RISKY BUSINESS...

The international war on drugs was doomed from the start, say critics

In February 2001, on the edge of Afghanistan's "Desert of Death," troops set
poppy fields ablaze, crushed others with tractors and even pulled them up by
the roots by hand.

It ended a campaign begun by the Taliban eight months earlier to kill
production of heroin's main ingredient. The Taliban was reacting to
international criticism that their fundamentalist state was supported by
drug money. They made $30 million a year taxing the $180-million annual
crop.

Both the UN and the U.S. declared the campaign a success, suggesting up to
95% of the poppy production was wiped out. In fact, it was judged so
successful that a request for aid from local "non-government" agencies was
greeted with a $43-million grant from the U.S. government that March.

But critics say the grant was the latest example of how the U.S. fight
against drugs has clashed with foreign policy to make foreign dictators and
despots wealthy. And, when combined with prices driven up by prohibition,
they say it has helped terrorists kill people.

ERADICATION ONLY DROVE UP THE PRICE

Less than two years after the poppy crop purge, the Taliban reign is over.

Despite U.S. willingness to work with them on drug issues, the terrorist
attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, ended any pretense of co-operation and led to an
invasion.

But even before the Taliban was tossed, evidence existed that the poppy
trade had resumed full force, despite the U.S. grants. UN officials in
Afghanistan reported in mid-October 2001 that Afghan production was set to
resume.

Neighbouring states had scoffed at the earlier Taliban "destruction" of the
crop. Tajikistan reported during early 2001 more heroin than ever crossed
its border. And The Financial Times reported the Taliban had stockpiles of
poppies.

"In fact, all they were actually doing by getting rid of some crops was
driving up the price," says Ted Carpenter, the author of more than a dozen
books on foreign policy and a terrorism expert with the Washington,
D.C.-based libertarian think-tank, the Cato Institute.

Earlier this month, The Associated Press reported the U.S. Drug Control
Program is reopening a Kabul office and the Drug Enforcement Administration
has staff at the U.S. embassy. The region's governor told the press that it
was back to business as usual because "if we try to enforce a ban on the
farmers, it wouldn't be good for us."

In the end, says Carpenter, most of the $43 million probably wound up in
Taliban hands, given that it controlled all of the agencies within its
borders. That made it the latest example of U.S policy not only funding an
extremist government but actually making the drug business easier for them.

"The only real reason that they have value to terrorists is that they're
illegal, which makes them harder to get. Plain and simple," says Carpenter.

HISTORY OF EASING THE FLOW

As Carpenter points out, American foreign policy decisions have a history of
both easing the flow of drugs into North America and keeping prices high by
propping up the dealers:

- - The CIA ferried opium for Vietnamese warlords during Vietnam's civil war
in the 1960s; Air America, a CIA airline, transported the drugs between
Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, with some of the resulting product hooking U.S.
troops.

- - The Reagan administration's near-decade of financial support for
Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega and his "commitment" to the war against
drugs, four years before kidnapping him and prosecuting him for being a
trafficker;

- - According to congressional testimony from a senior bureaucrat with the
National Security Archive in Washington there was "concrete evidence that
U.S. officials - the White House, NSC and CIA - not only knew about and
condoned drug smuggling in and around the Contra war, but in some cases
collaborated with, protected, and even paid known drug smugglers who were
deemed important players in the Reagan administration's obsessed covert
effort to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua."

- - Disgraced colonel Oliver North, implicated in the Contra funding scandal,
went on to recommend leniency for a drug dealer charged with trying to
smuggle 345 kilograms of cocaine into the U.S. because he had worked with
the CIA while a general in the Honduran military. He got less than five
years in a minimum-security pen.

- - The current U.S. support for the new government in Colombia has largely
ignored evidence, says the Cato Institute, that its president, Alvaro Uribe,
got money from the right-wing United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia, a
drug-funded group on the U.S.'s own list of terrorist groups.

In the end, promoting "democracy" in countries that are net illicit drug
exporters has allowed governments the U.S. wants onside politically to
profit from the trade, says Eugene Oscapella, head of the Canadian
Foundation on Drug Policy.

"The Americans aren't stupid. When we speak of why drug laws are entrenched,
well, the U.S. government has over decades used the drug trade to help
support groups with which it is ideologically aligned," says Oscapella.
"They will tolerate the drug traffic if it serves a foreign policy goal.
This became clear last year when the State Department effectively said
'well, yeah, we know the (Afghan) Northern Alliance is trafficking drugs but
we need their support.' Drug policy is subservient to foreign policy."

MORE HEROIN AND COCAINE THAN EVER

But it's not just subservience; In the 1950s, the U.S. ran irrigation
projects in Afghanistan, bringing in engineers to help feed the arid land.
Despite good intentions, that unwittingly let Afghanis cultivate opium
poppies.

Then, between 1979 and 1982, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan,
officials with the Pakistani military claim the CIA worked with its secret
service to turn the opium into heroin in the hopes of hooking Soviet
soldiers.

The effect was dramatic. In a region where heroin was rare, Pakistan
reported 4.1 million citizens hooked within two years. And within a decade,
Afghanistan's drug industry was only marginally smaller than Burma's, the
world's largest producer.

Between its policies in South America and Afghanistan, critics say U.S.
foreign policy has ensured more heroin and cocaine than ever wound up on
western shores.

But 10 years later, maverick conservative columnist Arianna Huffington wrote
in her syndicated column (online and in major U.S. newspapers), Feb. 7,
2002, "in The World According to George W. Bush and his drug czar, John
Walters, the kid smoking a joint at a party is the moral equivalent of Osama
bin Laden or Mohammed Atta."

BUSH: FIGHT TERRORISM

In its media kit linking terrorism with drugs, the U.S. government says 12
of the 28 major terrorist groups partially fund operations through drug
sales or by trading drugs. Last January, the U.S. government paid $3 million
for ads during the Super Bowl to push the message.

"It's so important for Americans to know that the traffic in drugs finances
the work of terror, sustaining terrorists, that terrorists use drug profits
to fund their cells to commit acts of murder. If you quit drugs, you join
the fight against terror in America," said U.S. President George Bush.

But drug profits only exist, says Oscapella, because of how hard they are to
get compared to mainstream products. Therefore, as long as the U.S.
anti-drug campaign only manages to stop a fraction of the narcotics coming
into the country, it will remain readily available but risky to buy and
expensive.

This year the U.S. government has predicted that despite massive increases
in security since Sept. 11, 2001, at most 20% of all drugs coming in will be
intercepted.

"I cannot believe that with all of their intellectual power, the U.S. does
not understand how drug prohibition finances terrorism," says Oscapella.
"And yet they are the world's leading proponent of maintaining that drug
prohibition. They want to go to war over terrorism but they won't look at
stopping one of the major sources of terrorism funding in the world. Through
drug prohibition, they're supporting the groups that are trying to kill us."

That position is echoed by the U.S.-based drug policy alliance, which noted
earlier this month that the U.S. government has pulled the plug on the
advertising campaign.

"It was meant to tell skeptical adults that the failed drug war still
mattered after 9-11," said Ethan Nadelmann, the group's executive director.
"No wonder young people ignored it."

Nadelmann called the terrorism-by-drugs campaign grossly misleading.
"Blaming Americans for funding terrorism is like blaming alcohol consumers
in the 1920s for Al Capone's violence," he said.

According to the United Nations Office for Drug Control and Crime
Prevention's 2001 report on global drug trends, the wholesale price of a
gram of opium in Aghanistan was three to seven cents. That same gram sells
in North America for about $39, or up to 1,300 times what the producers
charge.

By the time it gets to a customer in North America, the drug has been
processed, refined and smuggled or bribed past customs agents. Without those
additional costs - all extensions of prohibition policy - the product has
little value.

The same is true of cocaine, which according to the UN is grown for up to
$400 a kilogram in Colombia but after being smuggled, sells for as much as
$100,000 per kilogram in the U.S.

In 2001, drug crime was worth as much as $450 billion, and, based on
International Monetary Fund figures, would account for about a third of all
money laundered through various financial systems around the globe.

"Prohibition greases the wheels of terrorism just as it greases the wheels
of organized crime," according to Oscapella's Senate brief.

The latter comparison has been recognized by police - even among departments
that officially promote drug prohibition. Though his membership association
repeatedly states its support for the war on drugs, the head of Edmonton's
Green Team - a city police/RCMP task force that fights marijuana grow
operations - said as much last year in The Sun.

"One of the older guys compared it to Prohibition, not that he was around
then, but maybe that's almost where we're at," said Det. Clayton Sach.
"People want booze and in the old days we didn't give it to them and the
mobsters made lots of money. Well, now the Hells Angels are making lots of
money."

LEGAL PRODUCTS ON THE BLACK MARKET

But cigarettes and the prescription painkiller Oxycontin - both thriving on
the black market - demonstrate legalizing doesn't get rid of demand, argues
veteran Drug Enforcement Administration spokesman Will Glaspy.

"The bottom line is, there would be a black market for drugs until you made
every drug available to anyone who wanted it, free and in unlimited
quantities," said Glaspy.

"A perfect example of this is the recent case where a man was buying
cigarettes in Carolina for pennies on the dollar and selling them up in
Michigan for a profit, then turning around and giving that money to
terrorist organizations.

"Cigarettes are certainly legal but there's still a black market for
cigarettes at a reduced price. And that's what this guy was doing: providing
his proceeds to a terrorist organization."

There's a big flaw in the argument, Carpenter notes: to get cigarettes "at a
reduced price" involves stealing them for resale, at which point they're no
longer a legal product.

"Terrorist groups are not making their money off alcohol or tobacco, because
to create a black market for those products, you actually have to sell them
for less than their market value," notes Carpenter. "That's a ridiculous
analogy."

Glaspy dismisses any such suggestion.

"Typically, the people who make those arguments want drugs completely legal
because they want to get high."