DRUGS: THE WAR NO ONE WANTS TO WIN

The U.S. boasts the world's largest and fastest growing prison
population. More than 60 percent of inmates - their ranks have doubled
in the last decade - are serving time for drug-related crimes, which
now account for better than one-third of all felonies.

Substance abuse in 2007 has reached calamitous dimensions.
Narcotrafficking now generates $500 billion a year in revenues.
Recognized as the single major cause of violent crime, drug addiction
accounts for rising health costs exceeding $100 billion annually. It
is also contributing to an alarming rise in absenteeism, vehicular
accidents, and premature deaths.

Smuggled in hollowed concrete posts, frozen broccoli packs, sacks of
coffee and crates brimming with exotic woods and aromatic spices,
enough drugs reach the streets of America to keep an estimated five
million addicts bombed out of their heads for two months straight. If
the new lords of terror and high finance have their way, the richest
and most drug-dependent nation on earth may never awaken from its
psychedelic stupor.

Juggling deals that exceed the combined assets of Boeing, Texaco, and
Pepsi, funding political campaigns and controlling vast communications
networks, the "narcocracy's" race for quick, ill-gotten profits is
fast changing the world's political landscape and further eroding the
resolve and ability of nations to fight back. Despite high-profile
busts that helped net several drug kingpins and large quantities of
contraband, there appears to be no real political will to bring the
drug war to a victorious end. Powerful economic and geostrategic
interests get in the way.

When it comes to fighting drugs with words, the U.S. is the undisputed
champion of double talk. To help Nicaragua's Contras, the CIA and Col.
Oliver North not only covered the tracks of their drug-running
proteges, they also laid the drug pipeline from Colombia to the U.S.
The Kerry Commission later disclosed that Florida's Homestead Air
Force Base had been used as a transit point in the shipment of large
quantities of marijuana.

In 1996, Richard Horn, a DEA agent, filed suit against top former
State Deptment and CIA officers based in Burma (Myanmar), contending
that they acted to thwart his antidrug mission. Horn, it turned out,
was lied to, surveilled, and kicked out of Burma - not by the Burmese
traffickers he was trying to nab but by U.S. officials who thought his
zealous antidrug campaign interefered with their diplomatic objectives.

It is not the first time that priorities of American agencies abroad
have been at loggerheads. Reckless support for a ragtag band of
hard-core Islamic Afghan fighters, it will be remembered, also
justified any means. After all, at the time the Soviet Union was still
our arch-enemy. So the CIA secretly funneled weapons to the Afghan
rebels through the intermediary of Pakistan's military. On their
return trips, supply trucks were brimming with opium which was
promptly processed into heroin in 200 "flying kitchens" - clandestine
labs hastily erected along the Pakistani-Afghan border. The CIA
reportedly knew but looked the other way.

Nor are the major international financial institutions particularly
vigilant about drug money laundering. Developing countries are
ruinously in debt. Those that produce narcotics (or serve as willing
conduits) use narcodollars to pay off creditors who don't care where
the money comes from.

Recent congressional reports, whose findings are described as
"disappointing and disconcerting," assert that the organization behind
the flow of narcotics in the U.S. is chiefly an operation run by
governments hostile to the U.S. and by various terrorist networks.
Owing its marriage of convenience to international terrorism,
narcotrafficking has now reached catastrophic proportions. Partners in
crime have merged, with terrorists providing protection to traffickers
and traffickers financing terrorist activities. Their bond is so
absolute as to render them indistinguishable and earn them the
redoubtable moniker - narcoterrorists. Their shared objective is to
bring down political and social order.

That the prime objective of narcotrafficking is political is perhaps
the most disturbing revelation contained in various congressional
reports. Yes, profit is a major motivation. Money is the plasma of the
cartels, necessary for the operation and growth of the vast black
market. It subsidizes their vast armies and ensures the silence, if
not active complicity, of the nations that shelter them. With illicit
profits, politicians, judges, police and journalists are regularly
bought - or "neutralized" by hired goons.

But money is not the essential reason for the trafficking. The
ultimate objective, Interpol agents in Central America have told this
writer, is to destroy the social fabric of western societies.

The U.S. likes its wars. The "War on Poverty," a mythical crusade that
has fattened the coffers of countless "relief" organizations, has done
nothing to reduce the staggering level of indigence worldwide. The
"War on Terrorism," which unwisely inspired the calamitous invasion of
Iraq, has now cost the U.S. one trillion dollars.

Whereas "the War on Drugs," commodities that claim thousands of
victims annually and destroy the fabric of society, has raised a
paltry $35 billion.

It is this writer's conviction that the government is expending too
much effort on [blocking] supply and not enough on [curbing] demand.
People must be stopped from wanting drugs. Granted, this is a lofty,
perhaps quixotic quest in a world where greed, deception, the
mathematics of death, and the politics of silence prevail. The
alternative is bleaker yet.