Pubdate: Tue, 29 Apr 2003 Source: Edmonton Sun (CN AB) Copyright: 2003, Canoe Limited Partnership. Contact: http://www.fyiedmonton.com/htdocs/edmsun.shtml Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/135 Author: Jeremy Loome RISKY BUSINESS... The international war on drugs was doomed from the start, say critics In February 2001, on the edge of Afghanistan's "Desert of Death," troops set poppy fields ablaze, crushed others with tractors and even pulled them up by the roots by hand. It ended a campaign begun by the Taliban eight months earlier to kill production of heroin's main ingredient. The Taliban was reacting to international criticism that their fundamentalist state was supported by drug money. They made $30 million a year taxing the $180-million annual crop. Both the UN and the U.S. declared the campaign a success, suggesting up to 95% of the poppy production was wiped out. In fact, it was judged so successful that a request for aid from local "non-government" agencies was greeted with a $43-million grant from the U.S. government that March. But critics say the grant was the latest example of how the U.S. fight against drugs has clashed with foreign policy to make foreign dictators and despots wealthy. And, when combined with prices driven up by prohibition, they say it has helped terrorists kill people. ERADICATION ONLY DROVE UP THE PRICE Less than two years after the poppy crop purge, the Taliban reign is over. Despite U.S. willingness to work with them on drug issues, the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, ended any pretense of co-operation and led to an invasion. But even before the Taliban was tossed, evidence existed that the poppy trade had resumed full force, despite the U.S. grants. UN officials in Afghanistan reported in mid-October 2001 that Afghan production was set to resume. Neighbouring states had scoffed at the earlier Taliban "destruction" of the crop. Tajikistan reported during early 2001 more heroin than ever crossed its border. And The Financial Times reported the Taliban had stockpiles of poppies. "In fact, all they were actually doing by getting rid of some crops was driving up the price," says Ted Carpenter, the author of more than a dozen books on foreign policy and a terrorism expert with the Washington, D.C.-based libertarian think-tank, the Cato Institute. Earlier this month, The Associated Press reported the U.S. Drug Control Program is reopening a Kabul office and the Drug Enforcement Administration has staff at the U.S. embassy. The region's governor told the press that it was back to business as usual because "if we try to enforce a ban on the farmers, it wouldn't be good for us." In the end, says Carpenter, most of the $43 million probably wound up in Taliban hands, given that it controlled all of the agencies within its borders. That made it the latest example of U.S policy not only funding an extremist government but actually making the drug business easier for them. "The only real reason that they have value to terrorists is that they're illegal, which makes them harder to get. Plain and simple," says Carpenter. HISTORY OF EASING THE FLOW As Carpenter points out, American foreign policy decisions have a history of both easing the flow of drugs into North America and keeping prices high by propping up the dealers: - - The CIA ferried opium for Vietnamese warlords during Vietnam's civil war in the 1960s; Air America, a CIA airline, transported the drugs between Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, with some of the resulting product hooking U.S. troops. - - The Reagan administration's near-decade of financial support for Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega and his "commitment" to the war against drugs, four years before kidnapping him and prosecuting him for being a trafficker; - - According to congressional testimony from a senior bureaucrat with the National Security Archive in Washington there was "concrete evidence that U.S. officials - the White House, NSC and CIA - not only knew about and condoned drug smuggling in and around the Contra war, but in some cases collaborated with, protected, and even paid known drug smugglers who were deemed important players in the Reagan administration's obsessed covert effort to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua." - - Disgraced colonel Oliver North, implicated in the Contra funding scandal, went on to recommend leniency for a drug dealer charged with trying to smuggle 345 kilograms of cocaine into the U.S. because he had worked with the CIA while a general in the Honduran military. He got less than five years in a minimum-security pen. - - The current U.S. support for the new government in Colombia has largely ignored evidence, says the Cato Institute, that its president, Alvaro Uribe, got money from the right-wing United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia, a drug-funded group on the U.S.'s own list of terrorist groups. In the end, promoting "democracy" in countries that are net illicit drug exporters has allowed governments the U.S. wants onside politically to profit from the trade, says Eugene Oscapella, head of the Canadian Foundation on Drug Policy. "The Americans aren't stupid. When we speak of why drug laws are entrenched, well, the U.S. government has over decades used the drug trade to help support groups with which it is ideologically aligned," says Oscapella. "They will tolerate the drug traffic if it serves a foreign policy goal. This became clear last year when the State Department effectively said 'well, yeah, we know the (Afghan) Northern Alliance is trafficking drugs but we need their support.' Drug policy is subservient to foreign policy." MORE HEROIN AND COCAINE THAN EVER But it's not just subservience; In the 1950s, the U.S. ran irrigation projects in Afghanistan, bringing in engineers to help feed the arid land. Despite good intentions, that unwittingly let Afghanis cultivate opium poppies. Then, between 1979 and 1982, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, officials with the Pakistani military claim the CIA worked with its secret service to turn the opium into heroin in the hopes of hooking Soviet soldiers. The effect was dramatic. In a region where heroin was rare, Pakistan reported 4.1 million citizens hooked within two years. And within a decade, Afghanistan's drug industry was only marginally smaller than Burma's, the world's largest producer. Between its policies in South America and Afghanistan, critics say U.S. foreign policy has ensured more heroin and cocaine than ever wound up on western shores. But 10 years later, maverick conservative columnist Arianna Huffington wrote in her syndicated column (online and in major U.S. newspapers), Feb. 7, 2002, "in The World According to George W. Bush and his drug czar, John Walters, the kid smoking a joint at a party is the moral equivalent of Osama bin Laden or Mohammed Atta." BUSH: FIGHT TERRORISM In its media kit linking terrorism with drugs, the U.S. government says 12 of the 28 major terrorist groups partially fund operations through drug sales or by trading drugs. Last January, the U.S. government paid $3 million for ads during the Super Bowl to push the message. "It's so important for Americans to know that the traffic in drugs finances the work of terror, sustaining terrorists, that terrorists use drug profits to fund their cells to commit acts of murder. If you quit drugs, you join the fight against terror in America," said U.S. President George Bush. But drug profits only exist, says Oscapella, because of how hard they are to get compared to mainstream products. Therefore, as long as the U.S. anti-drug campaign only manages to stop a fraction of the narcotics coming into the country, it will remain readily available but risky to buy and expensive. This year the U.S. government has predicted that despite massive increases in security since Sept. 11, 2001, at most 20% of all drugs coming in will be intercepted. "I cannot believe that with all of their intellectual power, the U.S. does not understand how drug prohibition finances terrorism," says Oscapella. "And yet they are the world's leading proponent of maintaining that drug prohibition. They want to go to war over terrorism but they won't look at stopping one of the major sources of terrorism funding in the world. Through drug prohibition, they're supporting the groups that are trying to kill us." That position is echoed by the U.S.-based drug policy alliance, which noted earlier this month that the U.S. government has pulled the plug on the advertising campaign. "It was meant to tell skeptical adults that the failed drug war still mattered after 9-11," said Ethan Nadelmann, the group's executive director. "No wonder young people ignored it." Nadelmann called the terrorism-by-drugs campaign grossly misleading. "Blaming Americans for funding terrorism is like blaming alcohol consumers in the 1920s for Al Capone's violence," he said. According to the United Nations Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention's 2001 report on global drug trends, the wholesale price of a gram of opium in Aghanistan was three to seven cents. That same gram sells in North America for about $39, or up to 1,300 times what the producers charge. By the time it gets to a customer in North America, the drug has been processed, refined and smuggled or bribed past customs agents. Without those additional costs - all extensions of prohibition policy - the product has little value. The same is true of cocaine, which according to the UN is grown for up to $400 a kilogram in Colombia but after being smuggled, sells for as much as $100,000 per kilogram in the U.S. In 2001, drug crime was worth as much as $450 billion, and, based on International Monetary Fund figures, would account for about a third of all money laundered through various financial systems around the globe. "Prohibition greases the wheels of terrorism just as it greases the wheels of organized crime," according to Oscapella's Senate brief. The latter comparison has been recognized by police - even among departments that officially promote drug prohibition. Though his membership association repeatedly states its support for the war on drugs, the head of Edmonton's Green Team - a city police/RCMP task force that fights marijuana grow operations - said as much last year in The Sun. "One of the older guys compared it to Prohibition, not that he was around then, but maybe that's almost where we're at," said Det. Clayton Sach. "People want booze and in the old days we didn't give it to them and the mobsters made lots of money. Well, now the Hells Angels are making lots of money." LEGAL PRODUCTS ON THE BLACK MARKET But cigarettes and the prescription painkiller Oxycontin - both thriving on the black market - demonstrate legalizing doesn't get rid of demand, argues veteran Drug Enforcement Administration spokesman Will Glaspy. "The bottom line is, there would be a black market for drugs until you made every drug available to anyone who wanted it, free and in unlimited quantities," said Glaspy. "A perfect example of this is the recent case where a man was buying cigarettes in Carolina for pennies on the dollar and selling them up in Michigan for a profit, then turning around and giving that money to terrorist organizations. "Cigarettes are certainly legal but there's still a black market for cigarettes at a reduced price. And that's what this guy was doing: providing his proceeds to a terrorist organization." There's a big flaw in the argument, Carpenter notes: to get cigarettes "at a reduced price" involves stealing them for resale, at which point they're no longer a legal product. "Terrorist groups are not making their money off alcohol or tobacco, because to create a black market for those products, you actually have to sell them for less than their market value," notes Carpenter. "That's a ridiculous analogy." Glaspy dismisses any such suggestion. "Typically, the people who make those arguments want drugs completely legal because they want to get high." - --- MAP posted-by: Josh