THE LOST WAR ON DRUGS

We've Spent 36 Years And Billions Of Dollars Fighting
It, But The Drug Trade Keeps Growing.

Poppies were the first thing that British army Capt. Leo Docherty
noticed when he arrived in Afghanistan's Helmand province in April
2006.

"They were growing right outside the gate of our forward operating
base," he said.

Within two weeks, he realized that "poppy is the economic mainstay,
and everyone is involved right up to the higher echelons of the local
government."

Poppy, of course, is the plant from which opium and heroin are
derived.

Docherty was quick to realize that the push into northern Helmand
province was going to run into serious trouble. The rumor was "that we
were there to eradicate the poppy," he said. "The Taliban aren't
stupid, and so they said, 'These guys are here to destroy your
livelihood, so let's take up arms against them.' And it's been a
downward spiral since then."

Despite the presence of 35,000 NATO troops in Afghanistan, the drug
trade there is going gangbusters. According to the U.N. Office on
Drugs and Crime, Afghan opium production in 2006 rose 57 percent over
the previous year.

Next month, the United Nations is expected to release a report showing
an additional 15 percent jump in opium production this year while
highlighting the sobering fact that Afghanistan now accounts for 95
percent of the world's poppy crop.

The success of the illegal narcotics industry isn't confined to
Afghanistan. Business is booming in South America, the Middle East,
Africa and across the United States.

Thirty-six years and hundreds of billions of dollars after President
Nixon launched the war on drugs, consumers worldwide are taking more
narcotics - and criminals are making fatter profits - than ever before.

The syndicates that control narcotics production and distribution reap
the profits from an annual turnover of $400 billion to $500 billion.
And terrorist organizations such as the Taliban are using this money
to expand their operations and buy weapons.

In the past two years, the drug war has become the Taliban's most
effective recruiter.

Afghanistan's Muslim extremists have re-invigorated themselves by
supporting and taxing the countless peasants who are dependent on the
opium trade, their only reliable source of income.

The "war on drugs" is defeating the "war on terror."

For the past three years, I have been researching a book on the rise
of transnational organized crime since the collapse of communism and
the advent of globalization.

I have witnessed how a drug gang mounted an assault on Sao Paolo,
closing the Brazilian city for three days. I have watched Bedouins
shift hundreds of kilos of cocaine across the Egyptian-Israeli border
on the backs of camels, and I have observed how parts of Africa have
become an international narcotics distribution hub.

The trade in illegal narcotics begets violence, poverty and
tragedy.

Wherever I went, gangsters, cops, victims, academics and politicians
delivered the same message: The war on drugs is the underlying cause
of the misery. Everywhere, that is, except Washington, where a
bipartisan consensus has turned the issue into a political third rail.

The problem starts with prohibition, the basis of the war on drugs.
The theory is that if you hurt the producers and consumers of drugs
badly enough, they'll stop doing what they're doing.

Instead, the trade goes underground, which means that the state's only
contact with it is through law enforcement. So vast is the demand for
drugs in the United States, the European Union and the Far East that
nobody is even remotely able to effectively police the trade.

A confidential strategy report prepared in 2005 for British Prime
Minister Tony Blair's Cabinet and later leaked to the media offered
one of the most damning indictments of the efficacy of the drug war.

Law enforcement agencies seize less than 20 percent of the 700 tons of
cocaine and 550 tons of heroin produced annually. According to the
report, they would have to seize 60 percent to 80 percent to make the
industry unprofitable for the traffickers.

Supply is so plentiful that the price of a gram of heroin is
plummeting in Europe.

According to the United Nations, the street price of a gram of cocaine
in the United States is less than $70, compared with $184 in 1990.
Adjusted for inflation, that's a drop of nearly 70 percent.

Ninety-eight percent of the money for Plan Colombia, the $4.7 billion
worth of drug-fighting assistance the United States gave to Colombia
in the first half-decade of this new century, is devoted to beefing up
the Colombian armed forces' assault on coca plantations and left-wing
guerrillas.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office says 70 percent of the money
allotted to Plan Colombia never leaves the United States. It is used
to buy helicopters and other weapons for the military, and a large
chunk is paid to the security firm DynCorp International.

For several years, DynCorp has been spraying the herbicide glyphosate
on thousands of acres of coca in Colombia. The impact of the
eradication program has been negligible.

The FARC - the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, a 17,000-strong
peasant-based army - not only continues to control a swath of
territory the size of Switzerland in south-central Colombia, but it
has established itself in the north as well.

The United Nations has identified coca plantations in 24 of the
country's 32 provinces, whereas the drug was grown in only six when
spraying began.

Before his trip to Washington in May, President Alvaro Uribe was
forced to announce that production of coca was up 8 percent in 2006.

And now the U.S. government wants to repeat this "success" in Mexico.
There's talk in Washington about a $1 billion aid package for the
government of President Felipe Calderon to back his own war against
drugs.

And it's definitely a war: Calderon has mobilized the army to fight
traffickers. In the first half of this year, more than 1,000 people
were gunned down by rival drug cartels.

International mobsters, unlike terrorists, don't seek to bring down
the West; they just want to make a buck.

But these two distinct species breed in the same swamps. In areas
notorious for crime, such as the tri-border region connecting
Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina, gangsters and terrorists habitually
cooperate and work alongside one another. Those swamps are steadily
seeping toward the United States.

British Columbia is now home to the greatest number of organized-crime
syndicates anywhere in the world (if we accept the U.N. definition of
a syndicate as more than two people involved in a planned crime).

According to British Columbia government statistics, the production,
distribution and export of B.C. Bud, highly potent marijuana grown in
hothouses along the province's border with the United States, accounts
for 6 percent of the region's gross domestic product.

The majority of the province's criminals remain passive hippie types
for whom the drug is a lifestyle choice.

But as Brian Brennan, the chief investigator for the drug squad of the
Royal Canadian Mounted Police, told me, the marijuana trade is
threatening to turn nasty as British Columbia's Hells Angels, one of
the best-organized criminal syndicates in the world, moves in on the
action.

Could anything replace the war on drugs? There's no easy
answer.

In May, the Senlis Council, a group that works on the opium issue in
Afghanistan, concluded that Afghan farmers should be permitted to grow
opium that can then be refined and distributed for medical purposes.
(That's not going to happen because the United States is committed to
poppy eradication.)

Others argue that the only way to minimize the criminality and social
distress that drugs cause is to legalize narcotics so the state can
exert proper control over the industry.

In Washington, the war on drugs has been a third-rail issue since its
inauguration. It's obvious why - telling people that their children
can take drugs is the kiss of death at the ballot box.

But that was before 9/11. Now the drug war is undermining Western
security.

In one particularly revealing conversation, a senior official at the
British Foreign Office told me, "I often think we will look back at
the war on drugs in a hundred years' time and tell the tale of 'The
Emperor's New Clothes.' This is so stupid." How right he is.

Misha Glenny, a former BBC correspondent, is the author
of "McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Underworld,"
to be published next year.