The War on Drugs is lost
hippiemom
Posts: 3,326
The war on drugs
Friday, August 31, 2007
Misha Glenny
Poppies were the first thing that British army Capt. Leo Do cherty 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 are 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 percent 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.
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.
Glenny is a former BBC correspondent and the author of "McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Underworld," to be published next year. (Washington Post)
http://www.cleveland.com/plaindealer/stories/index.ssf?/base/opinion/118854974975300.xml&coll=2&thispage=1
Friday, August 31, 2007
Misha Glenny
Poppies were the first thing that British army Capt. Leo Do cherty 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 are 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 percent 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.
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.
Glenny is a former BBC correspondent and the author of "McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Underworld," to be published next year. (Washington Post)
http://www.cleveland.com/plaindealer/stories/index.ssf?/base/opinion/118854974975300.xml&coll=2&thispage=1
"Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity." ~ MLK, 1963
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Comments
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Dammit!
I hate losing.I cannot come up with a new sig till I get this egg off my face.0 -
It's a dual edged sword no doubt. I say legalize MJ without question. Sure people will flaunt it for a while...but it will level out, and the black market crime will die off with all the fanfare.
That would eliminate probably 50-70% of illegal underground bread and butter....and save many billions in wasted money.Progress is not made by everyone joining some new fad,
and reveling in it's loyalty. It's made by forming coalitions
over specific principles, goals, and policies.
http://i36.tinypic.com/66j31x.jpg
(\__/)
( o.O)
(")_(")0 -
Poppies are pretty.
"Ideas are bulletproof." --V
Peace and Love
Deni
0 -
Misha Glenny wrote:The war on drugs
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.)
I wonder why the US is always opposing anything progressive with the WOD :mad: And why is it that they feel it's their right to dictate policy to these countries? Worry about your borders, not what everyone else is doing!
This smells a little like the 80's, when cheap crack suddenly showed up all over the US...I wonder, if you followed the money on all this cheap heroin, just who you'd find pulling strings...and which rebel/guerilla/contra (oops - post 9/11 -they're terrorists now) group was being secretly armed with that money...and which corps were making money off the sale of those arms......and which politicians were taking money from those corps...this is the REAL organized crime. Never mind the gangsters running lousy million dollar drug businesses. It's nearly a street-level $100 billion dollar a year industry in the US. Who's making the real money? round we go...
legalize ALL drugs...focus on harm reduction.0 -
RolandTD20Kdrummer wrote:It's a dual edged sword no doubt. I say legalize MJ without question. Sure people will flaunt it for a while...but it will level out, and the black market crime will die off with all the fanfare.
That would eliminate probably 50-70% of illegal underground bread and butter....and save many billions in wasted money.
I know how to get rid of 100% of crime. Get rid of 100% of the laws. I necessarily have the passion for writing this, and you have the passion for condemning me; both of us are equally fools, equally the toys of destiny. Your nature is to do harm, mine is to love truth, and to make it public in spite of you. - Voltaire0 -
Legalizing it is one thing, but letting the government control it is another. Under their guidance, it will be a failure just like anything else.The only people we should try to get even with...
...are those who've helped us.
Right 'round the corner could be bigger than ourselves.0 -
know1 wrote:Legalizing it is one thing, but letting the government control it is another. Under their guidance, it will be a failure just like anything else.
I can definitely agree with this. A good start would be lifting all restrictions on MJ as a test pilot program. It's just a stupid plant...let it grow, and watch a good chunk of the underground street crime and gangs begin to wither and die.
Canada is at least trying...the US is on some right wing rampage from hell..Progress is not made by everyone joining some new fad,
and reveling in it's loyalty. It's made by forming coalitions
over specific principles, goals, and policies.
http://i36.tinypic.com/66j31x.jpg
(\__/)
( o.O)
(")_(")0 -
RolandTD20Kdrummer wrote:I can definitely agree with this. A good start would be lifting all restrictions on MJ as a test pilot program. It's just a stupid plant...let it grow, and watch a good chunk of the underground street crime and gangs begin to wither and die.
Canada is at least trying...the US is on some right wing rampage from hell..
I'm with you on the fact that we should try a test program with legalizing pot. Now that I live in a city that's a major transfer station for heroin and other addictives, I really don't know how that should be handled yet. They made the streets safer in New York, and a lot of the major drug traffic moved to my little rinky dink police departmented town with a few entrance ramps to I-95, so I'm getting a pretty good first hand look at how this all works.
I actually think legalizing hard stuff would help with all the peripheral crime that goes on, like shootings and turf wars and street thugs, but there's really no easy way to go about legalizing it without the government controlling it.
We DEFINITELY aren't winning the war by spraying fields in Columbia and Ecuador with defoliants to rid OUR country of coca, or now, Afganistan again for poppies. This did a lot of damage to the landscape AND innocent farmers' skin, and who knows what will happen to them later, long term, as in Agent Orange from my era.
I was down there a few years ago and the common question I got from Ecuadorians and Columbians was, "Why do you spray our land and burn our skin? Stop the demand in your country and there won't need to be drug wars. If it doesn't grow here, it'll grow anywhere in South America." This was in the remote jungles and hills, where people barely in touch with the world even know US politics and the principals of supply and demand better than most people from the US.
Ok, well I forget what I was talking about, as usual. (probably due to legal wine!) Be kind, man
Don't be mankind. ~Captain Beefheart
__________________________________0 -
Poppies....POPPIES!!!!
Okay, here's my take. If you wanna get stoned on pot, grow it on your balcony or fire escape. If you wanna get high on crack or cocaine, learn how to build your own little mini-lab, or gain a friend who has one.
Stop buying it, start making it on your own.
And for all our sakes, don't sell it.
Case closed. That simple.Feels Good Inc.0 -
we've already got a pretty damn significant war going on that we're never going to win and that happens to be sucking the economy dry, so maybe since the WOD has been lost since it's conception we should just make it as done as disco, and concentrate on one travesty at as time.Do you see the way that tree bends?
Does it inspire?
Leaning out to catch the sun's rays...
A lesson to be applied.
Best night of my life. . .
Noblesville, IN 06-22-03.
myspace.com/justonemorebottle0 -
The government already runs the drug trade. They enforce laws that do not help users. They use tax payer money to fund other countries' wars on drugs, as a way of securing political favours and support for other foreign programs. They let drugs 'slip' into the US when it's convenient or beneficial to them. At least if it was regulated, the money trails could be audited, and purity levels could be monitored...oh, and a much much better treatment system could be implemented. THAT is the only way to help addicts. Throwing them in jail will not straighten them out, period. Recreational users of any drug should not be imprisoned for a personal choice.
I don't think using MJ as a pilot program would be all that beneficial...it's apples and oranges. In my experience, people that find their MJ use is becoming a problem, simply stop smoking or cut down....it's not that simple with coke or heroin.
Bu2 - telling peole to make their own cocaine and heroin is unrealistic...that's pretty much impossible to do in North America.0 -
Why should those of us against drug use have to pay taxes for government funded "treatment systems"? If people could actuallyl use drugs responsibly, and it wasn't so addictive, there would be no argument against legal drug use. But people prove time and time again in general, en masse that they cannot control drug use. It is dangerous and irresponsible. The war on drugs will never cease. Legalization will never happen. Except maybe marijuana as a medicinal purpose with a prescription.Drowned Out wrote:The government already runs the drug trade. They enforce laws that do not help users. They use tax payer money to fund other countries' wars on drugs, as a way of securing political favours and support for other foreign programs. They let drugs 'slip' into the US when it's convenient or beneficial to them. At least if it was regulated, the money trails could be audited, and purity levels could be monitored...oh, and a much much better treatment system could be implemented. THAT is the only way to help addicts. Throwing them in jail will not straighten them out, period. Recreational users of any drug should not be imprisoned for a personal choice.
I don't think using MJ as a pilot program would be all that beneficial...it's apples and oranges. In my experience, people that find their MJ use is becoming a problem, simply stop smoking or cut down....it's not that simple with coke or heroin.
Bu2 - telling peole to make their own cocaine and heroin is unrealistic...that's pretty much impossible to do in North America.Makes much more sense, to live in the present tense.
A truly liberal person is conservative when necessary.
Pro-life by choice.0 -
Juberoo wrote:Why should those of us against drug use have to pay taxes for government funded "treatment systems"? If people could actuallyl use drugs responsibly, and it wasn't so addictive, there would be no argument against legal drug use. But people prove time and time again in general, en masse that they cannot control drug use. It is dangerous and irresponsible. The war on drugs will never cease. Legalization will never happen. Except maybe marijuana as a medicinal purpose with a prescription.
Your money is being used already to fight them! Probably MORE of your money than you'd need to put towards treatment. And it IS addictive, nothing you can do about that...prohibition has not stopped drug use, so why do you think trying to help the people that are addicted, instead of punishing them is a bad idea? Yes it's dangerous and irresponsible...but what has prohibition EVER done to convince people of that? If the war on drugs never ceases, it will be because people refused to open their eyes to the alternatives.
oh, and please explain to me why you're against drug use? try to give a response that cannot be applied to prescribed drugs, alcohol or tobacco, and does not involve the words "it's illegal".0 -
no shit man! does anyone honestly believe more tax dollars would go to treatment systems and legalization processes then already go to the ever-worthless WOD?Drowned Out wrote:Your money is being used already to fight them! Probably MORE of your money than you'd need to put towards treatment. And it IS addictive, nothing you can do about that...prohibition has not stopped drug use, so why do you think trying to help the people that are addicted, instead of punishing them is a bad idea? Yes it's dangerous and irresponsible...but what has prohibition EVER done to convince people of that? If the war on drugs never ceases, it will be because people refused to open their eyes to the alternatives.
oh, and please explain to me why you're against drug use? try to give a response that cannot be applied to prescribed drugs, alcohol or tobacco, and does not involve the words "it's illegal".Do you see the way that tree bends?
Does it inspire?
Leaning out to catch the sun's rays...
A lesson to be applied.
Best night of my life. . .
Noblesville, IN 06-22-03.
myspace.com/justonemorebottle0 -
And I don't mind my money going to fight against drug use. But I'll be damned if I am going to pay for your detox when you fuck your ass up.Drowned Out wrote:Your money is being used already to fight them! Probably MORE of your money than you'd need to put towards treatment. And it IS addictive, nothing you can do about that...prohibition has not stopped drug use, so why do you think trying to help the people that are addicted, instead of punishing them is a bad idea? Yes it's dangerous and irresponsible...but what has prohibition EVER done to convince people of that? If the war on drugs never ceases, it will be because people refused to open their eyes to the alternatives.
oh, and please explain to me why you're against drug use? try to give a response that cannot be applied to prescribed drugs, alcohol or tobacco, and does not involve the words "it's illegal".Makes much more sense, to live in the present tense.
A truly liberal person is conservative when necessary.
Pro-life by choice.0 -
but if the money that 'fights drug use' just fuels a war between cops and underground druglords--who are responsible for more crimes and distribution of addiction than anybody--than how the hell is that a useful implementation of tax dollars?
today the government spends between 40 and 60 billion dollars each year on the war on drugs.
40-60 billion.....if ANYbody in here can convince ANYbody else that this is even close to almost being close to being worth it, they're gonna be one persuasive motherfucker.
also, a marijuana smoker is arrested every 42 seconds in america. this leads annually to more arrests than arrests for murder, rape, molestation, and aggravated assault COMBINED....good to see the police going after the real bad guys...
heroin and cociane are cheaper now than in previous decades, yet are more concentrated and potent. heroin and marijuana are as easily available as they were in the 70s. the drug war corrupts police officers just as much as prohibition in the 20's did, and i fail to see how it's not obvious that the government has never been winning this war, is not winning it now, and will never even come close to winning it.Do you see the way that tree bends?
Does it inspire?
Leaning out to catch the sun's rays...
A lesson to be applied.
Best night of my life. . .
Noblesville, IN 06-22-03.
myspace.com/justonemorebottle0 -
you'd rather pay to send me to jail?Juberoo wrote:And I don't mind my money going to fight against drug use. But I'll be damned if I am going to pay for your detox when you fuck your ass up.0 -
really good point...given the recitivism rate among drug offenders in prison, incarceration obviously does nothing but cost tax dollars so someone can be locked up for a few years before they go back in the streets and use again. tax dollars for treatment plans might actually help people kick addiction and quit using....man....so...obvious..it hurts....Drowned Out wrote:you'd rather pay to send me to jail?Do you see the way that tree bends?
Does it inspire?
Leaning out to catch the sun's rays...
A lesson to be applied.
Best night of my life. . .
Noblesville, IN 06-22-03.
myspace.com/justonemorebottle0 -
It seems to me that the reasons for drug and alcohol abuse are social, psychological, and even physiological. I don't think this is not a problem that laws can solve.
Until we understand why and can affect the reasons that people desire drugs, nothing will change except perhaps that drug problems will be used as an excuse to eliminate our Constitutional right to privacy.The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance,
but the illusion of knowledge.
~Daniel Boorstin
Only a life lived for others is worth living.
~Albert Einstein0 -
Quote:Originally Posted by baraka
It seems to me that the reasons for drug and alcohol abuse are social, psychological, and even physiological. I don't think this is not a problem that laws can solve.
Until we understand why and can affect the reasons that people desire drugs, nothing will change except perhaps that drug problems will be used as an excuse to eliminate our Constitutional right to privacy.
yes, read some of the recent posts in the war in the marijuana thread going. i put up a decent post of studies conducted that show how much more complex addiction is than previous decades of thought have suggested.
__________________Do you see the way that tree bends?
Does it inspire?
Leaning out to catch the sun's rays...
A lesson to be applied.
Best night of my life. . .
Noblesville, IN 06-22-03.
myspace.com/justonemorebottle0
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