vowing not to resign, President Carlos Mesa stepped down on June 6. A few days later, Bolivian legislators took flight from the besieged capital to select a new president in Sucre, nearly five hundred miles to the southeast. But demonstrators had other ideas. Blockades were lifted so that truckloads of protesters could race to Sucre to prevent parliament from naming right-wing senate leader Hormando Vaca Diez, Washington's friend in La Paz, as the successor to Mesa. The mayors of El Alto and La Paz announced hunger strikes to oppose Vaca Diez, who, a poll revealed, was supported by only 16 percent of Bolivians.

Parliament's morning session was canceled as miners, coca growers, and other protesters battled police in Sucre's streets. According to news reports, several legislators urged the cancellation of the session so that they could fly out of Sucre before demonstrators took over the airport. They didn't move quickly enough. In protest of Vaca Diez, airport workers went on strike. Now stuck in Sucre, parliament met again around midnight, and then gave in. Vaca Diez resigned his const.i.tutional right to ascend to the presidency, as did the next in line, Marlo Cossio. At 11:47 p.m. on June 10, the man whom protesters had been demanding as a caretaker president, Supreme Court leader Eduardo Rodriguez, was sworn in, with elections scheduled for several months later.

Protest leader Morales swept the elections, becoming president on January 22, 2006, and quickly aligning himself with Washington enemies Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro, and the Sandinista Daniel Ortega. He'd carried a coca plant through crowds of supporters on his way to vote, and he soon went on an international tour to promote the crop. Before the United Nations General a.s.sembly, he called coca criminalization a "historical injustice." "The coca leaf is symbolic of Andean culture, of the Andean environment, and of the hopes of peoples," he argued. "It is not acceptable that the coca leaf be legal for Coca-Cola and illegal for medicinal consumption not only in our country but throughout the world."

Morales wasn't calling for the worldwide legalization of cocaine, but in the eyes of some American drug warriors, he might as well have been. Morales is probably overstating it to call himself "America's worst nightmare." But he does present a significant challenge to the U.S. government's long-held policy of overseas eradication, and to the notion that America's drug problem is the world's drug problem. When our moral resources, as President Richard M. Nixon described them, collide with someone else's natural resources, we can have a very different kind of problem. In September 2008, Morales kicked the Drug Enforcement Administration out of the Chapare, and Bolivia joined Venezuela and Myanmar on a short U.S. list of countries that refuse to cooperate with the drug war.

The idea that the Mafia or some other underworld syndicate is in glamorous command of the world drug market is held not just by the HBO-watching public and the media, but also by law enforcement and the federal government. If only a big enough kingpin could be brought down, they all a.s.sume, the whole intricate structure would topple.

The truth is much less romantic. The international drug trade, involving countless users, producers, distributors, agents, and middlemen, is, after all, merely a marketplace. It's moved, above all, by economic realities, not by the whim of cartel leaders-or, conversely, by the will of federal governments. To the great benefit of drug producers-and the great detriment of drug warriors-the market as a whole is extremely resilient and extremely flexible. Interdiction is invariably met with innovation, whether it's consumers shifting to a new high or producers shifting to a new precursor. The people most affected by interdiction are those who profit least from the drug trade-those who, like Morales's cocaleros, are as much raw materials of the drug trade as their crops are.

In the Chapare province of Bolivia, where coca has been grown for centuries, Christian and I met a woman who had been shot in the back while running toward her coca field to protect it from eradication. Several years later, she was still growing-our jeep was forced off the road to drive around her drying crop. For the small farmers who produce the raw materials for much of the world's drug supply, violence is less of a threat than poverty. The woman's husband, who stood outside their splintering, dirt-floored shack, didn't seem very political. He's a member of Morales's party because he, like a U.S. autoworker, is required to be. But he doesn't often attend meetings. What does he think of the natural-gas issue? "I cook with wood," he said in Spanish. "Why would I care about gas?"

Naturally, some of the princ.i.p.al risks a.s.sociated with an illegal enterprise are that the owner or his employees can be shot, arrested, jailed, have their a.s.sets seized, or experience some other interference from law enforcement. The greater the size of an operation, the higher the risk, and therefore the more expensive the enterprise, because that risk must be accounted for. Employees must be paid commensurate with their risk, otherwise they might take an equally well-paying job in a less perilous trade-if such a job is available.

In Bolivia in the mid-nineties, growing fruit netted a small farmer several hundred dollars less per acre than growing coca. At the time, about 10 percent of the country's work force was involved in the drug trade in some way, with more than 6 percent of the gross domestic product resulting from cocaine trafficking. Today, some of that business has shifted to Peru and Colombia, but coca remains the backbone of the peasant economy.

The seeds of Morales's leftist uprising were sown a few years before. In 1988, in response to long-standing U.S. disapproval of local coca cultivation, the Bolivian government put a cap on the amount of the plant that could be grown legally, vowing to wipe out the illegal portion of the crop. In 1997, President Hugo Banzer developed a national plan for crop destruction-Plan Dignidad, or the "Dignity Plan."

Washington contributed hundreds of millions of dollars to the effort, which succeeded not only in reducing the number of coca plants grown in Bolivia, but also in lowering the already low standard of living among the country's peasant farmers. An $800 million attempt to introduce alternative crops such as pineapple, animal feed, and tea faltered along with the Bolivian economy. Prices for those alternatives were simply too low for growers to bother, thanks in part to U.S. subsidization of domestic farmers.

The food-price spikes that began in 2008 could alter the calculus, however: prices more than tripled that year in Afghanistan, causing some farmers there to switch from poppies to wheat.

Risk is the reason the drug market is decentralized. The bigger an operation, the greater the need for expensive cautionary measures such as payoffs to law-enforcement officials and politicians. Trafficking high volumes is also risky, because one seizure can result in losses large enough to threaten the viability of the entire organization. Witness the enormous seizures of cocaine in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean in 2007, which were likely the result of tips to law enforcement from warring cartels. If the entire U.S. cocaine import in a given year is around 500 metric tons, then the one-time loss of more than 20 metric tons means a significant drop in someone's revenue.

Prohibition also puts pressure on a company's cash flow and access to credit. Because banks can't be used with impunity by illegitimate businesses, employees and agents must be trusted to carry large amounts of cash-and, of course, to skim some off the top. And larger amounts of cash are proportionally more difficult to transport. In the spring of 2007, Mexico seized more than $200 million in one raid. That's a ma.s.sive loss even to a legitimate multinational corporation. The legitimacy of a drug operation's cash is an issue, too. Money laundering is a service: clients pay a fee to make dirty money clean. Above-board corporations get quite different economic treatment, with banks and other investment agencies paying for the privilege of holding the company's money.

More important, perhaps, is that it's tough for an illegal enterprise to get a loan. Certainly there are lenders out there-most of them illegal themselves-willing to take a risk on a bookie or a drug producer or distributor. But their increased risk is accounted for in the borrower's paying higher interest rates than a business with auditable books could expect from a bank-and for smaller amounts of capital, too. And a cartel can't go public with shares of its business to raise fresh funds. Without access to credit and capital markets, an organization must grow by reinvesting its profits. That's not impossible in a lucrative industry, but it's a relatively slow road to riches.

When a distributor can break out of the credit trap, the results can be dramatic. In the early eighties, the suppliers of California trafficker Ricky Ross-known as "Freeway Rick"-began to provide him with a line of credit in the form of product that was delivered up front but paid for only when sold. Partly thanks to that advantage, Ross was able to spread his crack-cocaine operation throughout Los Angeles and then across the country. It's not surprising that his suppliers could afford to give him such a valuable benefit: They were representatives of the Contras, a right-wing insurgent group created and armed by the United States to battle leftists in Central America. The protection they received from the CIA-as well as the use of airplanes and landing s.p.a.ce-enabled them to greatly cut their operating costs.

University of Maryland professor Peter Reuter notes that prohibition makes illegal businesses difficult to sell, which would limit growth to the life of the owner. In theory, a business could be taken over by a relative-or by force-and continue apace, as long as the new owner knew what he was doing. But because employee loyalty is often to the owner himself-say, Pablo Escobar-rather than to the firm, the new boss might have some trouble keeping things together.

Escobar suggests what at first seems to be a counterargument, if the man's operation was even a fraction the size of legend. In 1989, Forbes listed history's favorite narco-trafficker as one of the world's ten richest people. Major Mexican cartels, too, don't seem to find it hard to grow a business. Just two days after that $200 million seizure in Mexico, the U.S. Coast Guard intercepted a ship carrying 43,000 pounds of c.o.ke, which was visible in an aerial photo of the Panamanian-flagged vessel. The DEA estimated the seizure was worth $300 million. Somebody's doing some business on a large scale-although it's clearly not Bolivian coca growers.

Rather than refute Reuter's theory, such spectacular examples support his notion that legal risk is the greatest limiter of firm size. In Colombia and Mexico, where the governments are exceptionally corrupt and a major dealer has only a small chance of getting busted, the market can be taken over by a few strong players. The bigger an operation in a corrupt country, the less likely it is to be busted because of its political power. Smaller firms are more likely to be taken down, both as a favor to the larger cartels and as a sign to Washington that the country is serious about pursuing the drug war.

Profit margins are so high in the drug trade that producers can lose large portions of their product and remain in the black. The British government has estimated that, at best, 20 percent of the world drug supply is seized, whereas somewhere around 80 percent of it would have to be nabbed for the business to become unprofitable. Even under the best of circ.u.mstances for law enforcement, that's just not going to happen. Government agents might as well be looking for a bale of cocaine on a snow-covered mountain. The high value of drug imports belies their relatively small size-something around 15 tons for heroin and 400 to 500 for cocaine, which is vanishingly puny compared to overall American imports.

Prohibition helps create the very conditions that make prohibition ineffective. Attempts to disrupt the drug supply face all kinds of problems because that supply is the product of a decentralized market. The easiest market players to go after domestically are small-time dealers, and the easiest on the world stage are small-time farmers. In both cases, those who bear the brunt of the penalties are the lowest-level personnel in an operation.

In the United States, mandatory-minimum sentences implemented in the eighties, under which someone caught with 5 grams of crack must face the same prison term as someone busted with 500 grams of powder cocaine, have all but a.s.sured that most of those locked up are easily replaceable cogs. Gauging the level of a person's involvement in an enterprise based on the quant.i.ty of drugs he or she is carrying makes about as much sense as a.s.suming that the driver of an armored car is the CEO of the bank, anyway. Lock up the driver, and the bank will find another one for the same price.

Lewis Rice Jr., special agent in charge of the DEA's New York Field Division, told Congress roughly the same thing when he testified on Ecstasy enforcement in June 2000. It cost a smuggling organization in the Netherlands, he said, $200 per trip to recruit somebody to be a courier of between 30,000 and 45,000 pills. When the United States caught one, the five-year mandatory minimum sentence for drug possession would apply. So the state would sh.e.l.l out at least $100,000 to imprison this p.a.w.n, while it cost the dealer $200 to find a new one. Extrapolate this disparity across the spectrum of the drug war, and we begin to see how relatively small players are able to confound the multibillion-dollar efforts of the world's only superpower.

As the United States has intensified its drug war abroad over the past two decades, overseas casualties, too, have come disproportionately among the small-time.

The typical Bolivian cocalero grows a relatively tiny crop of coca. Throughout the fifties and up through the eighties, left-wing organizations were organizing these and other Bolivian peasants, often with the aid of the Soviet Union. Among them were miners who worked extracting the nation's rich tin deposits, an activity that once accounted for 40 percent of Bolivian exports but became dramatically unprofitable as the price of the metal tumbled on the world market in the mid-eighties. In 1985, under the guidance of Senate president Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, Bolivia became a testing ground for a "shock therapy" cure of its various economic ills, including a ma.s.sive national debt and 24,000 percent hyperinflation. State subsidies were discontinued; industries were privatized. Inflation was indeed halted, but thousands lost their jobs in the process.

As the unemployed flooded into the Chapare in search of land to grow coca-for many, the only moneymaking option available-the United States launched its Bolivian drug war, funding the military unit Unidad Movil de Patrullaje Rural ("Mobile Rural Patrol Unit"), or UMOPAR, which was tasked with the destruction of illegal coca crops. Morales and the cocalero unions organized to defend themselves against the onslaught. At the time, both left-wing insurgents and right-wing paramilitaries were involved in the Latin American drug trade. Given that the latter were protected by the CIA, that agency's mission tended to collide with that of the DEA. In 1982, the Reagan White House issued an order that the CIA was not required to disclose to the DEA when it was working with a suspected drug-smuggling operation.

But the DEA has had a tougher fight against the forces of economics. Take the agency's one major success: the spraying of ma.s.sive Mexican poppy fields with pesticides greatly reduced the flow of opium and heroin into the United States in the mid-seventies. But American demand for those drugs was then met by Afghanistan and Southeast Asia, and the Mexican growers adapted by moving to smaller, better hidden locations. Within about five years, their country was once again a major supplier. The Afghan and Southeast Asian crops were both encouraged by the CIA, which was happy to see its bands of local anti-Communist warriors with a steady stream of income. The Afghan crop initially supported the U.S.-backed mujahideen, who battled the Soviet Union. Today, it still supports an insurgency against an occupier, only this time that occupier is the United States. Once again, eradication is the favored policy.

Wiping out any crop is nearly impossible, even under the best of circ.u.mstances, and on an international scale, it's fraught with political difficulty. The small farmer struggling to feed his family can plainly see that were it not for American demand for his harvest, he'd have no reason to be in the business. Resistance to eradication in Afghanistan is fierce, and the Taliban uses it as its strongest political tool: Uncle Sam wants to destroy your crops, it correctly warns poppy farmers. We' ll protect you and your livelihood. The cost of that protection is political allegiance and a stiff tax, which the Taliban uses to wage its insurgent effort.

Attempts to take out coca in South America have faced similar intransigence. The DEA managed in the early part of this century to reduce the number of acres of the plant grown in Bolivia and Peru, but the crop just shifted to Colombia-and Bolivia elected a coca-grower president. When the U.S. and Colombian governments sprayed coca fields in Colombia, growers moved their operations to national forests, where spraying isn't allowed. Still, acreage known to be under coca cultivation has declined by about a third in South America since 2000. But the decline hasn't been accompanied by any significant disruption in production, according to the 2007 World Drug Report produced by the United Nations. This is largely due to another adaptation to U.S. policy: producers' increasing the yield of the coca plant.

Despite the high price the United States pays politically, eradication does essentially nothing to stop the flow of drugs into America. The cost of coca or poppies is a negligible fraction of the final price of cocaine or heroin, so drug producers are willing to pay farmers relatively well to compensate for the risk of growing. It costs about $300 to buy the coca leaf needed to make a kilo of c.o.ke, which retails for more than $100,000 in the United States. Doubling or tripling a farmer's pay won't have much impact on either the producer's bottom line or the farmer's quality of life-but it will encourage the planting of more coca.

The Bolivian example highlights the political hurdles the United States faces when attempting to destroy a drug crop. While Christian and I were in the Chapare, we had an interview with two regional mayors. Both were members of Morales's party, Movimiento al Socialismo ("Movement toward Socialism"), or MAS. In response to a question about the consequences of the war on drugs, the mayor of Villa Tunari, Feliciano Mamani, lifted his pant leg, revealing a star-shaped scar on his shin. He was. .h.i.t by a tear -gas canister during a 2000 demonstration. It is a human-rights violation to fire canisters directly at people rather than bouncing them off the ground. My experience in La Paz and the wound on Mamani's leg indicated that that rule wasn't a high priority for Bolivian soldiers.

"It just stopped p.u.s.s.ing a few weeks ago," he said in Spanish. Though the 2000 protest had been over water rights, it is instructive that Mamani first and foremost blamed the American drug war. American power in Bolivia was seen to be behind every effort to control the countryside. That suspicion was not without merit, given that the United States had funded and trained the Bolivian military and propped up several American-educated presidents. The American government also cut monthly checks to Bolivian judges and prosecutors, payments laughably known as "anticorruption bonuses."

Mamani and Shinahota mayor Rimer Agreda, both cocaleros, came up through the MAS party ranks during the eighties and nineties. "The war made the American government's intentions clear to the people of Chapare," said Mamani. "Behind the war on drugs there are other interests. Interests in natural resources, and in dismantling the [MAS] unions in the Chapare." Agreda added, "There was a reaction of the people, and they decided to oppose this until they reached their goal." The calculus is quite simple: Coca is what allows the people of the Chapare to survive; therefore, an attack on coca is an attack on the people.

Jaimie Rojas, a seventy-four-year-old newspaper vendor and college student in Villa Tunari, had been in the Chapare longer than almost anyone else. He arrived as one of the early settlers in the fifties, and he'd known Morales and the other MAS leaders since they were in their early twenties. I asked him when he noticed Morales's leadership skills. "When UMOPAR came to Chapare and Evo spoke out against it," he said. "He was able to unite the people and have them all turn back UMOPAR."

I spoke with Evo himself at the Cochabamba airport-just before warily boarding a small plane with the leftist leader-and asked him if the U.S. drug war had contributed to his rise to power. "In the beginning, yes, but now we are much bigger," he said in Spanish. Through a translator, he added that coca eradication and U.S. imperialism, which are one and the same thing as far as he 's concerned, are so unpopular that they allowed his union to form and his movement to grow. He stressed that his supporters now encompa.s.sed more than just coca producers, an a.s.sertion that would be proved correct several months later, when he captured almost 54 percent of the vote, beating the Washington-backed candidate in a 25-point landslide.

It's one thing for MAS leaders to believe that they came to power because a majority of Bolivians oppose the U.S. war on drugs. But even those charged with fighting the war say the same thing.

Christian and I visited a military base in Chimore to take a DEA-SPONSORED helicopter ride and meet with the base commander, but he was nowhere to be found. Bolivian soldiers played a lively game of soccer while we were distracted with a tour of the base's p.i.s.s-stained prison and the DEA's c.o.ke museum. Afterward, Christian pulled out his bag of coca leaf, which he had bought in La Paz and we'd been chewing steadily. Combined with a touch of baking soda, which almost all Bolivians carry around in a small vial, coca leaf gives a caffeine-like buzz and numbs the mouth and stomach. Personal possession of the plant is legal under Bolivian law, which makes the U.S. effort to uproot it that much more difficult. It's often chewed by UMOPAR soldiers while they' re doing their eradication.

Christian offered me some. The soldier minding us got a shocked look on his face. "Desde La Paz?" he asked, pointing to the bag.

"Si."

The soldier smiled: La Paz coca is supposed to taste better than the Chapare variety, which it was his charge to destroy.

" Por favor?"

Christian nodded, and the soldier stuffed a handful in his mouth, then stashed another in his canteen bag. "Quita el hambre," he said. "It takes away the hunger."

His mouth numbed by coca, the soldier warmed up to us. He told us he wasn't unhappy in his job. He was poorly educated, he said, so his lot could have been worse. He's paid roughly $130 a month by the Bolivian government and a little extra by the United States. Plus, he admitted with a smile, he likes the uniform.

After a long silence, he asked us in Spanish why it was that we were allowed to come to his country and tour the military bases, but he couldn't get a visa to visit our country. "It's called imperialism," Christian said in English, a statement no one translated.

While still waiting for the base commander, we were taken in to see the subcommander. Before we asked a question, he told us how committed he is to derechos humanos, "human rights." UMOPAR has had a history of corruption and human-rights abuses, just like almost every effort that relies on the poor to staff a unit dealing with large amounts of cash, funded by a foreign government, and opposed by the local people. The operation is similar in style and substance to many others around the globe, and its transgressions have included disappearances, political a.s.sa.s.sination, seizure of land, and other methods of terrorizing the local populace.

The subcommander is so committed to human rights, he said, that he recently took a course on them with the Ministry of Justice. To prove it, he handed us a certificate: "Major Fernando Plato has successfully completed the course Human Rights and s.e.xually Transmitted Diseases."

" What does that mean?" Christian whispered to me. "They teach them to wear condoms when they' re raping detainees?"

Plato told us that the human-rights abuses a.s.sociated with the antidrug campaign of the eighties and nineties sparked fierce resistance among the people of the region, which MAS channeled to build its organization.

As Plato filibustered, it looked less and less like we'd be getting a helicopter ride. We were brought bread and three-liter bottles of c.o.ke and, finally, Colonel Dario Leigue. He's sorry, we were told, but he can't meet with us without the permission of the commander-in-chief, Admiral Luis Aranda, who was in a meeting. Seeing our skepticism, Leigue told us to call his commander ourselves. He gave us a cell number, but the admiral didn't answer. (A few weeks later, he was in the news denying that he was plotting a coup. I called him up again, but he didn't answer then, either.) At the checkpoint outside the base, a woman was selling coca. "Prohibido Orinar," said a sign on a crumbling wall behind her. "No urinating."