DRUG WAR TRUMPS PORT SAFETY

The top objective of the U.S. Coast Guard's anti-terrorism strategy is
to protect what's called the "U.S. Maritime Domain," including
American ports.

But it is hard to take seriously the idea that ports are being
effectively protected when the Coast Guard spent more tax dollars last
year fighting the war on drugs than has been spent in total on port
security since Sept. 11, 2001.

Since becoming part of the Department of Homeland Security in early
2003, the Coast Guard reports interdicting at sea some 340 tons of
cocaine bound for the United States.

For 2005 alone, it was 150 tons, shattering all previous annual
seizure records.

This record-breaking drug interdiction takes place mostly in the
"transit zone," 6 million square miles of water that includes the
Caribbean Sea, the Gulf of Mexico, and the eastern Pacific Ocean, as
well as the territorial waters of cooperating nations.

Monitoring all that ocean keeps valuable Coast Guard assets busy far
away from any American port.

The Coast Guard's budget was increased 9 percent to $6.3 billion by
the Department of Homeland Security Act of 2005. A 13 percent request
for drug interdiction pushed the agency's drug-war spending to $650
million in 2005, an increase of more than $100 million in the last
couple of years.

That same Homeland Security Act also provided a little over $100
million for implementation of the Maritime Transportation Security Act
(MTSA), enacted by Congress in 2002 to establish a counterterrorism
program for America's 361 ports, and for which the Coast Guard is the
lead agency.

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that while the United States
has spent billions on other security measures since Sept. 11 terrorist
attacks, "it has spent just $630 million to improve security at the
nation's ports."

Of course, coastal security does not just mean ports. Recent news
reports described the Coast Guard intercepting a suspect ship bound
for the United States some 200 miles off the East Coast.

This is an excellent example of combining intelligence with long-
range assets to "push out the border" and meet potential threats
before they get to America's shores.

The 2006 National Drug Control Strategy, which federal drug czar John
Walters recently introduced in Denver, brags about how the Coast Guard
Cutter Hamilton and its embarked MH-68 helicopter "dominated" parts
of the eastern Pacific on drug patrol in 2005. Hamilton, among other
things, busted a go-fast boat "some 300 miles west of Ecuador," and
"searched for a trafficker speedboat in the remote areas north of the
Galapagos Islands."

Needless to say, Coast Guard ships chasing dopers around the Galapagos
Islands are obviously unavailable to meet a potential threat
approaching the American coast.

The National Drug Control Strategy claims that thanks to "successes in
our overseas market-disruption strategy," the U.S. retail price of
cocaine rose 19 percent to $170 per gram in 2005.

This is part of the rationale for expanding Coast Guard transit zone
drug patrols, at the expense of port and coastal security, in 2006 and
beyond.

But even a casual look shows that allowing the drug war to trump
counterterror can hardly be called a "success."

Writing on the recent spike in cocaine prices, Ted Galen Carpenter
from the Washington, D.C.-based Cato Institute notes: "For the past 12
years, street prices of cocaine have fluctuated between $120 and $190
per gram. Clearly, a price of $170 is well within that 'normal' range."

What the seizure statistics and the massive range of cocaine flow
estimates (between 325 and 675 metric tons of cocaine a year in the
transit zone) - along with price and availability of cocaine in the
U.S. - suggest is that more cocaine is getting through than ever before.

So not only does cocaine interdiction distract the Coast Guard from
its port security mission, cocaine interdiction itself is failing.

Most disturbing is that Congress, the Coast Guard and the drug czar
all seem fine with this - and, in fact, want even more of the same.