{news} US DC: OPED: The Lost War

[clifford thornton]

Newshawk: http://www.november.org<http://www.november.org/>
Pubdate: Sun, 19 Aug 2007
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Page: B01
Copyright: 2007 The Washington Post Company
Contact: letters at washpost.com<mailto:letters at washpost.com>
Website: http://www.washingtonpost.com/<http://www.washingtonpost.com/>
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/491<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."

Poppy, of course, is the plant from which opium -- and heroin -- are derived.

Docherty was quick to realize that the military push into northern 
Helmand province was going to run into serious trouble. 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."

Despite the presence of 35,000 NATO troops in Afghanistan, the drug 
trade there is going gangbusters. 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. But the success of the illegal narcotics industry 
isn't confined to Afghanistan. Business is booming in South America, 
the Middle East, Africa and across the United States.

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.

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."

* * *

For the past three years, I have been traveling the world researching 
a book on the jaw-dropping rise of transnational organized crime 
since the collapse of communism and the advent of globalization. I 
have witnessed how a ferocious drug gang mounted an assault on Sao 
Paolo, closing the city for three days as citizens cowered at home. I 
have watched Bedouins shift hundreds of kilos of cocaine across the 
Egyptian-Israeli border on the backs of camels, and observed how 
South Africa and West Africa have become an international narcotics 
distribution hub.

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.

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, a sprawling refugee camp that extends south 
from Bogota and houses about 1 million people. A few weeks earlier, 
she had been forced to leave her home after a pitched battle between 
the Colombian military and the FARC near La Macarena National Park.

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. Ninety-eight percent of that money was devoted to 
beefing up the Colombian armed forces' assault on coca plantations 
and left-wing guerrillas. I was rather pleased to uncover one of its 
few civilian outlets. All the library needs now is to open (it was 
padlocked), a few books (there were none) and some people who can 
read (a rare species in Ciudad Bolivar).

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.

The impact of the eradication program has been negligible at best. 
The FARC not only continues to control a swath of territory the size 
of Switzerland in south-central Colombia, but it has established 
itself in the north as well. The United Nations has identified coca 
plantations in 24 of the country's 32 provinces, whereas it was grown 
in only six when spraying began. But most embarrassing of all, before 
his trip to Washington in May, President Alvaro Uribe was forced to 
announce that production of coca was up 8 percent in 2006. Coca 
production has been so ample that the wholesale price of Colombia's 
best-known export has continued to slide throughout the course of 
Plan 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. Among the 
dead were newspaper reporters, narcotics police investigators, judges 
and politicians.

* * *

The collapse of communism and the rise of globalization in the late 
1980s and early 1990s gave transnational criminality a tremendous 
boost. The expansion of world trade and financial markets has 
provided criminals ample opportunity to broaden their activities. But 
there has been no comparable increase in the ability of the Western 
world to police global crime.

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). 
According to B.C. government statistics, the production, distribution 
and export of B.C. Bud, highly potent marijuana grown in hothouses 
along the province's border with the United States, accounts for 6 
percent of the region's gross domestic product. It now employs more 
Canadians than British Columbia's traditional industries of mining 
and logging combined.

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. The drug trade is so 
lucrative, he said, that when police seize growing operations in 
houses worth $500,000, suspects simply abandon the properties. "They 
are making so much money that they don't care about losing that 
investment," he said.

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.

Efficacy
PO Box 1234
860 657 8438
Hartford, CT 06143
efficacy at msn.com<mailto:efficacy at msn.com>
www.Efficacy-online.org<http://www.efficacy-online.org/>
 
"THE DRUG WAR IS MEANT TO BE WAGED NOT WON"

Working to end race and class drug war injustice, Efficacy is a non profit
501 (c) 3 organization founded in 1997. Your gifts and donations are tax
deductible

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