The Western world’s anti-narcotics policy is failing to stem the tide of illegal drugs flowing into the United States and other developed countries, and the time has come to choose new tactics.
For several decades, the US and its courternarcotics partners overseas have at pursued two goals while attempting to eradicate illegal drugs:
— Criminal prosecution: aggressively attacking and incapacitating drug trafficking networks by eradicating crops, destroying laboratories, and interdicting drug shipments.
— Political stability: preventing drug dealers from entering political systems and economies of drug-source countries by helping at-risk governments fight the narco-terrorists threat.
Regrettably, international law enforcement officials have devoted most of their resources to the first goal — to little avail.
According to recent US intelligence reports, criminal organizations in Latin America and Asia have increased illegal drug production in the last decade, and have become more sophisticated in distributing cocaine and heroin.
The result, American drug analysts warn, is an epidemic growth in the use of heroin in the United States. US health officials say that evidence of this growing drug plague is an upswing in heroin-related admissions to US hospital emergency rooms, which in the last five years has jumped 30 percent in the last five hears.
Since 1991, the US Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency have been actively at war against the world’s drug lords. On the waters of the Caribbean Sea, ships and Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) aircraft from the US Navy’s Atlantic Command search for drug planes and boats, while military radar aerostat balloons hover in the sky. Along America’s border with Mexico, Marines and Army Special Forces units watch drug smugglers through nigh vision goggles, while CIA spy satellites — once used to snoop on military forces in the former Soviet Union — monitor illegal cocaine, marijuana and cocaine crops in Latin America, Central Asia and Southeast Asia.
Prior to the September 2001 terror attacks, counternarcotics was one of the CIA’s most important missions. The agency worked closely work with US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) agents and other law enforcement officials on counternarcotics operations. Today, over 200 CIA officers are still assigned to this mission, gathering intelligence on drug rings, teaching spy techniques to law enforcement officials, and using their formidable surveillance capabilities — both human and high tech — to monitor global narcotics production.
To many in the military and intelligence community, the shifting of focus from the Cold War to the drug war had meant “job security.” The fall of the Iron Curtain also forced leaders at the CIA and the Pentagon to “redefine” their mission — a task that they put off until 9/11 forced them to act. And though efforts to fully achieve this redefinition failed to bear fruit, many leaders in the US government were confidant that drug eradication was a mission worth pursuing.
Sadly, this belief is disputed by the US Government Accounting Office, the accounting arm of the US Congress, which has reported over the past decade in several comprehensive studies that the overall US counternarcotics program suffers from weak management, poor coordination and inattention to how its efforts are implemented.
The GAO — and many intelligence officials — says that the drug interdiction efforts begun in the early 1990s by then US President Bill Clinton is failing to keep pace: there has been a 20 percent drop in the amount of cocaine seized in recent years.
Ironically, today’s complaints by the GAO and other Clinton critics echo a study commissioned by the Clinton administration to study the drug war mounted by his immediate predecessor, President George H. W. Bush — father of the current US president.
Shortly after Clinton took office, a White House drug policy review panel within the National Security Council (NSC) concluded that Defense Department interdiction efforts have largely failed to stem the flow of cocaine in the United States, and recommended a drastic refashioning of the international drug effort.
The classified review by the NSC concluded that despite the $1.1 billion being spent each year by the Pentagon — much of it to detect drug smugglers in the “transit zones” of Central America and the Caribbean — there has been virtually no affect in the price or availability of cocaine on America’s streets.
Back in 1993, a unidentified Clinton Administration official told the media that George Bush, Sr.’s military drug interdiction plan was a “waste of personnel and resources,” and said the White House intended to abandon Bush’s policy of “squandering tax dollars” on interdiction.
In words that seem to be echoed today by critics at the GAO, the unnamed source in the Clinton White House added:
“The availability of drugs has not been significantly affected over the past four years as a result of (Bush’s) efforts...The price is about the same, the number of (drug-related) emergency room (admissions) is the same. And that’s all we have empirically to measure how effective we have been.”
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Arab News Features 13 November 2002