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Only the drug war could create a situation in which banana consumers inadvertently support terror. Makes you wonder what else supports terrorism. Coffee? Soda? Probably, but it's really the international drug war that facilitates the growth of terrorist armies and empowers them to extort absolutely everything in sight.

Banana manufacturer Chiquita Brands International is in big trouble for paying protection money to various terrorist armies in Colombia. They've been assessed a $25 million fine in U.S. federal court and now Colombian prosecutors are seeking the extradition of 8 Chiquita employees. From Forbes.com:

Prosecutors say the Cincinnati-based company agreed to pay about $1.7 million between 1997 and 2004 to the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, known as AUC for its Spanish initials.
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In addition to paying the AUC, prosecutors said, Chiquita made payments to the National Liberation Army, or ELN, and the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, as control of the company's banana-growing area shifted.

These poor bastards at Chiquita got extorted out of $1.7 million by the AUC only to then be extorted out of another $25 million by the U.S. Justice Department. We'll see about the extradition, but I give it good odds considering our interest in maintaining healthy mutual extradition policies with the Colombian government.

You gotta feel for these folks considering that banana cultivation is one of the more legitimate economic activities going on in Colombia. This kind of publicity isn't doing any favors for our crop substitution efforts.

Thanks to drug prohibition, you can't even grow goddamn bananas without becoming a pawn in the international war on narco-terrorism.

The current anti-cannabis crusade in the UK press is going hot and heavy. I imagine we're all used to the "cannabis boy in drugs shame" tabloid headlines from over there, and, as I blogged a couple of days ago, we now see respectable newspapers like the Independent on Sunday flip-flopping on marijuana (now it's bad). But sometimes, it's just too ridiculous. Here are the opening paragraphs of a story about potent weed from the Liverpool Echo:

Police issue warning about super strength Cannabis Mar 20 2007 by Ben Rossington, Liverpool Echo SUPER-strength cannabis so potent that just one puff can cause schizophrenia is being grown by Merseyside drug gangs. Cannabis resin, usually smuggled in from Morocco, has been replaced by home-grown super skunk as the drug of choice for sale by criminal gangs on Merseyside. Experts warn this new strain of cannabis is so incredibly strong it can bring on the early signs of schizophrenia from a single puff. Today Merseyside’s police chief has warned that organised gangs are moving into the production of the drug as a quick way of making cash.

Wow, that stuff must have a 150% THC content. The article also repeats the claim that this super-skunk is 25 times more potent than what Brits are used to. But here's what the most recent peer-reviewed scientific evaluation of THC levels in Europe had to say: