BobW
--- Michael Pollak <mpollak at panix.com> wrote:
>
> [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 at which.net
>
> 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
>
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