Latest Drug War News

GoodShop: You Shop...We Give!

Shop online at GoodShop.com and a percentage of each purchase will be donated to our cause! More than 600 top stores are participating!

Google
The Internet Our Website

Global and National Events Calendar

Bottoms Up: Guide to Grassroots Activism

NoNewPrisons.org

Prisons and Poisons

November Coalition Projects

Get on the Soapbox! with Soap for Change

November Coalition: We Have Issues!

November Coalition Local Scenes

November Coalition Multimedia Archive

The Razor Wire
Bring Back Federal Parole!
November Coalition: Our House

Stories from Behind The WALL

November Coalition: Nora's Blog

January 5, 2005 - The Cato Institute (US)

Drug Prohibition is a Terrorist's Best Friend

by Ted Galen Carpenter; the Cato Institute's vice president for defense and foreign policy studies, & author of Bad Neighbor Policy: Washington's Futile War on Drugs in Latin America.

Return to Drug War News: Don't Miss Archive

Under pressure from Washington, Afghan President Hamid Karzai is urging his people to fight narcotics as ferociously as they fought the Soviet occupation in the 1980s. Such a struggle seems destined to undermine the campaign against al Qaeda and the Taliban. Karzai and his American patrons can prevail against the country's opium growers or its terrorists, but not both.

Afghanistan has been one of the leading sources of opium poppies, and therefore heroin, since the 1970s. Today, the country accounts for more than 75 percent of the world's opium supply. It is clear that some of the revenues from the drug trade -- at least 10 percent to 20 percent -- flow into the coffers of al Qaeda and the Taliban.

That is obviously a worrisome development. But it is hardly unprecedented. For years, leftist insurgent groups in Colombia, principally the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), and right-wing paramilitaries have been financed largely by that country's cocaine trade. Conservative estimates place the annual revenue stream to the FARC alone at between $515 million and $600 million per year. (In 2002, the U.S. ambassador to Colombia put the figure at "several billion" dollars.)

The harsh reality is that terrorist groups around the world have been enriched by prohibitionist drug policies that drive up drug costs, and which deliver enormous profits to the outlaw organizations willing to accept the risks that go with the trade.

Targeting the Afghanistan drug trade would create a variety of problems. Most of the regional warlords who abandoned the Taliban and currently support the U.S. anti-terror campaign (and in many cases politically undergird the Karzai government) are deeply involved in the drug trade, in part to pay the militias that give them political clout. A crusade against drug trafficking could easily alienate those regional power brokers and cause them to switch allegiances yet again.

Unfortunately, Washington is now increasing its pressure on the Karzai government to crack down on opium cultivation, offering more than a billion dollars in aid to fund anti-drug efforts. In addition, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld announced in August that U.S. military forces in Afghanistan would make drug eradication a high priority -- a mission that the military properly continues to resist.

U.S. officials need to keep their goals straight. Recognizing that security considerations sometimes trump other objectives would not be an unprecedented move by Washington. U.S. agencies quietly ignored the drug-trafficking activities of anti-communist factions in Central America during the 1980s when the primary goal was to keep those countries out of the Soviet orbit. In the early 1990s, the United States also eased its pressure on Peru's government to eradicate drugs when President Alberto Fujimori concluded that a higher priority had to be given to winning coca farmers away from Shining Path guerrillas. U.S. leaders should refrain from trying to make U.S. soldiers into anti-drug crusaders: Even those policymakers who support the war on drugs as an overall policy ought to recognize that American troops in Central Asia have a difficult enough job fighting terrorists.

There is little doubt that terrorist groups around the world profit from the drug trade. What anti-drug crusaders refuse to acknowledge, however, is that the connection between drug trafficking and terrorism is the direct result of making drugs illegal. The prohibitionist policy that the United States and other drug-consuming countries continue to pursue guarantees a huge black market premium for all illegal drugs. The retail value of drugs coming into the United States (to say nothing of Europe and other markets) is estimated at $50 billion to $100 billion a year. Fully 90 percent of that sum is attributable to the prohibition premium.

Absent a world-wide prohibitionist policy, this fat profit margin would evaporate, and terrorist organizations would be forced to seek other sources of revenue.

Drug prohibition is terrorism's best friend. That symbiotic relationship will continue until the United States and its allies have the wisdom to dramatically change their drug policies.

For the latest drug war news, visit our friends and allies below

We are careful not to duplicate the efforts of other organizations, and as a grassroots coalition of prisoners and social reformers, our resources (time and money) are limited. The vast expertise and scope of the various drug reform organizations will enable you to stay informed on the ever-changing, many-faceted aspects of the movement. Our colleagues in reform also give the latest drug war news. Please check their websites often.

The Drug Policy Alliance
Drug Reform Coordination Network
Drug Sense and The Media Awareness Project

Working to end drug war injustice

Meet the People Behind The U.S. Sentencing Guidelines

Questions or problems? Contact webmaster@november.org