War on Drugs or war on terror?

[lmno250]

"Consequences and confrontation."
The war on drugs destroys lives" and "Drug law isolates.” "The United Nations USA, EU of Prohibition."Ty to USA and EU for creating at least six Narco States in world after 9/11 due to war on terror instead off war on drugs.

The war on drugs has devastated nations and irreparably harmed countless people, including people who have nothing to do with the war. The war against the $320- 400, billion drug trade per annum around the world. World markets were still supplied with about 1,000 tonnes of heroin, around 1,000 tonnes of cocaine and untold volumes of cannabis (marijuana) and synthetic drugs.

The alarming power of the drug cartels is leading to a criminalization of politics and a politicization of crime. And the corruption of the judicial and political system is undermining the foundations of democracy in several Latin American countries.Why the drug lords continue to proliferate in luxury and the military and law enforcement industry get flush with tax dollars, while individuals, families and communities continue to suffer under a rubric that disfavors treatment, resulting in insufficient resources, neglected and ineffective institutions and cynicism all the way.

Colombia's president, Alvaro Uribe, who backs Washington's drug war, has sounded the alarm. "Organised (DRUGS)crime could destroy us all if we do not come together to fight it," Latin American nations have long been divided in the fight against powerful drug cartels, reluctant to share information and doing little to stop the laundering of drug profits in real estate and banking. Guatemala and Panama have also seen a sharp upsurge in violence and Colombia remains the world's top cocaine producer.

Panama's President Martin Torrijos said organized crime and drug trafficking represented “strategic threats to national security and the viability of democratic states” in Latin America. Other Central American nations Costa Rica, Nicaragua and El Salvador, they are key transit countries for U.S.-bound narcotics.

A U.N. anti-narcotics drive has backfired in part by making drug cartels so rich they can bribe their way through West Africa and Central America, U.N. crime agency chief Antonio Maria Costa said, When mafias can buy elections, candidates, political parties, in a word, power, the consequences can only be highly destabilizing," Costa, head of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, told a U.N. drug policy review meeting.

"While ghettoes burn, West Africa is under attack (by Latin American traffickers transshipping cocaine to Europe), drug cartels threaten Central America and drug money penetrates bankrupt financial institutions,"

Nowadays the UN Office on Drugs and Crime no longer talks about a drug-free world. Its boast is that the drug market has “stabilised”, meaning that more than 300m people, or almost 6% of the world’s adult population, still take illegal drugs—roughly the same proportion as a decade ago. (Like most purported drug facts, this one is just an educated guess: evidential rigour is another casualty of illegality.) The production of cocaine and opium is probably about the same as it was a decade ago; that of cannabis is higher.

From Caracas to Sao Paulo, Mexico City to Buenos Aires, Central and South America are experiencing a dramatic upswing in youth crime. "The drug mafia recruits children as young as nine or 10," says Guaraci de Campos Viana, the chief justice of Rio de Janeiro's juvenile court. "Children have no sense of danger. Being a member of a drug gang gives them a sort of adrenaline rush.

"The United Nations is currently celebrating the 100th anniversary of the “international war on drugs.” Yes, it was On February 26th 1909 that 13 countries joined together in the “International Opium Commission” to halt the Chinese opium trade. And how did that go?

A group of foreign diplomats gathered in Shanghai for the first-ever international effort to ban trade in a narcotic drug. Just a few decades after Britain had fought a war with China to assert its right to peddle the stuff. Many other bans of mood-altering drugs have followed. In 1998 the UN General Assembly committed member countries to achieving a “drug-free world” and to “eliminating or significantly reducing” the production of opium, cocaine and cannabis by 2008.

Like first-world-war generals, many will claim that all that is needed is more of the same. In fact the war on drugs has been a disaster, creating failed states in the developing world even as addiction has flourished in the rich world. By any sensible measure, this 100-year struggle has been illiberal, murderous and pointless, At least 6 Narco states is created in world after 9/11 due to USA,EU,war on terror instead war on Drugs.

Thirty years before George W. Bush initiated his “war on terror,” President Richard Nixon conceptualized his “war on drugs.” Both are proving to be utter and complete failures, as terrorist cells and anti-US sentiment proliferate around the globe, and drug use leaves a tsunami of horrors behind.
"At the beginning of the Clinton administration, "the War on Drugs was like the War on Terror is now." With profit margins of up to 5,000 percent, cocaine traffickers make fortunes. The cost to Latin America is incalculable. Every stage of the trade inflicts damage.

“The War on Terrorism is sometimes linked to a suggested War against Islam, a perceived campaign to hinder the activities of those who practice the Muslim faith.

Though used to describe actions against anarchists in the 1800s and Zionists in the 1940s, the phrase "War on Terrorism" (or "War on Terror") was invoked by President George W. Bush in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks against the United States. It describes a large array of military and law enforcement programs involving at least two actual wars (the current war in Afghanistan and the Iraq War) and the USA PATRIOT Act's increase of police and federal powers against people suspected of terrorist involvement.
In the book The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, Alfred W. McCoy, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, provides evidence of the use of opium by agents of the U.S. Government to fund covert operations in Vietnam

It was alleged by the Soviets on multiple occasions that American CIA agents were helping smuggle opium out of Afghanistan, either into the West, in order to raise money for the Afghan resistance or into the Soviet Union in order to weaken it through drug addiction

A recent study from the Cato Institute noted 331 U.S. citizens killed from 2005-2009, explaining that police in many Border States besides Arizona (and border patrol agents) increasingly find themselves up against the violence of the Mexican drug trade.

Prohibitionist policies based on eradication, interdiction and criminalization of consumption simply haven't worked. Violence and the organized crime associated with the narcotics trade remain critical problems in our countries. Latin America remains the world's largest exporter of cocaine and cannabis, and is fast becoming a major supplier of opium and heroin

One in 100 Americans today is behind bars. That number by far and away leads the world, and is at its highest point in American history. About 350,000 of the approximately 3 million Americans behind bars are there for nonviolent drug crimes (trafficking or possession).

The eradication policy remains in place even though it is widely recognized as a failure. Richard Holbrooke, Obama's new envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, last year called the eradication program "the single most ineffective program in the history of American foreign policy."

The United States has spent an estimated $500 billion to fight drugs — with very little to show for it. Cocaine is now as cheap as it was when Escobar died and more heavily used. Methamphetamine, barely a presence in 1993, is now used by 5.5 million Americans and may be more addictive than crack. USA nearly 800,000 people behind bars for drug crimes — a twelve fold increase since 1980 — with no discernible effect on the drug traffic. Virtually the only success the government can claim is the decline in the number of Americans who smoke marijuana — and even on that count, it is not clear that federal prevention programs are responsible

The War on Drugs became an actual war during the first Bush administration, when the bombastic conservative intellectual Bill Bennett was appointed drug czar. "Two words sum up my entire approach," Bennett declared, "consequences and confrontation." Bush and Bennett doubled annual spending on the drug war to $12 billion, devoting much of the money to expensive weaponry: fighter jets to take on the Colombian trafficking cartels, Navy submarines to chase cocaine-smuggling boats in the Caribbean. If narcotics were the enemy, America would vanquish its foe with torpedoes and F-16s

The War on Drugs had targeted three enemies. First there were the hippie drugs — marijuana, LSD — that posed little threat to the general public. Then there was heroin, a horrible drug but one that was largely concentrated in New York City. And, finally, there was crack. What meth proved was that even if the DEA could wipe out every last millionaire cocaine goon in Colombia, burn every coca field in Bolivia and Peru, and build an impenetrable wall along the entire length of the Mexican border — even then, we wouldn't have won the War on Drugs, because there would still be methamphetamine, and after that, something else.

The Clinton foreign-policy team, having spent the previous few years dealing with the consequences of failed states in Somalia and the Balkans, was deeply concerned about the possibility of a failed narco¬state in America's own back yard.

Production of cocaine had increased by 16% across the whole of South America and said that was due to increases in supply from Bolivia and Peru. In fact the regional increase, recorded in a UN survey released last year, was due primarily to a 27% increase in coca production in Colombia. Much smaller increases of 5% in Bolivia and 4% in Peru were recorded

The worst days of the war against the Shining Path rebels two decades ago. The war, which terrorized the country Peru's and took nearly 70,000 lives, supposedly ended in 2000.The drizzle-shrouded jungle of Vizcatán, a region in the Apurímac and Ene River Valley, nine hours by four-wheel drive along switchbacks from the Maoist rebels' Andean cradle of Ayacucho, is Peru's largest producer of coca, the raw ingredient for cocaine.

The Shining Path controls a large part of the cocaine trade in Peru , and as Peru's production has thrived, the rebel group has used its profits to rebuild.In 2007, the latest year for which data is available, coca cultivation in Peru increased by 4 percent, reaching the highest level in a decade, according to the United Nations. At the same time, estimated cocaine production rose to a 10-year high of about 290 tons.

According to military and anti drug analysts, the Shining Path is now in the business of protecting drug smugglers, extorting taxes from farmers and operating its own cocaine laboratories.The guerrillas killed at least 26 people in 2008, including 22 soldiers and police officers, the bloodiest year since the late 1990s, according to security analysts.

With increasing enforcement of drug trafficking in the Caribbean, Colombian drug lords merely changed the routes by which they deliver cocaine to Europe. And the poor countries of West Africa provided the perfect transshipment zone.

Guinea-Bissau, whose president was recently assassinated, is now the country of choice for Colombian traffickers. The world's fifth-poorest country, Guinea-Bissau is often referred to as the world's first narco-state, as the people and the government are easy prey for the powerful and wealthy drug lords.

Guinea-Bissau has little by the way of police and military -- at least police and military members who have not been paid off -- and has no functioning jail. But what it does have, despite its intense poverty, is drug dealers who live in gated mansions, drive exotic European sports cars and live it up in the country's nightclubs.

The drug war has led to the implementation of draconian measures in many countries, most notably Thailand, where a crackdown in 2003 led to the extrajudicial killings of some 2,800 people.

According to Human Rights Watch, other countries, including Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan, have exposed suspected drug offenders to severe beatings, electroshock and partial suffocation.

Drug addicts have also suffered tremendously from these efforts to rid the world of drugs, as many are deprived of treatment and locked in prisons where they are suspectible to infection with HIV and other blood-borne diseases.

In Latin America, the “Plan Colombia” drug interdiction effort spearheaded by President Clinton has been a disaster, as USA military aid has funded right-wing paramilitary groups responsible for mass human rights abuses and spawned public support for the FARC guerilla organization that periodically rises up to threaten the country’s stability. The other main component of the plan—the mass spraying of concentrated herbicide on Colombian coca fields—has poisoned vast tracts of farmland (and, some say, many people), depriving many Colombians of their livelihood. This, again, isn’t likely to foster warm feelings toward the United States

Almost 10,000 people died in drug-related violence in Mexico last year alone, an unprecedented level of mayhem that is showing signs of spilling northwards into the United States. More than 1,800 have been killed already this year in Mexico.The U.S.-backed and heavily U.S.-funded drug war has led to a particularly bloody civil war in several provinces in Mexico. Large swaths of Mexican police forces are working for the country’s drug cartels. Meanwhile, U.S. drug agents and politicians have been corrupted in their own way—in their willingness to accept brutal violence in Mexico as collateral damage if it brings hope for a diminished drug supply in the U.S.

The price of one KG of Cocaine is $8,000 dollars in Mexcio. frequent lip-service dedication paid to spending cuts, the U.S. is still planning to spend $1.6 billion in fiscal year 2009 on international drug war efforts (and those figures from the State Department don’t seem to include the full costs of the multi-year $1.4 billion “Merida Initiative” for drug war waging in Mexico).

A former federal drug warrior write in an Arizona newspaper that all the death and carnage in Mexico is welcome news—merely a necessary step on the road to “victory.” Just last year, the U.S. Congress approved another $400 million in drug war aid to Mexico, despite concern from human rights organizations that the Mexican military may be killing innocent Mexican citizens in its vigor to crack down on the drug lords

In Colombia, shadowy new groups with names such as the Black Eagles have muscled into the gap left by a government assault on rightwing militias and leftwing guerrillas, the groups that traditionally trafficked cocaine. Production is increasing after being reined in earlier in the decade.

In Bolivia coca cultivation increased by 5 percent in 2007, a much smaller rise than in Colombia. Bolivia's estimated cocaine production grew to 104 tons in 2007 from 80 tons in 2005, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, or UNODC.

The strategy of Bolivian President Evo Morales, an indigenous coca farmer and Washington critic, has been unique: Expel US counter-narcotic agents, let farmers grow coca for uses such as tea and medicine and order local security forces to root out the cocaine element. The government lobbies the UN to decriminalize the coca leaf.

Venezuela has become a hub, with 282 tonnes of Colombian cocaine slipping through in 2007, four times higher than in 2004, according to US officials

President Lula, for his part, has had enough and has now brought in the military in an attempt to tackle the problem .Roughly 80 tons of cocaine enter Brazil each year, much of it from Bolivia, and about half is re-exported to Europe and the United States, according to police and the UNODC. Rio's teenagers have picked up weapons to fight in the ongoing drug wars.. Last year Marcos Marcola, the leader of the PCC criminal gang, used a mobile phone to direct his gang's attacks on buses, banks and police stations in Sao Paulo -- from his prison cell. More than 100 people died, and all because Marcola refused to be transferred to a high-security prison.

In December the jailed bosses of "Comando Vermelho" (Red Commando) ordered similar attacks in Rio, costing 20 people their lives. Seven were burned alive when the gangsters refused to allow their victims to get off buses to which they had set fire. Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva referred to the incidents as acts of "terrorism." it is impossible for Brazil to control its 9,000 km (5,600 miles) of border with its cocaine-producing neighbors - Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia, as well as Paraguay, another major transit country for drugs and contraband

20% of the 48,000 Brazilians Murdered Every Year Are Killed by the Police a United Nations human rights expert said

Indian drugs also go south to Sri Lanka, where guerrillas with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam use money from heroin trafficking to fund their war for independence. Meanwhile, those who need the painkilling peace that opium-based drugs brings go without."

Since the U.S. invasion in 2001, the American and Afghan governments have made the poppy-growing areas of Afghanistan, which produce 90 percent of the world's opium, a major front in the war on drugs. Yet despite eight years of efforts to eliminate the crop, farmers keep growing poppies, and the crop still reaches the black market.

According to Ray Kendall, the British outgoing Secretary General of Interpol at least 80 percent of the heroin entering Western Europe does so through Turkey and the Balkans - with Albanian gangs playing an increasingly important role. The "Albanian mafia" has acquired a fearsome reputation. It has now established itself within the European Union as well - reportedly wresting control of the criminal underworld in north Italian cities like Milan and Turin from gangs linked to the Italian mafia

Five years ago the amount of cocaine shipped to Europe via West Africa was negligible. Today 50 tonnes a year worth £1.4 billion pass through the region. Interpol estimates as much as two thirds of the cocaine sold in Europe this year will reach the Continent via West Africa. there is evidence that Italy's Calabrian mafia, Irish gangsters and Balkan mobsters are also involved.

“We are seeing multi-tonne shipments transiting West Africa. We have recorded arrests of Latin Americans all over West Africa,” said Antonio Mazzitelli, at the regional office of the United Nations Office for Drugs and Crime in Dakar, Senegal. “They are using ships, speedboats, small and large aeroplanes, 4WDs ... There is really no limit to the imagination of traffickers.”
Cocaine use is on the increase worldwide. In Europe the number of users has tripled over the past decade: four million Europeans regularly take it, paying up to £50 a gram. Europe's cocaine boom attracts the South American cartels that control the global trade .

Consumption of cocaine has declined gradually in the United States from its peak in the early 1980s, but the path is uneven (it remains higher than in the mid-1990s), and it is rising in many places, including Europe.

The United States alone spends some $40 billion each year on trying to eliminate the supply of drugs. It arrests 1.5m of its citizens each year for drug offences, locking up half a million of them; tougher drug laws are the main reason why one in five black American men spend some time behind bars. http://www.amconmag.com/blog/2009/03...-the-drug-war/

The time to act is now, and the way forward lies in strengthening partnerships to deal with a global problem that affects us. Part 2nd will publish soon Usman Karim based in Lahore Pakistan lmno25@hotmail.com