[SLATE] How the drug war is undermining the war on terrorism.

Let the Afghan Poppies Bloom
How the drug war is undermining the war on terrorism.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, Dec. 13, 2004, at 11:47 AM PT

Why should it be that the intervention in Afghanistan has apparently gone so much better than anyone would have predicted, while the intervention in Iraq has proved to be so much more arduous? There are a number of thinkable answers to this question. Afghanistan had already had the experience of theocracy and civil war, to the point where its citizenry was sickened and inured. The Taliban had only been in power for a fairly short time, while the Iraqi Baath Party had had more than three decades in which to debauch the country's treasury and accustom its citizens to fearful obedience. Most of Afghanistan's neighbors generally want the Karzai government to succeed, or at least to see some version of stability, while some of Iraq's neighbors short-sightedly believe that they might benefit from a discrediting of the Allawi government in Baghdad.

To these contrasting hypotheses one might add another variable, this time on the other side of the ledger. Coalition forces in Iraq do not come roaring into towns and villages to tell the local people to stop producing or consuming oil products. Nor do they roam the country blowing up oil-wells or drills. Picture how the situation in Iraq might be different if they did. Now picture something that you do not have to imagine—a determined effort by the liberators of Afghanistan to force the country back into warlordism and anarchy. Every day, soldiers acting in our name are burning or spraying Afghanistan's only viable crop.

Like many stories in the mainstream media, this dramatic piece of news can appear on the front page only if it is printed upside down. Thus we learned from the New York Times of Dec. 11, in a front-page article bylined by Eric Schmitt, that a secret "assessment" by Lt. Gen. David Barno, the senior American officer in the country, has concluded that poppy cultivation is the main threat to the creation of a decent society, and the main avenue by which former Taliban and al-Qaida forces can hope to return from their crushing defeat.

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Any attentive reading of the report, however, shows that it is the campaign against poppy cultivation that constitutes the threat. This point was underlined, perhaps coincidentally, by an op-ed essay in the same edition of the Times, written by Afghanistan's tireless and talented finance minister, Ashraf Ghani. "Today," he wrote, "many Afghans believe that it is not drugs, but an ill-conceived war on drugs that threatens their economy and nascent democracy" (my italics). Ghani went on to point out that a third of Afghanistan's GDP depends on the crop and that "destroying that trade without offering our farmers a genuine alternative livelihood has the potential to undo the embryonic economic gains of the past three years." As he further emphasized, these highly undesirable consequences arise from the control of the trade by a "mafia" with links to Islamic nihilism.

Ghani's meticulous analysis promptly broke down with a non-sequitur: a call for more money and force to be spent in combating a "mafia" that, as he has already admitted, commands a decisive part of the rural economy. Nowhere is it even asked what would happen if the trade was legalized and taxed: a measure that would immediately remove it from mafia control and immediately enrich a vast number of Afghan cultivators who currently exist on the margin of survival.

Reporting from Afghanistan a few months ago (Vanity Fair, November 2004) I pointed out a few obvious facts. Twenty and more years ago, the country's main export was grapes and raisins. It was a vineyard culture. But many if not most of those vines have been dried up or cut down, or even uprooted and burned for firewood, in the course of the hideous depredations of the past decades. An Afghan who was optimistic enough to plant a vine today could expect to wait five years before seeing any return for it, whereas a quick planting of poppies will see pods flourishing in six months. What would you do, if your family or your village were on a knife-edge? The American officers I met, tasked with repressing this cultivation, were to a man convinced that they were wasting their time and abusing the welcome they had at first received in the countryside. It doesn't take much intelligence to understand the history of Prohibition, or to know that American consumer demand is strong enough to overcome any attempt to inhibit supply. In any case, we know this already from dire experience in Bolivia, Colombia, and Mexico.

There is the further point that opium is good for us. Painkillers and anesthetics have to come from somewhere, and we have an arrangement with Turkey to grow and refine the stuff that we need. Why Turkey, an already over-indulged client state? Isn't it time to give the struggling Afghans a share of the business? We could simultaneously ensure a boost for Afghan agriculture, remove an essential commodity from terrorist and warlord control, and guarantee a steady supply of analgesics that would be free of impurities or additives.

In order to comprehend this point, there is no need to know much about Afghanistan. Do you know anyone who really believes in the "war on drugs" as it is supposedly waged in the United States? It is widely understood to be the main index of pointless and costly and unjust incarceration, a huge source of corruption in police departments, and a cause of crime in its own right as well as a source of tainted and "cut" narcotics. And that is before you even consider absurdities and cruelties like the denial of medical mar1juana, or the diversion of personnel and resources from the war against more threatening gangsters. Our entire state policy, at home and abroad, is devoted not to stopping a trade that actually grows every year, but rather to ensuring that all its profitable means of production, distribution, and exchange remain the fiefdom of criminal elements. We consciously deny ourselves access to properly refined and labeled products and to the vast revenue that could accrue to the Treasury instead of to the mobsters here and overseas.

This demented legacy of the Nixon administration will have to be abandoned sooner or later, and I believe that the threatened sacrifice of Afghanistan to the dogma may be the "tipping point." There are numerous policy planners, prison officials, policemen, elected politicians, and scientific specialists, on the intelligent Right as well as the intelligent Left, who have concluded that decriminalization is an urgent necessity. It's hard to think of any other single reform that could make more difference in more areas. The idea offers a way out of the current sterile red state/blue state dichotomy. It ought to be the next big thing.

http://slate.msn.com/id/2110987/#ContinueArticle

 

If any of you can refute the points brought up in this (admittedly, an opinion) piece, please try.

 

That is certainly part of it, but the rest of the piece certainly explains another part.

 

This Is American History On Drugs
BY MICHAEL MANVILLE
POLITICS | 2.25.2002

Viewers of the Super Bowl, and there were a lot of them, were probably surprised to learn they had been helping the terrorists win. Not all of the viewers, of course, just those who might have occasionally sparked a joint, or dropped some acid, or perhaps plunged themselves into the irreclaimable abyss of heroin addiction (not that a lot of your hard-core junkies watch football's finest day, but you know, if they did). They learned they'd been helping the terrorists win during the third quarter, and then again during the fourth, when the Office of National Drug Control Policy ran an ad that linked drug money to terrorism, and that suggested, therefore, that anyone using drugs wasn't just hurting themselves but could also accept blame for exploding courthouses in Colombia and child warriors in the tropics. Goodbye, methodological individualism, hello social conscience. We've gone from "Just Say No" to "Drugs: it's not just masochism anymore!"

The ads were nothing if not dramatic. They feature close-cropped, All-American looking children--presumably recreational drug users--saying things like "I taught kids how to murder," and "I helped kill a judge." Made by the New York advertising giant Ogilvy and Mather, and directed by British filmmaker Tony Kaye (who has made such films as "American History X", and who, bizarrely, occasionally appears at comedy clubs dressed as Osama bin Laden), the TV spots cost $3.4 million and represented the largest single advertising purchase in the history of the U.S. government.

They also represented the opening of a new ONDCP campaign, "Drugs and Terror," which has its own web site, its own ads, and assorted other propaganda fixings. The Office calls the program a valuable new aspect of its "prevention toolbox." Critics call it a cynical attempt to link the wildly popular War on Terror with the wildly ineffective War on Drugs. It is hard not to believe the cynics. The War on Drugs could badly use a new friend. It is much older than the War on Terror, but where the latter has the Army Rangers and solid victory in Afghanistan, the former is a $20 billion albatross whose dubious heroes include the LAPD's Ramparts Division, an elite gang unit seduced by corruption, which took over and controlled the distribution of crack in a large downtown neighborhood for the latter part of the 1990s. The ONDCP, of course, would prefer to see the world in somewhat simpler terms. "Drug use hurts our families and our communities," Drug Czar John Walters said in a press release that announced the ads' airing. "It also finances our enemies. To fight the terror inflicted by killers, thugs and terrorists around the world who depend on American drug purchases to fund their violence, we must stop paying for our own destruction and the destruction of others."

As evidence, the press release points out that twelve of the 28 international terror groups recognized by the State Department engage in drug trafficking, and that many drug cartels use terrorism to gain market share and deter law enforcement. The release also has a nice quote from Rep. Mark Souder, (R-Il), who states that "Americans who buy and sell illegal narcotics are lending a helping hand to people like those who attacked America on September 11."

This is not an entirely unreasonable statement. "Those who attacked America on September 11," would, of course, be Al Quaeda, and Al Quaeda certainly has a history in drug trafficking. The world's main highway for heroin runs straight through Afghanistan, and money derived from heroin sales certainly helped the Taliban--Al Quaeda's chief benefactor--maintain its hold on power. That is beyond dispute, and skeptics need only visit the Drugs and Terror website, where the ONDCP has helpfully compiled a list of major media articles ("Taliban accused of creating 'super heroin'" for example) to have their doubts dispelled.

Unfortunately, the ONDCP has never been above the occasional use of subterfuge (more on that later), and the archive does have a few glaring omissions. No mention is made, for instance, of the fact that the Taliban spent a good portion of last year as an official ally in the War on Drugs. The Bush Administration went so far as to send $43 million to the Taliban in 2001, in exchange for the group's eradication of Afghanistan's opium crop, and for its declaration that drug use is "against God's will." (Big deal. A far bigger challenge would be to find something the Taliban didn't consider "against God's Will," since during its reign it managed to outlaw anything that could be remotely construed as fun--i.e. women's faces--along with a good handful of things that couldn't.) The ONDCP archive also forgets to include stories like the one CBS News aired in January, which pointed out that the Taliban's downfall might lead to a larger heroin trade, and which also noted that while the Taliban had outlawed opium, our friends in the Northern Alliance had continued to traffic in it heavily.

Of course, the logic of the ONDCP campaign is hobbled in other, more obvious ways too. Al Quaeda has been funded far more by oil than it has by drugs, but our government has bent over backward since September 11 to ensure that we continue buying oil. The archive dodges this fact, and it misplaces as well any news stories about the Clinton Administration's early support of the Taliban, and its efforts--along with Unocal--to build an oil pipeline through Afghanistan. Which raises the question: why should a 14 year-old care if his $30 in pot money is going to a terrorist, if his government is sending millions of dollars in the same direction?

"The point isn't that if you buy a joint, you're automatically supporting terrorism," an ONDCP official told me. "The point is that you know where the money is going."

Well, okay. But I have a suspicion that if I buy a joint, my money will be going to a guy who scored some righteous bud a while back and now grows it using lamps in his basement. The illicit cash I give him will probably help fund sinister activities like paying rent (the one drug dealer I knew well in high school used his ill-gotten earnings to fuel a very ugly blue pickup truck) or buying mad stereo equipment. So although I don't know where my money goes, I have a decent idea. On the other hand, I really haven't a clue as to where most of my tax money goes, and if I decide to ask about some of its more interesting uses, my government's first inclination is usually to tell me to buzz off. But the world is full of people more persistent than me, and some of them have lawyers. As a result, I can now peruse a veritable bounty of declassified documents, and many of them indicate that a fair portion of my tax payment ends up with drug runners and terrorists. So I wouldn't be opposed at all if the ONDCP opened put a new web page called "Drugs and Your Government: A Blowback Story." The drug war is paralyzed by an absurd schizophrenia--the purpose of our domestic policy is the mitigation of our foreign one.

* * *

The most common criticism of the War on Drugs--and it is a valid one--is that it is lopsided far too heavily toward eliminating supply. Witness the $1.02 billion "Plan Colombia"--essentially money to fund an all-out war in a nation that does not need further encouragement to violence, or the fact that almost 70 percent of the nation's drug budget is directed toward "interdiction." Compared to this amount of money, the amount spent to reduce demand is indeed pathetic. But the true dysfunction of the drug war may lie more in its geographically distorted priorities; what is considered an unforgivable sin within our borders is often regarded as a transgression of secondary importance beyond them. Our government has no greater priority than the protection of our children from the waste and depravity of drugs, unless the dealers of those drugs can make themselves useful in other ways.

In 1982, for example, the Drug Enforcement Administration set up Sonia Atala, one of Bolivia's most powerful cocaine traffickers, in a sting operation. She was lured onto U.S. soil, arrested, and then--to the DEA's astonishment--moved immediately into the witness protection program, because she was a CIA asset. She was eventually allowed to return to Bolivia, with all her American property holdings intact. It should be noted that during this time, from 1980-83, Bolivia was producing 90 percent of the cocaine consumed in the United States. The nation's ascendancy as a narco-state had begun in 1980, during the bloody "cocaine coup" engineered by Klaus Barbie (a Nazi war criminal and another CIA asset), Argentine secret agents, and a military officer named Luis Arce Gomez (a graduate of the US Army's School of the Americas). Gomez seized control of the government and then abetted the narcotics trade with Barbie's help, and the help of the murderous paramilitary forces under Barbie's control.

Contrast that charming tale with the story of Oklahoma computer company owner Will Foster, who used mar1juana to treat his rheumatoid arthritis. He was arrested for having 70 mar1juana plants on his property and sentenced to 93 years in prison. A parole board twice granted him parole, but despite the nonviolent nature of his crime, and despite the healthy amount of evidence regarding mar1juana's effectiveness as a painkiller (it is endorsed by, among other sources, the New England Journal of Medicine) Oklahoma's governor vetoed the decision both times. Foster remains in jail.

It is hard to imagine a more asinine approach to public policy. But this very approach will likely continue, thanks to a seam in the national awareness that has opened up and swallowed most of the CIA's role in moving narcotics. There simply isn't room in this article to fully detail the Agency's past with drug running. It began as early as 1947, the first year of the CIA's existence, when the fledgling agency pumped money to the heroin-running Corsican Mafia, which was battling Communist union workers for control of Sicily's docks. It continued in the 1950s and 1960s, when the Agency worked with mobsters like Johnny Roselli and Santo Trafficante (the latter of whom controlled both a cocaine route from Colombia to South Florida, and an opium route that ravaged US servicemen in Southeast Asia). It helped install Bolivia's narco-government. It assisted the heroin running warlords of Central Asia. And it funded the Nicaraguan Contras.

From 1981 to 1987, the CIA conducted a vicious war against the Sandinista government of Nicaragua. The Sandinistas were Marxists who in 1979 overthrew the brutal U.S. backed dictatorship of Antonio Somoza. One would be remiss not to say that they were not angels, they were not elected, and their government was not a democracy. Most observers believe the Nicaraguan people were better off under them than under Somoza, but in the interest of fairness I will say that's open an question. Even given all that, however, it would be charitable to call the response of the United States disproportionate. Nicaragua, a state roughly the size of New York, with a population about 60 percent of New York City's, a debt burden (in 1979) of $1.6 billion, and governments friendly to the United States on all sides of it, was declared a threat to regional stability and--amazingly--a threat to America itself. So an embargo was slapped on the country. Its harbors were mined. And an army of outlaws was recruited by the CIA, trained everywhere from Honduras to Indiana, and loosed in rather indiscriminate fashion on the country's populace. An estimated 30,000 civilians died in the ensuing civil war. The CIA suffered a minor back eye when it was learned that the contras had been given manuals instructing them in the arts of torture and civilian "pacification," and the US suffered a bigger black eye when the World Court ruled it had violated international law by mining the harbors. These were the Nicaraguan contras: Ronald Reagan called them the moral equivalent of our founding fathers. Most everyone else called them terrorists. They were funded by our tax money until Congress prohibited any further aid for them. After that they were funded by, among other things, cocaine.

The number of people who remember the Kerry Committee is probably very small. Few people noticed it when it did exist, and almost no one paid attention to its final report, which yielded only four stories in major newspapers, and none on the front page. One would think, given these facts, that the committee had little to say. One would not think, given these facts, that in 1989, during the era of anticommunism and Just Say No, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts released a 1,600-page report that detailed almost excruciatingly the connections between the Nicaraguan contras, the CIA, and the trafficking of cocaine into the United States.

"It is clear," the report's executive summary stated, "that individuals who provided support for the contras were involved in drug trafficking, the supply network of the Contras was used by drug trafficking organizations, and elements of the Contras themselves knowingly received financial and material assistance from drug traffickers. In each case, one or another agency of the US government had information regarding the involvement either while it was occurring, or immediately thereafter."

Kerry's report, while admittedly a bit long and now 15 years old, still makes for interesting reading. His committee got its hands on some interesting pages from Oliver North's diary (one entry about the Contras reads "$14m to finance came from drugs") and notes that the State Department, between January and August 1986, gave over $800,000 to four companies that sent "humanitarian aid" to the contras. These four firms--Diacasa, Setco, Vortex and Frigorificosoe Puntarenas--were all "owned and operated by narcotics traffickers."

For those who like their evidence a bit less subtle, the report also contained the following exchange, under oath, between Kerry and a CIA asset:

SENATOR KERRY: What did you do with those drugs?

MR. MORALES: Sell them.

SENATOR KERRY: What did you do with the money?

MR. MORALES: Give it to the contras.

SENATOR KERRY: All right.

It doesn't get much clearer than that. Or at least it didn't seem like it could at the time. In 1996, however, the San Jose Mercury News released a painstaking--though sometimes hyperbole-prone--series called "Dark Alliance," which outlined the connections between the CIA, the contras, and international cocaine smuggling. Specifically, "Dark Alliance," which was written by News staffer Gary Webb, dealt with the Nicaraguan connections of "Freeway" Ricky Ross, the onetime high school tennis star who rose to become America's premiere dealer of crack cocaine. It is also recounted the weaponization of American inner cities, an appalling side effect of street gangs buying drugs from gun-runners. The contra-cocaine connection helped put Tec-9s, Uzis and other hi-tech military equipment onto street corners--an effect that helped South Central Los Angeles descend into a dystopic urban battleground.

The controversy that formed over Dark Alliance might have been funny, if it hadn't resulted in everyone forgetting about the story's substance, and if it hadn't ended with Webb being all but hounded out of his job. Webb's charges embarrassed other newspapers that had missed the story, and rather than picking up where the story left off, the LA Times, New York Times and the Washington Post immediately set about trying to discredit it. The LA Times, scooped in its own backyard, was particularly audacious. One of its reporters told the Colombia Journalism Review that he'd been assigned to the "get Gary Webb team," and another was overheard saying, "We're going to take away that guy's Pulitzer."

Which they did: large investigative pieces are rarely flawless, and the big papers seized on some of the holes and misleading language in Webb's articles and tore them apart. That most of the series was valid was lost along the way, and the News, writhing under pummeling from its peers, took the rather extraordinary step of disavowing its own work, and then exiled Webb to do beat reporting in a small agricultural community. And while the newspapers turned on their own (not a fair fight, by the way; the Washington Post picking on the San Jose Mercury News is sort of like the US picking on, well, Nicaragua) the CIA investigated itself and happily declared it had played no role in drug smuggling. The press dutifully reported this. As an afterthought, under oath in front of a Congressional committee, the CIA's Inspector General noted that from 1982 until 1995, the Agency had a formal agreement with the Justice Department that said it did not have to tell Justice if its assets were involved in drug smuggling.

Now, a thoughtful person might wonder why a government agency with no ties to drug trafficking would need a blanket exemption from the nation's drug laws for its assets. Fortunately for the CIA, thoughtful people as a rule do not rise up the ranks of the national media, and this story, too, was lowballed. But it hasn't disappeared. It's all out there: the Kerry Committee's report; the Iran-Contra Report (Oliver North intervened on behalf of the drug-smuggling Honduran General Jose Bueso-Rose, who acted as a major conduit of aid to the Contras, and got him a lenient prison sentence); the CIA's self-investigation following "Dark Alliance." It is rotting in prison with Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, imprisoned for drug trafficking but for years a US ally against Nicaragua. What are also out there are the transcripts of the World Court's case against the United States, the cascades of documentation on Contra atrocities, and--to swing us back around the enemy of the moment--the records of the U.S.'s involvement in promoting the Taliban. It is in the National Security Archive, in countless Freedom of Information Act requests, and in scholarly texts. It is the archives of the Costa Rican media, since that country's government expelled Oliver North for coke trafficking. Where it is not is available is the public discourse. There, instead of history, the government serves fried eggs that are supposed to be our brains and Super Bowl ads that ask how terrorists get their money, and suggest that if we buy drugs, maybe they get it from us.

"In my thirty year history with the DEA," said Dennis Dayles, who spent the 1980s as that agency's chief of enforcement in Central America, "the major targets of my investigations almost invariably turned out to be working for the CIA."

* * *

Given the amount of leeway the US government has afforded drug traffickers, one might think the ONDCP would be slightly uncomfortable with the sheer audacity of its ads. The ONDCP, though, is rarely uncomfortable with its own audacity. In 2000 Salon magazine discovered that then-Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey (a man known for, among other things, allegedly ordering a massacre in the closing days of the Gulf War) had gotten a bit creative with advertising purchases. Specifically, the ONDCP had arranged to buy TV time, at a discounted public service rate, from major networks, in order to air anti-drug ads. Then, however, in a bit of creativity, he gave the ad time back to the networks, so they could sell it at a higher price to for-profit customers, and all he asked in exchange was that the networks alter the scripts of popular TV shows to reflect the ONDCP's anti-drug message. Under this program, the scripts of ER, Chicago Hope, and Beverly Hills 90210 were all doctored, in what was essentially government-funded subliminal advertising. (In retrospect, none of this should have been surprising. While discussing his prevention programs in 1999, McCaffrey said their goal was to increase "mind share" and that to that end he had employed "experts in behavior change.")

So it is a bit of step forward that the Office is actually buying ads, and not going Clockwork Orange on Super Bowl viewers. Still, the questions nagged, so a few days after the Super Bowl I called the ONDCP and spoke to Jennifer de Vallance, a Public Affairs spokesperson, about the new campaign. I decided to skip the Contra subject, and asked instead how the Office reconciled the ad campaign with the fact that the Bush Administration had given $43 million to the Taliban last year for its help in fighting drugs. Her reply was that the ad was not necessarily about the Taliban. This was true--most of the ad's lines ("I helped kill a judge") refer to actual events that took place in Colombia. Nevertheless, I said, it seemed apparent that ads were designed to play upon fears of Islamic terrorism post-9/11; the Colombian FARC, reprehensible though it may be, has never attacked New York. She didn't say much to that. So I asked if it might be disingenuous to suggest that buying drugs sends money to terrorist groups, when the US government sometimes sends money to those same groups. She said it was not disingenuous at all, because the ONDCP was in the business of drug prevention, and that questions of foreign policy were thus not its purview.

From here the conversation took a profoundly weird turn.

"But as an office in the business of drug prevention," I said, "doesn't the ONDCP have a position on those aspects of American foreign policy that abet regimes who traffic in drugs?"

"You would have to ask the State Department about that."

"That's not my question. My question is whether the ONDCP, as an agency in the business of drug prevention, has a position on those aspects of American foreign policy that abet regimes who traffic in drugs."

"I can't answer that question."

"So the ONDCP, which is in the business of drug prevention, can't say whether it has a position on those aspects of US foreign policy that send money to regimes that traffic in drugs?"

"I didn't say that."

"I'm pretty sure you did."

"I've answered your question."

And on and on. At one point I switched directions and asked if the Northern Alliance traded in heroin. She said she didn't know but could find out. Since I can read a newspaper as well as she can, I declined. Finally I gave up and changed the subject entirely, asking what kind of feedback the ads had gotten. The answer--surprise!--was that everyone loved them. To be fair, Ms. de Vallance recognized my exasperation, and offered to get me a more comprehensive reply if I would email her more queries. I jotted down her email address, but it hardly seemed worth the effort.

Because what it comes back to, in the end, is the central lie about drugs and terror, and indeed the central lie about drugs themselves. There is a fundamental absurdity that lies at the heart of the War on Drugs, an absurdity that has been noted by the raggedy editors of Cannabis News and by Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman. Oil and drugs both help fund and arm terrorists, and if the US government to chooses to battle drugs and coddle oil, then so be it. But oil, at least, suffers from a certain degree of scarcity, and the costs of finding and extracting it are often prohibitive. It is also, for better or worse, intrinsic to America's national security.

The same cannot be said for drugs. Cannabis and poppy plants are more than bountiful. The former can and is grown almost anywhere--from backyard gardens in Connecticut to fields in Northern California. These plants are, in other words, worthless. Or at least they should be. What the drug war does, more than anything else, is inject scarcity into a market that has none, and this is what makes the business so lucrative, and what makes them worth killing over. According to Stanford University's Hoover Institute, outlawing narcotics has made them 1,700 percent more expensive. The drug economy is as artificial as it is illicit; we have used our laws to construct an enemy, and now we use our laws to fight it. Not since Prohibition have we engaged in such large-scale shadowboxing, have we, in our desire to fight crime, created a massive criminal class and fought it.

The War on Drugs is a mirage; the closer you get to it, the more you understand that it was never there at all. The United States mediates, far more than it fights, the $400 billion international traffic in illegal narcotics. Almost all of the CIA's covert wars have been enmeshed, to some degree, with the drug trade, and it is our very illegalization of drugs that have made them such a useful tool for funding the more violent and sordid aspects of our foreign policy. This in turn makes our foreign policy dependent on what our domestic policy abhors, and reduces drug enforcement within our borders to little more than a reactionary exercise against the byproduct of what we do overseas. If it sounds confusing, that's because it is. If it sounds ridiculous, it isn't. It might be, but lives are laid to waste every day by such grandiose ambivalence.

If drugs were legal, the vast balloons of cash they promise would quickly deflate, and it would be nice to say that once that happened, the militarism and terror that have become standard parts of drug trafficking would likewise collapse. But history, again, teaches us otherwise. Prohibition's end did indeed curb the worst aspects of the bootlegging trade, but one need only read Sally Denton and Roger Morris' horrifying The Money and the Power to see how a generation of men made into criminals found themselves, once liquor was legal, uninterested in the prospect of aboveboard business. They had been conditioned to see the law as an enemy and an impediment, violence as a tool. A stupid law had started this, but it couldn't put it in reverse.

Put it another way: if you're ever in Los Angeles, drive downtown and then go east, across the concrete bed of the LA River, and out through East LA. There, hanging over this low-rise city like dull mountains, are the West Coast's twin towers, built by the War on Drugs just as surely as the East Coast's were knocked down in the War on Terror. They are high-rise prisons, 4,100 beds, and filled for the most part with drug offenders. California now imprisons more people than do France, Germany, Japan, Singapore and the Netherlands combined. It has more people in jail for drug offenses than were in jail in the entire United States in 1978. Most of these inmates are not violent--even though America has built over 1000 new prisons and jails since 1980, the proportion of violent offenders entering them has steadily fallen. But of those who went in nonviolent, you can bet many are violent now. And of those who never felt considered themselves criminals, many now think like them. What will happen if they are let out? When they are let out?

And yet the war winds on, over and over and in on itself. It is a parade without spectators, marching in lockstep toward disaster while the public looks at something else entirely. The true empire of opiates is not the drugs but the war itself, the vast machinery of distraction aimed at building for Americans an enemy that does not exist. People should not abuse drugs, just as they should not abuse alcohol or smoke cigarettes. But they do, and they will. There will never be a world without drugs. There could, however be a world where people no longer fight and die for them, and where if you bought drugs they would be taxed, and you would "know where your money is going." Today drugs aren't taxed, and your taxes build prisons. They sprawl across the Southwest, the rural Northeast, and the Heartland. Forget Colombia and Afghanistan. Our own country is the true landscape of this war, and we are decorating it with the architecture of failure.

http://www.freezerbox.com/archive/article.asp?id=181

 

It isn't directly related, but in the interest of not starting another thread...
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The Longest-Running War
by Doug Bandow, December 20, 2004

Joel Miller, Bad Trip: How the War on Drugs Is Destroying America; (Nashville, Tenn.: WND Books, 2004).

Jeffrey A. Miron, Drug War Crimes: The Consequences of Prohibition; (Oakland, Ca.: The Independent Institute, 2004).

War has become a centerpiece of American politics. The war on terrorism is the focus of U.S. foreign policy. A real war is being fought in Iraq. Jimmy Carter proclaimed the “moral equivalent of war” over energy. Some analysts are advocating a war on obesity.

But the longest-running ongoing “war” is the war on drugs. For decades the U.S. government has attempted to suppress the use and sale of illicit substances. Alcohol and tobacco once were on the prohibited list but now are legal. Cocaine and mar1juana, which once were legal, are now banned.

Two new books persuasively argue that this campaign has been not just ineffective, but counterproductive. In the words of Joel Miller, “Prohibition is supposed to make America better. In reality it makes it manifestly worse — just like a drug trip gone bad.”

Neither Miller nor Jeffrey Miron, an economics professor at Boston University, advocates drug use. Indeed, Miller notes that he has never tried drugs and has no interest in doing so. But they argue that the practical consequences of prohibition are negative.

The costs of drug abuse are obvious: “Some people ruin their lives with drugs,” notes Miron. “The right question for policy analysis, however, is not whether drugs are sometimes misused but whether policy reduces that misuse, and at what cost.”

The answer of both authors is that the government only ineffectively cuts drug abuse, and does so at a very high social cost. Miron takes an unusual economic look at drug prohibition. Reviewing alcohol prohibition, he concludes that the attempt to stop Americans from drinking cut cirrhosis deaths by 10 to 20 percent: “This is not a trivial effect, but it is far smaller than suggested by many advocates of prohibition.”

Miron also points to the experience of the dozen American states that have decriminalized mar1juana. Although the evidence is limited, there was little increase in drug use. After reviewing the cases of Australia, Europe, and Japan, which are less restrictive than America, Miron finds that “there is no evidence these countries have higher drug use rates; indeed the U.S. rate frequently exceeds that in most other countries.”

This suggests that culture is more important than the law in determining drug demand. Moreover, prohibition obviously doesn’t work well. Miller explores the relative ineffectiveness of government interdiction efforts. By some estimates, law enforcement stops just 10 percent of the illicit supply — leaving abundant drugs and declining prices.

Indeed, the vast profits of trafficking encourage smugglers to be more innovative than the police. Writes Miller, “When dealers sound more like business-school graduates than hustlers and brand their produce like desktop PCs and designer-name chef’s knives — all despite the best efforts of police — perhaps people should begin questioning whether those efforts actually serve any use.”

If drug prohibition were merely ineffective, it wouldn’t matter too much. There is, of course, the $33 billion or so spent to enforce the drug laws, but the cost of attempting to prevent millions of Americans from voluntarily using drugs has been far, far higher.

Problem one, analyzed by Miller, is crime. He finds that drugs are not crimogenic, that is, drugs do not cause users to commit crime: “An overwhelming percentage of drug users never thump old ladies, loot convenience stores, beat their children, or shoot police officers.” Even PCP, research suggests, while creating agitation and disorientation, does not induce violence.

In contrast, drug prohibition inevitably generates crime. Those who use drugs do so illegally. Consumers who steal to fund their habits have to steal more when drug prices rise because of prohibition. More important, notes Miller, “Because the illegality of the drug trade removes legal protection from its participants, the business is subject to brutality.” Traffickers settle their disputes with guns rather than lawsuits.

Equally disturbing is the problem of police corruption. There always have been bad cops, but the greatest temptation is posed by ongoing and profitable criminal enterprises, such as the drug trade. It was a problem during Prohibition. The opportunity for vice is even greater today.

Writes Miller, “Crooked cops are empowered by prohibition because it gives them an incredibly valuable asset. Police are in the unique position to insulate drug dealers from arrest, something drug dealers appreciate and richly reward. If the price is right, an even sexier bargain can be arranged — one in which Johnny Flatfoot actually runs off competitors.”

But drugs are an equal-opportunity corrupter. Judges and politicians are equally susceptible to temptation. Writes Miller, “No other factor inflates corruption as much or as perniciously as drug prohibition.”

Of particular concern is the impact of the drug war on international terrorism. U.S. government officials blame drug users for effectively funding those who kill Americans, but, notes Miller, “Thanks to inflated prices caused by global narcotics prohibition, whoring after state sponsors is no longer needed.” Quite simply, absent the excessive profitability of the opiate trade due to America’s ban on drug use, the Taliban would not be raising millions from opium production throughout the Afghan countryside. So long as people will produce and use drugs — and they have proved willing to do so despite the threat of death on the street and prison at the hands of the state — drug prohibition ensures that foreign producers, including jihadists, will prosper.

Another casualty of the drug war is privacy. As Miller points out, the fact that drug abuse is a victimless (or, more accurately, self-victim) crime means that there is no complaining witness. It is hard to collect evidence against drug users without violating the privacy of all Americans. That means relying on searches, wiretaps, and snitches.

Even so, winning convictions in drug cases isn’t easy. There are too many of them to prosecute; proof beyond a reasonable doubt is made more difficult where the entire transaction is voluntary. Thus, the government has increasingly relied on property seizures. Miller quotes enforcement officials who frankly admit that they use forfeitures, which demand a lower standard of proof, to punish presumed wrongdoers. Yet Miller finds that the toll among the innocent is very high.

Despite the optimistic predictions that often flow from federal officials, there is little good news in the drug war. And there are few serious proposals to achieve better results, that is, to more sharply cut drug abuse at lower cost.

The government already is militarizing the drug war. Police have been turned into paramilitary forces, turning homes and entire neighborhoods into war zones. Even locking up ever more people won’t stop the flow of drugs, which are available inside supposedly secure penitentiaries. Particularly frightening is the increase in what Miller calls “drug-only offenders,” people who were not violent but were jailed, often for significant periods of time because of new mandatory minimums for drug crimes. Exactly how many nonviolent offenders are in prison remains in dispute, but Miller sensibly contends that even the low estimates, approximating 100,000, indicate there are far too many.

Imprisonment imposes huge social costs on the offenders and their families, makes future positive participation in society more difficult, and encourages offenders to shift to a life of more-violent crime. Writes Miller, “Welcome to prison — otherwise known as crime school — where inmates with varying levels of skills and smarts come together and teach each other how to sling dope.” Even if one is not sympathetic to drug offenders, one can see how arresting and imprisoning them is creating far more social harm than the drug use that otherwise would occur.

If intensifying the drug war won’t work, sticking with the status quo is no answer. Perhaps the only hope is to return drugs to the status of a moral, spiritual, and health problem rather than a legal one. Miller notes the importance of “social controls” in limiting destructive behavior. Some of that comes from family and church. Some from simple self-interest.

Basic self-interest and risk aversion dictate that the more dangerous a drug’s perception with the public, the better the society’s ability to control it. There’s a reason very few people use PCP compared to those that use mar1juana. While it does have something to do with availability, PCP is perceived by the public as wildly dangerous. Pot is not. As such, more people smoke weed than use PCP.

Proposals for decriminalization or legalization seem radical. But, notes Miron, “The arguments and data mustered for legalization are of far greater quality and objectivity than any brought to bear for prohibition.” America’s liberty tradition should put the burden of proof on supporters of prohibition. After all, concludes Miron, “The goals of prohibition are questionable, the methods are unsound, and the results are deadly.”

Debates over drug policy remain among the most difficult and emotional in the public square. While Miller and Miron might not convince the most dedicated drug warriors, they have presented a powerful case that the drug war is counterproductive. Their evidence deserves a serious response. Americans can no longer blithely assume that drug prohibition is making them safer and better off.

Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. Send him email.

http://www.fff.org/comment/com0412f.asp

 

Yet more evidence, this time some of it comes from commanders in the field who believe that using the military to eradicate poppy crops will endanger their mission there.


2. Bush Administration's Afghan Dilemma Coming to a Head: Promote Stability and Fight Terror -- or Fight Drugs?
http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/369/dilemma.shtml

The Bush administration has a big problem in Afghanistan. As DRCNet has previously reported (http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/363/afghanistan.shtml), there is a fundamental contradiction between the administration's primary goals in the country it invaded in late 2001 in the wake of the attacks on New York and Washington, DC. On the one hand, the US wishes to prosecute the so-called war on terror against Al Qaeda and the remnants of the Taliban regime it overthrew, which continue to wage war against the US-backed government of President Hamid Karzai. On the other hand, it remains formally committed to prosecuting its never-ending war on drugs in Afghanistan, which since the fall of the Taliban has reemerged as the world's leading opium producer, responsible for more than three-quarters of the global supply last year and set to produce even more this year, according to US and United Nations estimates.

The problem for the Bush administration is that if it seeks to pursue its drug war objective of eradicating the opium crop -- with a new planting season set to begin this month -- it is in danger of alienating the huge percentage of the Afghan population directly or indirectly dependent on the opium trade for an income. It also risks infuriating "good" warlords who hold posts in the Karzai government and are seen as allies, but who are reportedly making fortunes off the trade themselves.

The Bush administration is seeking $780 million in anti-drug funding for Afghanistan this year -- a more than five-fold increase over last year's $140 million -- including $152 million earmarked for aerial eradication, but according to a Sunday report in the Los Angeles Times, high level administration officials are divided over how to proceed. Drug war hawks are calling for deeper US military involvement in the anti-drug effort, as well as aerial eradication of the opium crop, while other officials worry that aggressive anti-drug efforts will destabilize the country as it heads for critical parliamentary elections in April.

The dividing lines are not only between different executive departments, but also within those departments. According to the Times, gung-ho Pentagon civilians want to charge forward, while US military commanders are hesitant. "Central Command would prefer not to be in the eradication business," Lieutenant General Lance Smith, Centcom's deputy commander, told the Times. "We have spent a lot of capital in trying to build relationships with the people in there and now this has the potential for us to do things that wouldn't be popular for some of the areas we're operating in."

Other US military officials said they feared deeper military involvement would alienate warlords such as Rashid Dostum and Ustad Attas Mohammed, who, while supporting the Karzai government, are also reaping huge profits from the trade (http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/316/rumsfeld.shtml). "If you pull at the thread of counter-narcotics the wrong way, because of the sheer proportion of the gross domestic product wrapped up in this business, you should be careful of unintended consequences," said General James Jones, the American who serves as supreme commander of NATO, which has 9,000 troops in Afghanistan.

But Pentagon and congressional hard-liners warn that if this year's crop is allowed to be harvested, an estimated $7 billion will flow into the hands of the warlords, perhaps allowing them to influence the election itself. Even worse, they claim, if the crop is harvested unimpeded, some of that money could find its way to the Taliban and perhaps even Al Qaeda, where it could pay for more attacks against the West.

"We have a record opium production that needs to be lowered because so many of the profits are used to finance Bin Laden and his operation," claimed Rep. Steven Kirk (R-IL). "On the other hand, you have to conduct an anti-drug campaign first and foremost with political sensitivity."

One unnamed official told the Times that the 2001 attacks on the US cost only $400,000 or $500,000. "Imagine what they could do with $10 billion. You can own a country with that much money," he argued. While the evidence that the Taliban or Al Qaeda is reaping opium profits is scanty, Assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Robert Charles told Congress last year that "drug profits are almost definitely" funding the Taliban, and maybe Al Qaeda too.

But other administration officials and independent observers are counseling a less aggressive approach. "You tell them, 'You're voting for a new democratic county,' while their government is allowing foreigners to come in and destroy their livelihoods?" scoffed Barnett Rubin, a United Nations advisor in Afghanistan in 2001. "And if you try to destroy it and have the economy decline by 10 percent, 20 percent, 40 percent in one year, what will the result be? The result will be armed revolt," he predicted.

Mark Schneider, director at the International Crisis Group, a global relief agency, echoed Rubin's skepticism about aggressive eradication. Aerial spraying, he told the Times, would be tantamount to "providing the Taliban with a great recruiting slogan: Go with us or they'll spray you."

The US decision-makers have not been helped by President Karzai. On the one hand, he recently declared a jihad, or holy war, against opium production, out of fear that opium profits will fill the coffers of his electoral foes and to try to silence rising criticism from Western Europe and particularly Great Britain that Afghan opium is being processed into heroin that is flooding Europe. On the other hand, he has rejected aerial spraying and has instead embraced limited manual eradication efforts.

There are conflicting reports that aerial spraying has already commenced (http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/365/afghanistan.shtml), but what is certain at this point is that manual eradication of the opium crop is already underway -- and that it is leading to a bitter harvest indeed. According to a report in the Pakistan Tribune datelined Jalalabad -- not Washington -- farmers in Nangahar whose crops have been destroyed have been reduced to selling their daughters to opium dealers who financed their crops. "I cannot pay you in any other way -- take my daughter," said Gul Miran, 42, to the dealer who had lent him $1,000 to start his plot. But the government had ploughed over his fields, leaving him with no way to repay the loan.

"I accepted the girl in return for my loan," said dealer Haji Naqibullah. "We had an agreement. He would pay me back regardless of whether his crops were wiped out by the weather or the government. In a year or 18 months, I will marry her off to my youngest son," he said. "He is 19 years old and has been married to his first wife for two years, but has not had a child yet."

Pavenda Gul was another farmer forced to sell his daughter after the government destroyed his crop. "When you have an agreement with an opium dealer," he said, "nothing but the opium can be paid, but they cannot refuse the daughters. It is a way in which a dealer can find a wife for himself or his son. The son may be disabled or growing older and not have a wife. It is easy to present him with a pretty girl."

Meanwhile, in Washington, "We still don't have a policy," one unnamed Republican congressional staffer told the Times.

____________________________________________________________

1. Editorial: Stop Before It's Too Late
http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/369/stop.shtml

David Borden, Executive Director, borden@drcnet.org, 1/7/05

A growing dilemma in Afghanistan is bringing into sharper focus the urgent need for society to enact some form of drug legalization. The Afghan situation is one in which multiple policy objectives now conflict, and our most pressing interests are threatened.

The problem is that Afghanistan's primary source of income is an illegal narcotic. Opium poppies are banned, yet more of it grows there than anything else, at least in cash terms, and Afghanistan grows more of it than any other country. It's accurate to say that to a significant degree in Afghanistan, opium rules. Without it, the nation's economy would quickly collapse.

At the same time, the illicit economy has pathologies. We desire Afghanistan's future to be one of peace, democracy and rule of law. Yet many of the nation's powerful warlords profit heavily from the trade in opium -- it's one of the things that make them powerful, in fact. The poor who grow opium out of necessity are vulnerable to exploitation. And while the true extent of the links is unclear, claims that Al Qaeda derives some of its funding from the illegal drug trade are plausible if unproven.

Having left the matter largely un-dealt with the last three years, the Bush administration is turning its attention now to the opium phenomenon in a more serious way. They may mean business this time -- the government has requested $780 million for Afghani anti-drug efforts, including $152 million earmarked for aerial eradication. But if we care about Afghanistan's political stability -- and that is one of the primary state goals of administration policy -- chopping down the poppy crop would be a supremely bad move, let alone burning it down with chemical poisons dropped from the air. What better way to push the vast numbers of Afghans who are economically dependent on opium into the arms of our enemies? What better way to foment social instability? That is the effect it has had, after all, in nations where it has been tried with coca. The difference in Afghanistan is that the number of people doing the growing is even larger. More importantly, they are hardened by decades of war, and they're not hesitant about accepting what they perceive as an invitation to a fight.

As a reformer, I don't want to see Afghanistan's government pushed into a drug war policy that is in the worst interests of itself and its people. But I also wish against that as an American who wants my nation's policies to be the right ones; who wants my tax dollars to promote peace and prosperity, not conflict and poverty and suffering; who wants our government and our people perceived as the friend of other peoples, not the enemy; who wants safety from and an end to political violence, for myself, for my countrymen, and for all others. It is fine to specifically target cultivation or other economic activity that has been found to be tied to financing of organizations that have violent intentions. But it's not fine -- it's downright dangerous -- to go beyond that to rampage against the rest of the people of the country who are just trying to survive. We should leave them alone -- we need to leave them alone.

Yet to leave the poppy farmers alone but not alter the framework within which they live and work is to address only half of the poisonous equation of the current system. It isn't enough, in the end, to not make things even worse. Only by ending prohibition itself can the dire problems of the underground drug trade be transformed into the manageable issues of a licit, aboveground economy. Dealing effectively with Afghanistan's needs is an urgent matter -- need anyone be reminded of the reasons why? There's no more time for drug war foolishness, not in Afghanistan and not here either. Let us not sacrifice security for a discredited drug war ideology, and let us end this sad chapter of human history -- the prohibitionist chapter -- once and for all.

 

Drug prohibition is a terrorist's best friend

Ted Galen Carpenter
National Post

Tuesday, January 04, 2005

Under pressure from Washington, Afghan President Hamid Karzai is urging his people to fight narcotics as ferociously as they fought the Soviet occupation in the 1980s. Such a struggle seems destined to undermine the campaign against al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Karzai and his American patrons can prevail against the country's opium growers or its terrorists, but not both.

Afghanistan has been one of the leading sources of opium poppies, and therefore heroin, since the 1970s. Today, the country accounts for more than 75% of the world's opium supply. It is clear that some of the revenues from the drug trade -- at least 10% to 20% -- flow into the coffers of al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

That is obviously a worrisome development. But it is hardly unprecedented. For years, leftist insurgent groups in Colombia, principally the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), and right-wing paramilitaries have been financed largely by that country's cocaine trade. Conservative estimates place the annual revenue stream to the FARC alone at between US$515-million and US$600-million per year. (In 2002, the U.S. ambassador to Colombia put the figure at "several billion" dollars.)

The harsh reality is that terrorist groups around the world have been enriched by prohibitionist drug policies that drive up drug costs, and which deliver enormous profits to the outlaw organizations willing to accept the risks that go with the trade.

Targeting the Afghanistan drug trade would create a variety of problems. Most of the regional warlords who abandoned the Taliban and currently support the U.S. anti-terror campaign (and in many cases politically undergird the Karzai government) are deeply involved in the drug trade, in part to pay the militias that give them political clout. A crusade against drug trafficking could easily alienate those regional power brokers and cause them to switch allegiances yet again.

Unfortunately, Washington is now increasing its pressure on the Karzai government to crack down on opium cultivation, offering more than a billion dollars in aid to fund anti-drug efforts. In addition, Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld announced in August that U.S. military forces in Afghanistan would make drug eradication a high priority -- a mission that the military properly continues to resist.

U.S. officials need to keep their goals straight. Recognizing that security considerations sometimes trump other objectives would not be an unprecedented move by Washington. U.S. agencies quietly ignored the drug-trafficking activities of anti-communist factions in Central America during the 1980s when the primary goal was to keep those countries out of the Soviet orbit. In the early 1990s, the United States also eased its pressure on Peru's government to eradicate drugs when President Alberto Fujimori concluded that a higher priority had to be given to winning coca farmers away from Shining Path guerrillas. U.S. leaders should refrain from trying to make U.S. soldiers into anti-drug crusaders: Even those policymakers who support the war on drugs as an overall policy ought to recognize that American troops in Central Asia have a difficult enough job fighting terrorists.

There is little doubt that terrorist groups around the world profit from the drug trade. What anti-drug crusaders refuse to acknowledge, however, is that the connection between drug trafficking and terrorism is the direct result of making drugs illegal. The prohibitionist policy that the United States and other drug-consuming countries continue to pursue guarantees a huge black market premium for all illegal drugs. The retail value of drugs coming into the United States (to say nothing of Europe and other markets) is estimated at US$50-billion to US$100-billion a year. Fully 90% of that sum is attributable to the prohibition premium.

Absent a world-wide prohibitionist policy, this fat profit margin would evaporate, and terrorist organizations would be forced to seek other sources of revenue.

Drug prohibition is terrorism's best friend. That symbiotic relationship will continue until the United States and its allies have the wisdom to dramatically change their drug policies.

Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president for defence and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C., is the author or editor of 16 books on international affairs, including Bad Neighbor Policy: Washington's Futile War on Drugs in Latin America (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2003).

http://www.canada.com/national/nati....html?id=a9a2748e-6a38-447e-9ce2-cebbf262ca70