Pubdate: Wed, 22 Aug 2007
Source: Daily Herald, The (Provo, UT)
Copyright: 2007 The Washington Post Company
Contact: http://www.heraldextra.com/component/option,performs/formid,1
Website: http://www.heraldextra.com
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1480
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.
Also: This is the same OPED which was published Sunday, the 19th in 
the Washington post as featured in this Focus Alert 
http://www.mapinc.org/alert/0353.html

THE LOST WAR ON DRUGS

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."

The rumor was "that we were there to eradicate the poppy," he said. 
"The Taliban aren't stupid and so they said, 'These guys are here to 
destroy your livelihood, so let's take up arms against them.' And 
it's been a downward spiral since then."

According to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Afghan opium 
production in 2006 rose a staggering 57 percent over the previous 
year. Next month, the United Nations is expected to release a report 
showing an additional 15 percent jump in opium production this year 
while highlighting the sobering fact that Afghanistan now accounts 
for 95 percent of the world's poppy crop.

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.

In the past two years, the drug war has become the Taliban's most 
effective recruiter in Afghanistan. Afghanistan's Muslim extremists 
have reinvigorated themselves by supporting and taxing the countless 
peasants who are dependent one way or another on the opium trade, 
their only reliable source of income. The Taliban is becoming richer 
and stronger by the day, especially in the east and south of the 
country. The "War on Drugs" is defeating the "war on terror."

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.

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.

Supply is so plentiful that the price of a gram of heroin is 
plummeting in Europe, especially in the United Kingdom. According to 
the UNODC, the street price of a gram of cocaine in the United States 
is now less than $70, compared with $184 in 1990. Adjusted for 
inflation, that's a threefold drop.

A surfeit of bananas drove 47-year-old Colombian Susan Castillo to do 
business with terrorists. "It was about 10 to 15 years ago," she told 
me. "We had built our farm and raised our seven children on corn and 
bananas. But suddenly nobody wanted to buy our bananas anymore. We 
did what everybody did then -- we switched from bananas and corn to 
coca. Actually, we did not grow the coca ourselves but we rented out 
our land to a cocalero and he grew the crop." Both the Castillo 
family and the grower paid tax to the FARC -- the Revolutionary Armed 
Forces of Colombia, a 17,000-strong peasant-based army, by far the 
largest terrorist organization in the Southern Hemisphere.

I spoke to Castillo in the bare office of a local U.N. counseling 
center in Ciudad Bolivar. Next to the U.N. office stands a spanking 
new library, courtesy of Plan Colombia, the $4.7 billion worth of 
drug-fighting assistance that the United States gave to Colombia over 
the first half-decade of this new century.

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 For several years, DynCorp has been 
spraying the herbicide glyphosate on thousands of acres of coca in Colombia.

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.

International mobsters, unlike terrorists, don't seek to bring down 
the West; they just want to make a buck. But these two distinct 
species breed in the same swamps. In areas notorious for crime, such 
as the tri-border region connecting Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina, 
or in the blood-diamond conflict zones such as Sierra Leone and 
Liberia, gangsters and terrorists habitually cooperate and work 
alongside one another.

Those swamps are steadily seeping toward the United States. British 
Columbia is now home to the greatest number of organized-crime 
syndicates anywhere in the world (if we accept the U.N. definition of 
a syndicate as more than two people involved in a planned crime).

The majority of the province's criminals remain passive hippie types 
for whom the drug is a lifestyle choice. But as Brian Brennan, the 
chief investigator for the drug squad of the Royal Canadian Mounted 
Police, told me, the marijuana trade is threatening to turn nasty as 
British Columbia's Hells Angels, one of the best-organized criminal 
syndicates in the world, moves in on the action.

An avalanche of B.C. Bud rolls southward into the United States every 
day, dodging U.S. customs in myriad imaginative ways.

Could anything replace the war on drugs? There's no easy answer. Some 
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. 
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake