US and NATO casualties in Afghanistan jumped sharply this week as some 4,000 US Marines and 650 Afghan army troops poured into Helmand province, Afghanistan's largest producer, which supplies more

Gretchen Peters certainly has a sense of timing.

Thousands of US Marines poured into Afghanistan's southern Helmand province this week to take the battle against the Taliban to the foe's stronghold.

As summer arrives in Afghanistan, it's not just the temperature that is heating up.

For hundreds, if not thousands, of years, residents of the Horn of Africa and the southern Arabian Peninsula have partaken of khat, an evergreen plant native to the region.

Leftist guerrillas of the Shining Path killed 14 Peruvian soldiers in a pair of ambushes in Ayacucho province, in the remote and rugged coca-growing region of the VRAE (Apurímac and Ene River vall

Mexico and its wave of prohibition-related violence were front and center in Washington this week as the Obama administration unveiled its "comprehensive response and commitment" to US-Mexico borde

A coca trade fair in Lima designed to demonstrate that coca is not cocaine showcased a number of products, but the star of the show was a coca leaf beer whose manufacturer has plans to export it to

The United Nations Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) met this week in Vienna to draft a

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A blue-ribbon commission of Latin American leaders has issued a report saying that the US-led war on drugs has failed and it is time to consider new policies, particularly treating drug use as a pu

Lately, the drug war is sounding less and less like an actual government policy and more like a distopian future from a science fiction movie:

As the nation's drug war rages on, with its weekly tallies of headless torsos, it is getting harder to produce a shock wave in the Mexican media. But the gruesome recipes of "The Stewmaker" have gripped public attention here, as authorities describe how a "disposal expert" working for a Tijuana drug cartel boss allegedly got rid of hundreds of bodies by dissolving the corpses in vats of caustic liquid. [Washington Post]

They call him "The Stewmaker" and his henchmen attacked the police station with machine guns after he was captured.

Does any of this sound like the story of a drug policy that works? How much more of this unfathomable gory mayhem do we feel like putting up with? We’ve crossed the line into some seriously dark territory here and it’s way past time something is done about it, something completely different from everything we’ve tried before.

In the last three years, South American cocaine traffickers aiming at lucrative European markets have increasingly turned to West Africa as a way station in the intercontinental trade.

In the 1980s, the Maoist Shining Path guerrilla organization conducted a bloody uprising against the Peruvian state in which nearly 70,000 people were killed.

Every day, the stories coming from Mexico get worse. Nothing surprises me at this point. Not even this:

MEXICO CITY – Elementary school teachers are the latest victims of an exploding extortion racket in the border city of Ciudad Juárez, as criminal gangs threaten educators to either hand over their coming Christmas bonuses or see harm done to their families or students, teachers' groups say.

With Monday a school holiday and news of the threats spreading in the media, on the Internet and by word of mouth during the long weekend, there were fears that an increasing number of parents would keep their children at home today, forcing additional schools to close. [Dallas News]

Is anybody going to come forward and claim this is just a temporary problem? Shall we double our drug war donations to restore law and order? Let’s get real. The drug war is destroying the entire country before our eyes and there’s no limit to how bad it can get.

It’s amazing to witness the criminal feeding frenzy that is now erupting all over the country now that the drug war has turned Mexico’s justice system into a complete mockery. Dangerous levels of police corruption have created a horrific laboratory in which violent criminals have begun experimenting with all sorts of terrible schemes. Can you even imagine what’s next?

If anything can solve the crime problems plaguing Mexico, it will have to be the exact opposite of everything we're doing right now.

The human rights group Amnesty International harshly criticized Colombia in a 94-page

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In August, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) released its annual survey of Afghan opium production,

UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) executive director Antonio Maria Costa used the occasion of the October 8 meeting of Ministers Responsible for Public Safety in Mexico City to again blame the d

The NATO and US forces battling Taliban and Al Qaeda insurgents in Afghanistan are on the verge of expanding their counterinsurgency efforts by getting more deeply involved in trying to suppress th

Impelled by profits from the coca trade and crackdowns in other parts of the country, coca farmers in Peru's south-central Apurimac and Ene River Valleys (VRAE) region are pushing into indigenous l

Has drug war destabilization in South America become a threat to our national security?

MIAMI (AP) — There is real danger that Islamic extremist groups such as al-Qaida and Hezbollah could form alliances with wealthy and powerful Latin American drug lords to launch new terrorist attacks, U.S. officials said Wednesday.

Extremist group operatives have already been identified in several Latin American countries, mostly involved in fundraising and finding logistical support. But Charles Allen, chief of intelligence analysis at the Homeland Security Department, said they could use well-established smuggling routes and drug profits to bring people or even weapons of mass destruction to the U.S.

Well that just sucks. Realistically, however, I think we’re relying on a rather twisted interpretation of the drug traffickers’ agenda here. These guys are making huge profits and they don’t want to rock the boat. Terrorists might pay for cover upfront, but they’re bad for business in the long term. I doubt high-level traffickers would deliberately abate straight-up terrorists whose goal is basically to kill their customers. They bring a different kind of attention that you seriously don’t want if you’re just moving a product.

Still, it’s certainly true that the massive blackmarket infrastructure has led to the development of invisible networks and services that terrorists could take advantage of. If you’re selling underground transit, you don’t ask too many questions of your customers. It’s not willful collaboration we should be worried about, so much as the reality that there’s an industry built around bringing anyone and anything into our country.

After decades of drug war demolition tactics throughout South and Central America, the situation is worse than ever. As new threats emerge, the drug war continues to literally puncture every mechanism that might protect us.