DEA EXHIBIT TRAFFICKING, TERROR

A photograph of President Bush waving a flag after the Sept. 11
attacks is juxtaposed against a black-and-white image of a black
mother smoking crack cocaine in bed next to her baby. Larger-than-life
portraits of Osama bin Laden and Pablo Escobar line the walls. The
central message of a traveling Drug Enforcement Administration exhibit
unveiled Friday at Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry is that
terrorism and drugs are inextricably linked.

Advocates of legalization who are leafleting outside the exhibit say
the DEA is leaving out an important part of the story. Critics agree
that drug trafficking provides a potentially lucrative revenue stream
for terrorist organizations. But they say the profit is fueled by the
government's war on drugs, which creates a situation akin to
prohibition of alcohol.

"If we taxed and regulated drugs, terrorists wouldn't have drugs as a
source of profit," said Tom Angell of the nonprofit Students for
Sensible Drug Policy, which focuses on restoring financial aid for
college students with drug convictions.

"With the connection to Prohibition in Chicago, we should know
better," said Pete Guither, a professor of theater management at
Illinois State University and founder of the blog DrugWarRant.com.

DEA spokesman Steve Robertson responded: "We're a law enforcement
agency - we enforce the laws as they are written. Congress makes the
laws. People say if we didn't have [drug] laws, there wouldn't be a
problem, but there was a problem before, and that's why laws were
established."

Critics of the DEA exhibit, which opened in Dallas on Sept. 11, 2003,
also question its linking of drugs to al-Qaida. Another Web site with
which Guither is affiliated, www.dea targetsamerica.com, quotes the
Sept. 11 commission report as finding that "there is no reliable
evidence that Bin Ladin was involved in or made his money through drug
trafficking."

The 2001 attacks are the centerpiece, with a display of rubble and
artifacts from the World Trade Center site under a banner reading
"Traffickers, Terrorists and You."

"For al-Qaida it's hard" to prove a link, said DEA public affairs
chief Garrison Courtney. "I don't think we're saying 9/11 was caused
by drug financing. But we're saying there is a link between drugs and
terror, and Sept. 11 is a poignant example of terrorism. Terrorists
don't hold bake sales to raise money."

The exhibit includes a list of organizations designated as terrorist
by the State Department, with the explanation that "nearly 50 percent"
of them get funding through drug trafficking. There are references to
heroin production funding the Taliban.

It does not mention that the Taliban publicly opposed heroin
production; that the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime reported
in 2003 that production of opium poppies in Afghanistan rose after the
Taliban was overthrown; or that a top U.S. antidrug official recently
acknowledged allies' doubts about the effectiveness of poppy
eradication in Afghanistan.