THE LOST WAR ON DRUGS

Poppies were the first thing that British army Capt. Leo Docherty
noticed when he arrived in Afghanistan's turbulent Helmand province
in April 2006. "They were growing right outside the gate of our
Forward Operating Base," he told me. Within two weeks of his
deployment to the remote town of Sangin, he realized that "poppy is
the economic mainstay and everyone is involved right up to the higher
echelons of the local government."

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."

According to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Afghan opium
production in 2006 rose a staggering 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.

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

In the past two years, the drug war has become the Taliban's most
effective recruiter in Afghanistan. Afghanistan's Muslim extremists
have reinvigorated themselves by supporting and taxing the countless
peasants who are dependent one way or another on the opium trade,
their only reliable source of income. The Taliban is becoming richer
and stronger by the day, especially in the east and south of the
country. The "War on Drugs" is defeating the "war on terror."

The trade in illegal narcotics begets violence, poverty and tragedy.
And wherever I went around the world, 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 powerful 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. But instead, the
trade goes underground.

Prohibition gives narcotics huge added value as a commodity. Once
traffickers get around the business risks -- getting busted or being
shot by competitors -- they stand to make vast profits. 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 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, especially in the United Kingdom. According to
the UNODC, the street price of a gram of cocaine in the United States
is now less than $70, compared with $184 in 1990. Adjusted for
inflation, that's a threefold drop.

A surfeit of bananas drove 47-year-old Colombian Susan Castillo to do
business with terrorists. "It was about 10 to 15 years ago," she told
me. "We had built our farm and raised our seven children on corn and
bananas. But suddenly nobody wanted to buy our bananas anymore. We
did what everybody did then -- we switched from bananas and corn to
coca. Actually, we did not grow the coca ourselves but we rented out
our land to a cocalero and he grew the crop." Both the Castillo
family and the grower paid tax to the FARC -- the Revolutionary Armed
Forces of Colombia, a 17,000-strong peasant-based army, by far the
largest terrorist organization in the Southern Hemisphere.

I spoke to Castillo in the bare office of a local U.N. counseling
center in Ciudad Bolivar. Next to the U.N. office stands a spanking
new library, courtesy of Plan Colombia, the $4.7 billion worth of
drug-fighting assistance that the United States gave to Colombia over
the first half-decade of this new century.

According to the Government Accountability Office, 70 percent of the
money allotted to Plan Colombia never leaves the United States. It is
used to buy U.S.-built helicopters and other weapons for the
military, and a large chunk is paid to the security firm DynCorp.
Britain and other E.U. countries For several years, DynCorp has been
spraying the herbicide glyphosate on thousands of acres of coca in Colombia.

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 in Mexico, 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,
or in the blood-diamond conflict zones such as Sierra Leone and
Liberia, 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).

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.

An avalanche of B.C. Bud rolls southward into the United States every
day, dodging U.S. customs in myriad imaginative ways.

Could anything replace the war on drugs? There's no easy answer. Some
argue that the only way to minimize the criminality and social
distress that drugs cause is to legalize narcotics so that the state
may exert proper control over the industry. It needs to be taxed and
controlled, they insist.

In Washington, the war on drugs has been a third-rail issue since its
inauguration. It's obvious why -- telling people that their kids can
do drugs is the kiss of death at the ballot box. But that was before
9/11. Now the drug war is undermining Western security throughout the
world. 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.