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War On Drugs And Terror The War on Drugs is lost!
The US has over the past century placed a heavy emphasis on declaring war on problems that often do not require a war to deal with them. Instead of war these problems usually require a far more subtle and nuanced In order to see how the laws of unintended consequences are unleashed when a scattershot approach is taken, it is quite edifying to examine the lessons of the so called ‘War on Drugs’. This is a long-running global effort which highlights the failures of the blunderbuss approach to an abstruse set of problems. It is useful and informative to look at how this particular war interfaces with, fuels, and is indeed inseparable, from the War on Terror. This is a war that has been fought on many fronts – Colombia, Laos, Afghanistan, Iran, Central America - and appears to be headed in much in the same direction of the US Prohibition on alcohol, which as history reminds us, the bootleggers won. They are, after all, now major players in the international trade in alcohol, with friends in high places. Similarly in the war on drugs, the global criminal underground is by all accounts winning. The kingpins remain at large as essential cogs as both intelligence assets of the west - in a long established modus operandi of covert operations - and as major contributors to the global economy. Let us not forget that the international drug trade is estimated to be worth anything between US$500 billion to one trillion US dollars per annum. That is around a tenth of the amount of the total US GDP, a not insignificant amount in global terms. Most of this money finds its way through the underworld, into tax havens and then is redirected directly into the economies of the developed world. This amount of money does not have insignificant influence, financially and politically. I know that there are endless conspiracy theories about the Drugs trade and the Bush and other powerful US families but lets just ignore these conspiracies for the time being and concentrate on what is known. Whilst the major players in the drugs trade remain at large, the US jail industry is rapidly being enlarged to accept the steep increase in drugs related arrests from the small players, the man on the street. It appears as if this is a nation not at war with drugs, but with itself. There were over one and a half million drugs arrests in 2003, half of them for marijuana. One in three prisoners in the world are now incarcerated in US’s increasingly privatised jail industry, propelling an industry that is worth at least US$30 billion annually. The war on drugs is also an inherently racist war, just as the war on terror is. In this war it is not Muslims who are targeted but people of any colour besides caucasian. This arose from the very roots of the war on drugs. The deeply racist Jesse Anslinger, the first US Drug Czar, demonised marijuana thus; "Most marijuana smokers are Negroes, Hispanics, jazz musicians, and entertainers. Their satanic music is driven by marijuana, and marijuana smoking by white women makes them want to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers, and others. It is a drug that causes insanity, criminality, and death -- the most violence-causing drug in the history of mankind." This fundamentalist thinking remains pretty mainstream in the present neo-conservative run political cabal. The results show. Of course many will say that drug use is more prevalent amongst black people, but this is yet another racist construct. White drug users outnumber black by around five to one in the US, yet more than 55% of prisoners incarcerated for drug offences are black, only 23% are white. Of those jailed for drug offences, nearly 50% are for marijuana related offences. Then there is the important fact that the US corporate run prison system uses prison labour to manufacture goods in what is a repeat of what occurred after the emancipation of Blacks in the South, after the bloody US civil war was fought around this matter. At that time white legislators, particularly in the South enacted nuisance laws as unjust and petty as any under apartheid – such as failure to show respect to whites, or dumb insolence - then incarcerated the black population and hired out their prisoners to farmers as cheap labour. Nothing much has changed, it seems. But even given these facts and statistics, the war on drugs is far more selective than it appears. After all, the nemesis of the present US leadership, Osama Bin Laden, was recruited to the anti Soviet mujahidin by US operatives. In those days most mujahidin worked closely with drug smugglers to fund their struggles against the Soviets. Much of Osama bin Ladens hate of the US arises not so much from his hatred of the nation but of its manipulative manner; he saw how the US used the mujahidin and then discarded them once Russia was sufficiently weakened by its own Vietnam, the first Afghani vs superpower war. It was only the rise of the Taliban which caused US support to return to that area to contain that problem, but it was a covert war that the US lost, despite its best efforts to cut deals for fuel pipelines through this strategic region of the world. The present Afghan situation is a direct result of US destabilisation and Bin Laden knows this. He is a dangerous man who turned around and bit his trainers. Around the same time there was the Iran-Contra scandal, where the CIA was found to have engaged in drug smuggling in order to fund insurgency operations. The rot in the US went, and possibly still goes, right to the top. All of this is public knowledge available to anybody who cares to research the facts. John Kerry was almost single-handedly involved in investigating and exposing the Contra arms for drugs deal. In this deal US operative Oliver North, together with other operatives, was the fall guy. But the man in charge of that entire operation was one slippery John Negroponte, who has now been given control of the entire US State security apparatus. He of course pleads ignorance of any of this, from the insurgency that happened during his watch, on his doorstep when he was US ambassador to Honduras, from where the US funded Contra insurgency was run. Negroponte’s plea of ignorance is highly unlikely, given the evidence for what went on in that war and the encouragement from the very highest levels, namely Ronald Regan as president, and more relevant to the war on drugs, the then vice president, previous head of the CIA and later president George HW Bush. Despite the billions spent on the war on drugs - over US$20 billion a year goes to this programme annually in the US – the flow of drugs and the number of drug users have not diminished one iota. Just as much cocaine enters the states now as did 10 years ago. Marijuana use continues to spiral despite repressive laws, including mandatory jail sentences for possession in many states. Heroin use remains alarmingly high around the world, no thanks to the US war on drugs. In fact things have just got a whole lot worse on the heroin front since the US booted out the Taliban from power in Afghanistan. The US government gave the Taliban over US$ 40 million in 2001 to destroy opium crops. It then removed them from power whilst ostensibly going after Osama Bin Laden when it invaded Afghanistan. Since the US has taken over in Afghanistan the opium crop has rocketed to levels even higher than those that existed before the Taliban regime. Over 3000 tonnes of opium were cultivated in 2002, more in 2003 and a similar amount in 2004, putting a tidy US$300 million back into the underground economy each year. By 2006 it had risen to around 6000 tonnes. This year it is up again. The UN estimates that the drug trade earned the Afghani economy around two and a half billion US dollars of value in 2006 alone. The number is approaching 10 billion dollars since the Taliban fell. Talk about counterproductive. It actually makes you wonder if there is some sort of conspiracy going on – after all surely nobody could be so stupid as to permit such blatant abuse of the system? Goodness sakes, people get life sentences in the USA for being caught with tiny amounts of this very same substance? Just what the hell is going on? Crikey, I cannot even open a bank account anywhere in the world because big-bloody-brother is looking for drugs under everyone’s bed, except of course where they really are. Its all so bizarre as to be absurd that anyone could consider the war on drugs anything approaching a realistic programme. Just as the war on drugs has been and continues to be connected to the war on terror, the war on terror has served, if anything, to worsen the situation. US support of autocratic regimes in its frontline states in central Asia, such as Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan has enabled increased drug smuggling routes to open up across this region as drugs are used to finance further insurrection and resistance movements. From central Asia it is a short leap to Turkey and Eastern Europe and hence the wealthy markets of the developed world where the drug lords increase their value to the cost of addicts and global society at large. Just as the war on drugs is falling apart in Asia it is in equally chaotic in Columbia. This is probably why Condoleeza Rice announced the end of the US$3 billion Plan Colombia, the Colombian theatre of the war on drugs, in May 2005. Two elite US Army Rangers, supposedly training and supporting Colombian government forces, were found to have sold over 30, 000 rounds of ammunition to right wing militias. These militias, together with US forces are alleged to have been implicated in working to destabilise Venezuela by opening up insurgency in the west of this oil rich country that thumbs its nose at the regional US hegemony. Oh boy, is this all not rather a familiar scenario by now? Two other US armed forces personnel were recently caught smuggling 14 kilograms of pure cocaine from Columbia, in a US air force transport plane bound for the USA. The very same aircraft that has been documented flying renditioned US prisoners around the world was recently found crashed in Central America with a load of what on board? Cocaine! All of this seems darkly reminiscent of the destabilisation of Central America by the same old crowd which are now far more entrenched in the halls of power in the USA than they were in the ‘80s. More worryingly these sorts of actions are bound to deepen already simmering resentment across the region, further destabilising this already volatile area. Instead of curbing drug use, manufacture and trade in narcotics around the world the US war on drugs has been at best counterproductive. At worst it is setting up another round of blow-back that will haunt the US as much as its early encouragement of Osama Bin Laden did after US intelligence forces cast him adrift after the fall of the Soviet run Afghan regime. Instead of targeting the main drug lords, the primary victims of the inflexible anti-drug crusade are those snared around the fringes, be they peasant farmers in Columbia, Afghanistan or Mexico, backyard growers of cannabis or small time ‘dime’ dealers in urban areas, consigned to poverty, death, displacement and incarceration. In turn the War on Drugs alienates people, destabilises nations and regions and is patently and obviously counterproductive on almost every conceivable level. The war on drugs is a fine example of misplaced priorities, of ideological bias trumping common sense and of the parochial and shortsighted vision of the present US leadership. It is what happens when you put the most fundamentally puritan folk in the US in charge of cleaning up the world for the rest of us. These people are so naïve and ill informed on how the ways of the world really work that the real bad guys not only find lots of room to operate but they by all accounts operate from within this very system. If it were a joke it would be funny. The problem is that the failure, no the completely reverse of the stated intentions creates massive crime problems everywhere, from Cape Town to Rio de Janeiro, and from Moscow to Motown and pretty much everywhere in between. Disenfranchised kids get into dangerous drugs like heroin and crack and amphetamines that are classified in the same category as cannabis by the same naïfs. Just as the war in terror has made the world a far more dangerous place than it has been since the end of the cold war, the war on drugs has opened up the world to the drug trade as never before. The results are on our doorsteps, with traditional drug use being augmented by potent artificial stimulants such as ice, tik, methamphetamine and regional drugs such as methaqualone and crack and now of course cheap Afghan heroin. Well yippee yay, the yanks have screwed up again. The war on drugs has been shown to be a dismal failure but Condoleeza Rice's announcement of the termination of Plan Columbia will not mean the end of the war on drugs. Instead efforts at controlling the drugs trade will almost certainly be meshed into the war on terror, repeating recent history. This will inevitably overstrain US resources, already in chaos from partisan appointments by the Bush administration who have essentially re-organised the entire structure of the intelligence arm of US government. Given that the same people are in charge as were during the Iran Contra scandal, we cannot hold out much hope that things will get better. Unless that is, you own shares in the US prison industrial complex and the military industrial complex. After all, is the American dream not about making as much money as possible, by any means possible, as long as you aren’t getting caught out? Plan Columbia was all for naught. Certainly it is true that the cocaine trade is no longer in full control of the cartels, such as the notorious Cali cartel. Instead its control has moved to both the right and left wing paramilitary forces, defined by the relationships they have with US interests in the region and to an amorphous network of cabals that work in the common interest. And of course to a shadowy network of well connected brokers who appear to manage to bridge the divide between the enforcers and the producers. It makes reality look like a long bad trip. And let’s not forget these relationships also include oil, another critical component of US foreign policy in Colombia as much as elsewhere. This could be behind the shift in US policy. Colombia’s oil is far more important to them at this juncture than the war on drugs. This would also correspond more closely to established US global policy. The war on drugs is as doomed to failure as the war on terror. Unless a far more focussed effort is made on reducing poverty, on building hope, hospitals and schools, until the poor of the world have something to look forward to, the rest of the world will inevitably come to the same conclusion as Osama Bin Laden, that the US is the great manipulator, a godless, profit driven, greedy, immoral and self serving superpower. While Bin Laden chose to enter battle with the US, others amongst us who believe in peace and who believe in building a sustainable future can see better ways to do things. With even a tiny percentage of the amounts spent on the war on Iraq and Afghanistan, the US could buy peace around the world by building schools, by putting health care in place, by actually spreading democracy and not supporting insurgencies and corrupt and violent dictatorships. If the US did actually stand for what it continually insists that it does – freedom, democracy and all the rest - it could rebuild its image in the world. But this is not going to happen with the present administration, hawks and corporate lackeys to a man, led by a boy president dressed up but with no party to attend besides those his puppetmaster, the vile Dick Cheney, creates. Show me a recent US president that dressed up in military gear to declare the end of hostilities and I will show you Eisenhower. The difference is Ike warned us about people like Bush, Cheney and the Military Industrial complex. He could see the evil, not be the evil. Just as the USA has the means to win the war on drugs – and for that matter the war on terror – it shows no signs of immediate reversion to sanity. To win this war it must move fundamentally from its confrontational attitude with the rest of the world and move toward becoming a benign superpower, supporting and enriching the world, not concentrating the worlds riches by nefarious means. The economic system that drives the US is inseparable from the war on terror, the war on drugs and the war that the neo-conservatives wage daily on our global environment. These are people for whom impeachment is almost too good. Perhaps they need some of what was dished out to the supposed baddies at Abu Ghraib, that hell hole whose name Bush could not even pronounce – along with lots of other words like ‘my pet goat’. One solution would be to put the bunch of them before the international criminal court but this may well be the central reason that the US refuses to recognise that global legal body of last resort, just as it thumbs its nose at the UN. And on it goes………a global psychopath run amok, spreading war, drugs and pestilence around the world in the name of greed. We all know it is not entirely the fault of the American people. Instead we shall have to lay it all at the door of Darth Vader – who presently resides in the guise of Dick Cheney. He who needs his pharmaceutical drugs to keep him alive as he sneeringly dumps tons of dangerous narcotics into the cesspool of poverty that his government encourages in every way at their disposal. We certainly need change – a change for the better and a change of tack – if we are to fix the evil that these particularly wicked people have unleashed upon the world in the guise of the wars on drugs and terror. Is it not remarkable that the Bible itself warns of the Antichrist as someone who will pretend to stand up for good? But that is a story for another time…………..and you may just hear it right here.
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