ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how US drug policy has evolved since the early years of the world antinarcotics movement. Recognition of the mutuality of the threat from drugs in the Western Hemisphere informed drug foreign policy since September 1989 when the Andean Strategy was announced. President George Bush, James A. Baker, and others in Washington concerned with drug policy realized at the least that the United States alone could not effectively control the international flow of illicit drugs. A drug policy bureaucracy that, in effect, set aside its own objectives in the name of security had lost a sense of proportion where drug control was concerned. The more that US drug officials equated their activities with security policy, the less relevant became one of the basic assumptions behind US drug control. Yet pressure from the United States to wage war against the cocaine barons, in the name of national security, has made more difficult the governing process.
