[Excerpted by Sam Smith in his Undernews digest. He adds "In the nearly 40 years that the Review has written critically of federal drug policy, this is the first time we can recall the Post ever running anything close to this."]
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/17/AR2007081701716.html
August 19th, 2007 Washington Post
The Lost War
We've Spent 36 Years and Billions of Dollars Fighting It, but the Drug Trade Keeps Growing
By Misha Glenny
<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.
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."
<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. But 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. As for
cocaine, according to the UNODC, the street price of a gram in the
United States is now less than $70, compared with $184 in 1990.
Adjusted for inflation, that's a threefold drop.
<snip>
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.
---
Misha Glenny is a former BBC correspondent and the author of
"McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Underworld," to be published
next year.
Full article at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/17/AR2007081701716.html