[LINK] Oliver stoned

[rfmcdonald]

Noel Maurer at The Power and the Money points out in his comments on statements made by Oliver Stone in the course of promoting his movie Savages about Mexico's drug economy, that whatever Stone's substantial accomplishment in the world of film the man is incapable of commenting with any degree of accuracy on the non-film world. This shouldn't come as a surprise after the 1991 film JFK, granted. Nevertheless.

Stone is right to point out that the mass incarceration of drug offenders is demonstrably inefficient and in many senses immoral, but his facts are incorrect. Drug offenders do not constitute 50 percent of the US prison system’s inmates, but just over 20 percent. There are certainly more effective and humane ways to deal with the issue than tossing these people behind bars, but the opponents of the largely mindless approach to drug policy that has dominated in the last 40 years only hurt their case by casually tossing out falsehoods.

The problem continues with Stone’s statement that flows of drug money in Mexico are larger than those from tourism, oil, or remittances. Estimates for the value of the Mexican drug trade are all over the map, but the most rigorous analyses have concluded that export revenue from the drug trade is far lower than Stone suggests. Alejandro Hope, for instance, places the figure somewhere between $4.7 to $8.1 billion, while the RAND Corporation estimates that Mexican traffickers earn roughly $6.6 billion per year from sending drugs to the US.

In contrast, remittances sent by Mexicans living abroad in 2011 amounted to $22.7 billion. Mexico’s tourist trade, notwithstanding the nation’s unfortunate image in the international press, still managed to generate $11.9 billion in 2010. Stone’s claim is even further from the mark with regard to oil: the revenues for Pemex, the national oil company, amounted to $125 billion in 2011.

Claims that the majority of the Mexican economy is tied up with the drug trade does multiple things, none of them good. "Stone’s comments fuel a dystopian narrative of Mexico that has done the nation a great disservice over the past few years. They also help feed a belief that Mexico’s criminals are invincible supermen, against whom capitulation is the only solution."