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 veggie  Registered: 07/26/04 Posts: 19,227 |
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Auto-SummaryThe U.S. Customs and Border Protection's P-3 air interdiction force has seized a record 105 tons of drugs in 2005, but the effectiveness of interdiction in stopping the drug flow into the U.S. is debated. While interdiction does make it difficult and expensive for traffickers, it is difficult to block every avenue for drug smuggling. The demand for drugs is too great, and the money involved makes it nearly impossible to stop the flow. Unintended consequences of interdiction include the shift of drug trafficking to other regions, such as Mexico and Central America. The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy believes that the U.S. is winning the war on drugs, citing indicators such as reduced drug use among teenagers and record seizures. However, some experts argue that the drug problem has changed, and a different strategy is needed to address the current situation. April 2, 2007 - NPR War on Drugs Hasn't Stemmed Flow Into U.S. The Forgotten War on Drugs This is the first report in a five-part series. The big, silver airplane lumbers into the air from its base in Corpus Christi, Texas, clears a bank of thunderclouds and heads south over the shimmering Caribbean. It's part of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection's P-3 air interdiction force, aimed at stopping drug smugglers from moving their cargo from Latin America into the United States. The sky outside is gray and drizzly, as federal agents in tan flight suits buckle themselves into a Lockheed Martin P-3 turboprop. When they spot something suspicious on the water, they swoop down as low as 500 feet for a closer look, then radio in the boat's location. The P-3 air interdiction force has been successful, by its own definition. In 2005, it seized a record 105 tons of dope. But when asked whether he thinks they're making a difference in the drug war, Dan Williams, a senior detection systems specialist on board the plane, is equivocal. "It's a tough question," he says. "We're catching people, but there's still stuff getting through." He adds, "We're hurting them, but I don't know that it's causing, you know, massive stoppage." Driven by Demand Williams says that what drives the drug trade is demand; all the interdiction in the world won't stop the flow of drugs. "The money involved is too great," he says. "If we could stop all the demand in the States, I'd be out of a job. If we didn't want to buy it, it wouldn't be coming." Williams' conclusions are shared by numerous studies that show interdiction on the high seas or at border crossings does not lead to a reduction in the flow of cocaine or heroin onto American streets. Both the Rand National Defense Research Institute and the Government Accountability Office reached that conclusion in studies more than a decade ago. Interdiction does, however, accomplish some important things, says Donny Marshall, head of the Drug Enforcement Administration from 1999 to 2001. "If you keep the traffickers off balance, you make it very, very difficult and expensive for them to do business, both in terms of money and in terms of the risk of incarceration," Marshall says. Still, most analysts of drug policy and drug smuggling agree that successful interdiction has mainly pushed the problem around the hemisphere. When U.S. authorities cracked down on Colombian smugglers in the Caribbean in the 1980s, the traffic — and savage violence — shifted to Mexico. There, drug gangs killed an estimated 2,000 people last year. The drug trade has also moved to Central America, where countries like Guatemala are turning into narco-republics. 'Next to Impossible to Block Out' These are the unintended consequences of an earlier enforcement surge, says John Carnevale, who served as a top budget official under four drug czars. "We were very successful in the '80s in stopping trafficking in southern Florida, and around the Gulf and the islands, in terms of cocaine especially and marijuana," he says. "We shut it down. But we opened up the whole Southwest border because we simply moved the problem from one location to another. And so, what have you accomplished at the end of the day? Probably not very much." Carnevale says the strategy now being used in Mexico — decapitating the cartels and extraditing drug lords — is an echo of what the United States did in the late '80s in Colombia with drug lords like Carlos Lehder, head of the Medellin Cartel. "We captured or killed, basically, the head of every one of these organizations, only to discover years later that the organization just got fragmented," Carnevale says. "And it continued to thrive, because as long as there was a demand for this product, people will figure out a way to bring it to market, especially with the profits that can be made." Just ask a smuggler. "There's always a way to get it into this country, one way or another," says Jim Barnard — "Barney" to his friends. He's a former drag racer and a convicted cocaine smuggler who did his time in federal prison. Now 63, Barnard lives quietly in Portland, Ore. One of the thrills of the old days, he remembers, was to think up new ways to out-fox the feds. "Everybody's got a new method, a new way to bring cocaine or illegal drugs into this country," Barnard says. "That can be inside of a piece of equipment, that can be inside of a container, that can be in a vehicle comes across the border, airplanes coming across the border, boats going round the border… There's so many avenues, it's almost next to impossible to block every avenue." Defining 'Victory' in the War on Drugs But the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy continues to believe that America is winning the drug war. David Murray, a top policy adviser to drug czar John Walters, points to numerous indicators of victory: lowered drug use among teenagers; record seizures of cocaine in transit zones; the disruption of domestic methamphetamine production; and the recent extradition of 15 Mexican cocaine cowboys to the United States. "We're saving people, and we're minimizing harm and impact," Murray says, adding, "If you take the magnitude of a problem that was burning high and hot and spreading, but you constrain it, you choke it down, push back against it, you make it smaller — that is, I believe, victory." The federal government publicizes its victories in the drug war with frequent press releases and press conferences. Last February, for instance, Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez was in San Diego to announce a major Drug Enforcement Agency operation against a Mexican drug lord that led to 200 arrests and netted 18 tons of narcotics. Gonzales called the raid "a serious blow for one of the largest and most significant trafficking organizations." But federal and state officials with long experience in prosecuting drug cases are not as sanguine about the progress they are making. Ken Bauman recently retired after 37 years as a federal prosecutor in Portland, Ore., with 800 drug cases under his belt. "You hear about seizures. Is that an indication of victory? My answer to that is no, it's not an indication of victory," he says. "You judge victory when the last person using illegal drugs stops." The Battle on the Streets If you judge that kind of victory by determining the availability of drugs, then the celebration is a long way off. On an icy day in Washington, D.C., Sgt. John Brennan is in street clothes, with bifocals around his neck. He sits in a Washington, D.C., police department squad car, squinting at a familiar scene: a cluster of suspicious men in overcoats loitering outside a seedy convenience store in the Northwest section of the city. "It's an open-air market for pharmaceutical pills, crack cocaine, heroin," Brennan says. The U.S. Capitol building, about four blocks away, looms in the background. Brennan gets a kick out of the proximity. "We're looking directly south on North Capitol Street, looking at the dome — in session," he laughs. Brennan is no drug-war dove. He thinks what the country needs is stricter judges and more jail cells. But, nearing the end of his 27-year career as a narcotics officer, he's frustrated. "Cocaine used to be a very expensive drug, and it was sold as the powder form, the hydrochloride, where they used to freebase it or snort it," Brennan says. "Nowadays, it's crack cocaine. It's sold for $10 a bag. It gets you a better high." The price has been $10 a bag, Brennan maintains, for at least 20 years. Heroin used to cost $20-25 a bag, he says, and came in forms less pure than what's available today. "Now you can buy a bag of heroin and the percentage [of pure heroin] is higher. And it's only $10 a bag." Too Much Enforcement? Many of the anti-drug professionals interviewed for this series, even career cops, believe that U.S. counter-drug policy has relied too much on enforcement. Steve Casteel spent 32 years with the DEA, retiring as chief of worldwide intelligence. "I believe the balance of the past, where the majority of the money went into the law enforcement, the sexy, five-o'clock-news type of stuff, should be reduced and balanced with prevention and treatment," Casteel says. "There needs to be a legitimate balance." Peter Reuter and Jonathan Caulkins, former co-directors of the Rand Drug Policy Research Center, co-wrote a paper last year for the National Academy of Sciences titled "Reorienting U.S. Drug Policy." They argue that the drug problem has fundamentally changed. Today, they say, America is dealing with an older, less violent, more stable population of drug abusers. "If we're stuck with the War on Drugs metaphor, then like any war, it has to adapt to changes in the enemy," says Reuter, of the University of Maryland. "We now have the problem of endemic rather than epidemic drug use, and we need a strategy that reflects that." Caulkins, of Carnegie Mellon University, concurs. "Smart drug control is hard work," he says. "There are no silver bullets. The best we can do is improve on the mix of interventions we're doing." And, he says, it's time for a change of policy. "We've allowed a set of policies that might have made sense in the 1980s to be locked in. A thorough top-to-bottom review of what we're doing in drug policy is long overdue." But the challenge is that drug policy today must work with fewer resources. Because of the demands of the global war on terrorism, under the current budget proposal, spending for federal anti-drug programs would decline for the first time in 20 years. After 38 years, we've learned what works and what doesn't, Caulkins and Reuter say. Now, they say, it's time for a smarter War on Drugs.
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 highdroponics Professional Deadhead     Registered: 11/14/06 Posts: 5,574 Loc: Earth, Milky Way 
Last seen: 13 years, 9 months |
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hmmmm, they have the power to end it, yet they are too ignorant to see. what a pathetic waste of time all together...they have proved nothing more than that drugs can create more problems when criminalized and sold illegally, not only does it give more money to terrorists and gangs because of it being an easy way to score big money, but it also hurts our taxpayers by having to keep people in prison that have done nothing more than shoot a little dope, snort a bit of coke, or toke up once in a while....the drug war will never end if people don't begin to realize it is a lost cause, then, and ONLY then will the war on drugs finally come to an end....its sad that we are over here spending billions on a pointless war on drugs when we could be using that money to help other countries in dire need of food and better civilization....why do us humans feel we can control uncontrollable things? also why do we have that need to run other peoples lives?
i personally look at drugs the same way i look at seat belt laws, if someone wants to not be secure behind a seat belt and go flying through a windshield scraping their face off by skidding 100 feet on the pavement, more power to them, that should be THEIR decision, no one elses...it may be harsh, but its true shit, and we should have absolutely no control (not even the slightest, tiniest bit) over what a person does to themselves. -------------------- Dr  says to stop trying to treat the side-effects of big government and focus on the core issues. End the Federal Reserve/audit the gold reserves at Fort Knox, abolish the IRS, end all wars and occupancies, stop the building of an empire that will inevitably fail, and cut all unconstitutional federal programs. Put the power back in the peoples' hands by ending this nanny-state.
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Daqq Magnetic Field  Registered: 02/03/07 Posts: 191 Loc: Sea of fire Last seen: 18 years, 2 months |
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whoa... I can't get a bag of white heroin for $10... and since when is the high from crack better than from coke... I beg to differ. And as for the "chief of intelligence" well, that's just ironic... WAKE UP POLICE doing the same thing over and over again expecting to get different results... look at prohibition in the twenties... backward ass government
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j3ckyl ☣☤Pe  Registered: 11/16/06 Posts: 450 Loc: Earth Last seen: 10 years, 4 months |
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Which in turn causes sharp rises in drug prices on the street leading to increased habit based crime and the dealers making a greater profit from it at the end of the day, this statement makes it very clear that what they do is ineffective and quite destructive. A far cry from the impact and minimisation of harm they claim. -------------------- 
"There are only two states of being: Too much and not enough" Isnt the war on drugs supposed to reduce harm? So far all i see are casualties.
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implicitli  Registered: 09/18/06 Posts: 3,027 |
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The US should declare a War on Childhood Poverty and a War on Illiteracy.
That would do a lot more good for the country then a war on drugs.
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BrainForest Stranger Registered: 03/29/07 Posts: 45 Last seen: 17 years, 3 months |
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The US government would probably carry out that war by locking up poor and illiterate kids in prison.
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MustNotBe HPPDer  Registered: 01/27/06 Posts: 930 Last seen: 4 years, 5 months |
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lol, the artical makes him sound like he hates drugs, he sounds like he's advertising them. -------------------- Junkies United we stand , Devided we're sick as fuck. - - - "Hallucinations are something heroin users are not at all accustomed to," said Const. Conor King, Victoria police drug expert. "They react like you or I would react if we took Aspirin and all of a sudden the TV got up and started walking across the room." - - - Make drugs legal, or alcohol and tobacco illegal. Either way it's more fair.
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highdroponics Professional Deadhead Registered: 11/14/06 Posts: 5,574 Loc: Earth, Milky Way
Last seen: 13 years, 9 months |
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^ yeah people like him are the ones that belong in prison...talkin about we need more jail cells, what a dickhole and a half.
-------------------- Dr says to stop trying to treat the side-effects of big government and focus on the core issues. End the Federal Reserve/audit the gold reserves at Fort Knox, abolish the IRS, end all wars and occupancies, stop the building of an empire that will inevitably fail, and cut all unconstitutional federal programs. Put the power back in the peoples' hands by ending this nanny-state.
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Hafrican Mega-ultrachicke  Registered: 01/31/03 Posts: 105 Loc: SW Azerbaijan Last seen: 19 years, 4 months |
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"Increased habit based crime" is the key. I have friends in Baltimore. When I visited one time years ago, my friend was frustrated that I left the rear hatch window of his 92 Honda Civic hatchback unlocked. It is an utter, POS automobile. He then explained that his car had been the subject of three burglaries in the past year. He had a Radio Shack Realistic car stereo (worth: $30 new) stolen twice. The floor of the car is covered with empty coffee cups and cigarette boxes. All for some junkie to get $10 to buy some red tops. Supply and demand. It's a lost cause. Sure: there are seizures and arrests. But all of the money and resources expended is a band aid over a bullet hole as far as policy goes.
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veggie Registered: 07/26/04 Posts: 19,227 |
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Auto-SummaryThe article discusses the ongoing war on drugs in Colombia, focusing on the U.S.-backed Plan Colombia, which has cost $5.4 billion to fumigate coca fields and modernize Colombia's armed forces. Despite the program's efforts, the amount of coca cultivated in Colombia remains the same as it was five years ago. Coca cultivation has shifted to smaller, harder-to-reach plots in lawless regions, where the U.S. strategy of repeatedly fumigating has been less effective. The article highlights the challenges faced by Colombian farmers who rely on coca cultivation for their livelihood and the mixed results of the U.S. intervention in reducing drug trafficking and violence in the region. Deep in the Colombian Jungle, Coca Still Thrives The Forgotten War on Drugs This is the second report in a five-part series. The war on drugs is fought full force in Colombia, where for seven years the United States has used crop dusters to spray a deadly defoliant to wipe out coca, the shiny leaf used to make cocaine. The spraying, which began in force in southern Colombia in late 2000, has wiped out huge, industrial-sized fields of coca. Paired with an intensive American-backed effort to modernize Colombia's armed forces, the program — called Plan Colombia — has also pushed back Marxist rebels that depend on the drug trade to finance their long war against the state, American policy makers contend. "I think Plan Colombia has been extraordinarily valuable," said David Murray, a senior policy analyst at the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP). "I believe, amongst other things, it's helped stabilize and save an emerging democracy that is now living under the rule of law." But Plan Colombia, which has cost $5.4 billion, most of it to bankroll fumigation and modernize Colombia's army, has done little to erode the flow of cocaine into the United States. In Colombia, coca has not been wiped out, just spread out — redistributed to smaller, harder-to-reach plots, spread out across virtually every state, in a country that is twice the size of France. The fact is, virtually as much coca is growing in Colombia as was cultivated at the start of the aerial fumigation program in 2000, American statistics show. And United Nations data shows that while there has been success at eradicating coca across the main coca growing countries in the South American Andes — Colombia, Bolivia and Peru -– the region still produces more than enough cocaine to satisfy demand in the United States and Europe. "Eradication has fallen flat on its face," said Myles Frechette, who was Washington's ambassador to Colombia in the late 1990's. "We've discovered, and it's right in the reports by the State Department and ONDCP, that after five years of Plan Colombia, the amount of acreage under cultivation for coca is the same as it was five years ago." Coca Country On a recent day, five single-engine spray planes returned to their base in Tumaco, a poor honky-tonk town on Colombia's Pacific coast, after a mission across coca country in Narino province. The planes had been fumigating coca fields in a region that has, in recent years, become the epicenter of Colombia's cocaine industry: A swath of jungles and soft, rolling hills that have attracted coca farmers, Marxist guerrillas, right-wing paramilitaries and the army. The idea, American officials have said, is to hit the coca farmers repeatedly, until they give up growing the plant. In essence, the plan has been to hit the traffickers where it hurts most: at the source. The pummeled fields are tucked away in hamlets like La Balsa, a tiny community of Afro-Colombian families near the porous border with Ecuador. It's a far cry from the huge coca fields that spray planes used to target. But the harder-to-reach plots are not really a byproduct of the spray program. They're part of a strategy aimed at evading the spray planes. Getting to La Balsa requires a bone-jarring journey to a riverside port community, then a ride on a fast-running river. Then, there's a two-hour hike along a narrow trail, deep into rebel territory. It is in this type of lawless region where coca grows — an area with no roads, no telephones, no sewage or services. There is no state presence whatsoever. Cocaine Labs in Lawless Territory What one does find here are rivers used to move in the chemicals needed to mulch coca into coca paste, and to transport the coca paste out to the cocaine-making labs. La Balsa is also a few hours' walk from Ecuador, through which cocaine is often transported. Though desperately poor, La Balsa has found a way to ease poverty with a boom crop that never busts: coca. Small comforts abound — tin roofs, homes made from wood planks. So farmers plant coca... even after the spray planes strike, as they did on a recent day. Jorlin Giovanny, 23, was busy one recent afternoon splitting stalks of coca that had been sprayed. He and a companion were trying to save the seeds. They planned to replant, and fast. "This afternoon we're going to dig and plant," he explained. "We can't lose time." Another villager who makes a living in another facet of the drug trade — churning coca leaves into coca paste — explained that the people in La Balsa have no other option, even if the defoliant keeps falling from the sky. The villagers plant bananas, yucca and other crops, but for their own consumption. The coca is what brings in the cash, said Uber Buila. "You try to save what you can," said Buila. "Imagine, this is a cocalera zone. Here, the people don't have anything else to live on. So if they fumigate, two or three months later, people are planting again." Less Violence, New Rebel Groups For Colombia, the impact of the American aid has been mixed. The money the United States has spent in Colombia has helped sharply reduce violence, American and Colombian officials say, since the army and police have been able to increase security in hundreds of towns. Fernando Araujo, Colombia's foreign minister, has said the assistance has helped the army better fight two Marxist rebel groups. Colombia's government, led by President Alvaro Uribe, has also overseen the disarmament of thousands of right-wing paramilitary fighters who participated in talks with his administration. More than 500 drug traffickers have been extradited, while the amount of seized cocaine — and the number of drug labs destroyed — continues to break records. But critics say that the central goal in Plan Colombia — delivering a powerful blow to drug trafficking — has failed to materialize. Cocaine continues to permeate Colombian society. Rebel forces remain strong. And new paramilitary groups, solely focused on the drug trade, are sprouting up and replacing the old groups that disarmed. John Walsh, who closely tracks the drug war for the Washington Office on Latin America, a policy group critical of American policy in the region, said that little has changed despite the purported advances. "Have we arrested or extradited this or that trafficker?" he said. "Have we disarticulated this or that organization? Have we moved, denied trafficking routes or patterns? Often the answers are yes, yes, yes." He continued: "For every grand success that official statistics describe, there'll be an array of countervailing factors that tend to dull the impact… the business as usual taking over, the trade regrouping, adapting and coming on in worse form." The Book of the Dead Across Narino is the town of Llorente, located on a lonely stretch of highway. Years ago, this was little more than a hamlet, home to a few farmers and their families. Today, it's a cocaine boom town, crawling with drug traffickers. The police patrol with assault rifles. They spend their nights in a specially protected bunker-like building. The spray planes have hit coca near the town, and the security forces have battled with the armed groups that roam in the region. But the violence has not ebbed much, said a local Catholic priest, Richard Yawe, who hails from Nigeria. Sitting in the parish hall, he displayed a thick black book. In it, he and the other priest in Llorente jot down the names and ages of people who've died in the town. Also, the circumstances. Often, it's homicide. "This is the book for the dead," he said. "Most of the people here in Llorente, we have here in the book for the dead. People have been assassinated, killed by bullets, involved in drugs." Further to the east, in the foothills of the Andes, is another town, Egido, also hit hard by drugs and violence. Indeed, the best-known landmark is the Red Bridge, from which armed groups would throw the bodies of their victims. Now, things are calmer. The American aid has meant the arrival of security forces, once absent from the region. But few think that the region is much closer to resolving its drug problems. Farmers complain there are no markets for their legal crops. Yoni Sanchez, a local government official, explained. "The people need markets, and they need to transport their products to big cities. And we don't have roads, we don't even have a good telecommunications," he said. "I think it's very expensive for people to transport their products." Making a Living Touring the region in a four-wheel drive, you run into people like Maximiliano Valdez. He's made a living working coca fields. And like other coca farmers approached along the main unpaved road through the region, he insisted that he planned to give up on coca and the drug trade. He spoke in what was left of a drug lab burned down by the police on a recent raid. "This is going to end," he said, speaking of the drug trade. But the next day, he was out in the fields, shaving coca off coca bushes with his bare hands. He was accompanied by a couple of friends. They planned to sell the coca, which would then be turned into coca paste and then cocaine. It would likely wind up in the United States. "If there were programs to allow you to plant something else and help us, things would be a lot better here, to allow us to leave this behind," he explained. "That doesn't exist. Here, there's nothing else to do."
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