Carded for Buying Bleach…The War on Drugs at Work

I was in line at the grocery store yesterday, stocking up on canned peaches and plain yogurt, when I saw it coming. The woman standing in line just in front of me had run into some snag at the cash register and when I looked down at her purchases I knew right way what the matter was.

She was seeking to commit one of those most suspicious of acts under the US War on Drugs. She was trying to buy a bottle of bleach. You know, like Clorox (but not actually Clorox).

Bleach you see, that fine chemical the smell of which reminds us of over-chlorinated high school swimming pools, is what is called in the Drug War trade, “a precursor”. In this case US anti-drug officials do not mean a precursor to, say, sparkly white socks. It is one of the chemical ingredients (kerosene, FYI, is another) used to transform the simple green coca leaf into coca paste and cocaine. So now you know why cocaine is white. It’s the Clorox.

In Bolivia, under the US financed and supervised War on Drugs, if you want to buy bleach you have to present a state identification card and sign a special register which is kept by the store’s manager. Now, to put this into perspective. When my son was 11 and it would be a hot day and I decided in my backyard that a cold beer might be nice, I could send him to the store to buy me one. The only rule covering that transaction was that he could use the change back to buy himself a coke.

This is a country with no rules. You can jam ten people in a Toyota station wagon. No one has heard of seatbelts. Hell, you an even block the nation’s major roads and get away with it. But do not try to buy bleach at a large grocery store. Nope, they need to register everyone who does that. Of course, if you go to the “cancha”, the large open-air marketplace where 90% of the city shops, you can buy bleach there both hassle free and perhaps cheaper.

This, my friends, is the war on drugs, which puts innocent people in jail for years (see this article I wrote years ago about one such case) in the name of ratcheting up arrest statistics to make the Embassy look good to Congress and the State Department. This is the war on drugs that thinks it will cut illegal drug production by making the young mother in front of me (the four year old, I am certain, was a drug trafficker in disguise) register her purchase of bleach.

It is all about looking like we have a War on Drugs. It is not about actually having a war on drugs. When I lived in California one f the campaigns that I help lead was to expand drug recovery programs for pregnant women. If we don’t have drug recovery services on demand for drug users in the US then we do not have a war on drugs.

And here is my favorite tale. The US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has a huge office here, in a vast old Bolivian mansion now hidden behind hideous black iron walls – Fort Gringo – guarded 24/7 by Bolivian police. Many times, if we are walking late at night, my wife and I pass by the entrance and give our greetings to the poor cop stuck with the overnight shift. To stay awake his mouth is jammed full of coca, something that many, many Bolivians do who work long hours. Narcotically speaking a mouthful of coca is a notch or two below a small-sized Starbucks cappuccino.

And there you have it. The US DEA headquarters, from which my government launches its War on Drugs, is kept safe at night by a policeman kept alert by a mouthful of coca.

Any more questions?