WASHINGTON NEWSPAPERS PRINT TWO IMPORTANT OPEDS PLEASE COPY AND DISTRIBUTE DrugSense FOCUS Alert #353 - Tuesday, 21 August 2007 Below are excerpts from the OPEDs printed Sunday and Monday. Unfortunately, with Congress in recess, your congresscritters may not see them -- unless you make an effort to get them copies and tell them you agree with the OPEDs and they should have the courage to act on their recommendations -- either in their district/state offices now, or in Washington when they return. Both are appropriate targets for your LTEs. It's not what others do; it's what YOU do. Pubdate: Sun, 19 Aug 2007 Source: Washington Post (DC) Page: B01 Copyright: 2007 The Washington Post Company Contact: Website: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/491 Author: Misha Glenny Note: Misha Glenny is a former BBC correspondent and the author of "McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Underworld," to be published next year. THE LOST WAR We've Spent 36 Years and Billions of Dollars Fighting It, but the Drug Trade Keeps Growing Poppies were the first thing that British army Capt. Leo Docherty noticed when he arrived in Afghanistan's turbulent Helmand province in April 2006. "They were growing right outside the gate of our Forward Operating Base," he told me. Within two weeks of his deployment to the remote town of Sangin, he realized that "poppy is the economic mainstay and everyone is involved right up to the higher echelons of the local government." [snip] Thirty-six years and hundreds of billions of dollars after President Richard M. Nixon launched the war on drugs, consumers worldwide are taking more narcotics and criminals are making fatter profits than ever before. The syndicates that control narcotics production and distribution reap the profits from an annual turnover of $400 billion to $500 billion. And terrorist organizations such as the Taliban are using this money to expand their operations and buy ever more sophisticated weapons, threatening Western security. [snip] The trade in illegal narcotics begets violence, poverty and tragedy. And wherever I went around the world, gangsters, cops, victims, academics and politicians delivered the same message: The war on drugs is the underlying cause of the misery. Everywhere, that is, except Washington, where a powerful bipartisan consensus has turned the issue into a political third rail. The problem starts with prohibition, the basis of the war on drugs. The theory is that if you hurt the producers and consumers of drugs badly enough, they'll stop doing what they're doing. But instead, the trade goes underground, which means that the state's only contact with it is through law enforcement, i.e. busting those involved, whether producers, distributors or users. So vast is the demand for drugs in the United States, the European Union and the Far East that nobody has anything approaching the ability to police the trade. Prohibition gives narcotics huge added value as a commodity. Once traffickers get around the business risks -- getting busted or being shot by competitors -- they stand to make vast profits. A confidential strategy report prepared in 2005 for British Prime Minister Tony Blair's cabinet and later leaked to the media offered one of the most damning indictments of the efficacy of the drug war. Law enforcement agencies seize less than 20 percent of the 700 tons of cocaine and 550 tons of heroin produced annually. According to the report, they would have to seize 60 to 80 percent to make the industry unprofitable for the traffickers. [snip] According to the Government Accountability Office, 70 percent of the money allotted to Plan Colombia never leaves the United States. It is used to buy U.S.-built helicopters and other weapons for the military, and a large chunk is paid to the security firm DynCorp. Britain and other E.U. countries have so far resisted spraying Afghan poppy fields with chemicals. But for several years, DynCorp has been spraying the herbicide glyphosate on thousands of acres of coca in Colombia. [snip] And now the U.S. government wants to repeat this "success" in Mexico. There's talk in Washington about a $1 billion aid package for the government of President Felipe Calderon to back his own war against drugs. And in Mexico, it's definitely a war: Calderon has mobilized the army to fight traffickers. In the first half of this year, more than 1,000 people were gunned down by rival drug cartels. Among the dead were newspaper reporters, narcotics police investigators, judges and politicians. [snip] An avalanche of B.C. Bud rolls southward into the United States every day, dodging U.S. customs in myriad imaginative ways. But as the Hells Angels and other syndicates get stronger and their control over the port of Vancouver tightens, the ability of U.S. and Canadian authorities to monitor the border becomes ever weaker. Could anything replace the war on drugs? There's no easy answer. In May, the Senlis Council, a group that works on the opium issue in Afghanistan, argued that "current counter-narcotics policies . . . have focused on poppy eradication, without providing farmers with viable alternatives." Instead of eradication, the council, which is made up of senior politicians and law enforcement officials from Canada and Europe, concludes that Afghan farmers should be permitted to grow opium that can then be refined and distributed for medical purposes. (That's not going to happen, as the United States has recently reiterated its commitment to poppy eradication.) Others argue that the only way to minimize the criminality and social distress that drugs cause is to legalize narcotics so that the state may exert proper control over the industry. It needs to be taxed and controlled, they insist. In Washington, the war on drugs has been a third-rail issue since its inauguration. It's obvious why -- telling people that their kids can do drugs is the kiss of death at the ballot box. But that was before 9/11. Now the drug war is undermining Western security throughout the world. In one particularly revealing conversation, a senior official at the British Foreign Office told me, "I often think we will look back at the War on Drugs in a hundred years' time and tell the tale of 'The Emperor's New Clothes.' This is so stupid." How right he is. Continues: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v07/n969/a02.html Pubdate: Mon, 20 Aug 2007 Source: Washington Times (DC) Copyright: 2007 News World Communications, Inc. Contact: Website: http://www.washingtontimes.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/492 Author: Arnold Trebach Note: Arnold Trebach is a professor emeritus at American University. Referenced: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v07/n959/a01.html FATAL ALLIANCE A recent article in The Washington Times by Sara A. Carter show the frightening importance of the alliance between Arabic terrorists and Mexican drug cartels. It documents how well known this dangerous situation has been for several years, for which no effective action had been taken by the Department of Homeland Security or local officials. [snip] In the longer run, our government must start taking even more courageous actions that account for the dynamics underlying this lethal alliance. That alliance is based on the fact that American drug laws and strategies have managed the majestic alchemy of converting relatively worthless plants into substances often worth more, ounce for ounce, than gold and diamonds. If we assume that the Arabs are jihadists planning to harm this country, then it follows that they have no interest in the drugs but rather in the great treasure to be made and the access to our cities and nuclear plants to be gained by associating with the Mexican gangs. [snip] In my latest book, "Fatal Distraction," I went over all the evidence that proved the war on drugs was indeed a fatal distraction. By that I meant that the drug war has never worked and now diverts limited resources from combating more deadly menaces -- bombs, not bongs. Today, in the Drug Enforcement Administration alone, a total of 10,891 federal officials are employed to save us all from drugs -- usually marijuana -- at an annual cost of $2.5 billion. [snip] Of course, Congress and the president must soon demonstrate the political courage to repeal the drug laws, dismantle the expensive drug-control bureaucracy and create a new legal system to control the formerly illegal drugs. That's no small task, but stopping another September 11 demands guts and imagination. Continues: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v07/n976/a04.html Additional suggestions for writing LTEs are at our Media Activism Center: http://www.mapinc.org/resource/#guides Or contact MAP's Media Activism Facilitator for personal tips on how to write LTEs that get printed. PLEASE SEND US A COPY OF YOUR LETTER Please post a copy of your letter or report your action to the sent letter list ( ) if you are subscribed, or by E-mailing a copy directly to if you are not subscribed. Your letter will then be forwarded to the list so others can learn from your efforts. Subscribing to the Sent LTE list ( ) will help you to review other sent LTEs and perhaps come up with new ideas or approaches as well as keeping others aware of your important writing efforts. To subscribe to the Sent LTE mailing list see http://www.mapinc.org/lists/index.htm#form Prepared by: The MAP Media Activism Team www.mapinc.org/resource =.

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