Many Partisans on Both Sides Get Drug Policy Wrong, Blogosphere Shows

Last Friday the blogosphere provided a good example of how readily even political progressives can fail to see the important points in drug policy. A post in Bob Geiger's U.S. Senate Report titled "Bill to Cripple Taliban Drug Trade Passes -- After GOP Tries to Kill It" informs us that Republican senators had unsuccessfully tried to block an amendment by Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to put $700 million into the latest defense appropriations bill for suppression of Afghanistan's opium trade. Schumer explained, "The Taliban draws its strength from the drug trade and in order to prevent them from reclaiming the country, we need to crack down the drugs that fuel their regime. We need to ensure that the Department of Defense has the resources available to attack this problem before it becomes far worse." Geiger, a partisan whose web site solicits "liberal love" and "conservative castigation" by e-mail, described the Republican effort as "inexplicable," remarks that it "will leave you shaking your head and asking yourself whose side Republicans are really on," and reports that "[f]ortunately... it passed with the support of a handful of Republican votes." Anti-war liberals like Geiger ought to also oppose the Drug War. An article we published in Drug War Chronicle Friday discusses in depth why opium eradication in reality is an extraordinarily bad idea that will strengthen the Taliban mightily by pushing countless poor farmers who are surviving on opium growing into their hands. Opium production is literally the backbone of Afghanistan's economy, and wiping it out at this point, even if that could be accomplished, would plunge the nation into chaos beyond anything before seen. While I doubt Geiger will be moved by the fact that libertarian free-marketeer Ted Galen Carpenter of the Cato Institute thinks the only satisfactory way of addressing the situation is through legalization, perhaps he'll pay some attention to the Brookings Institution fellow or the Univ. of Nebraska Afghan scholar we quoted. At a minimum he ought to at least note for his readers that not everyone thinks eradication is a good idea and that a radically different scheme, licensing the opium for the medical market, which stops short of legalization, is being fairly extensively discussed, including by high-level people in our NATO ally countries who are suffering an increasing share of the casualties. This is simply not the cut-and-dried issue Geiger has taken it to be. Geiger's piece was republished in the widely-read Huffington Post blog -- ironically, given Arianna Huffington's own longstanding opposition to the drug war. I don't know that she has specifically written about the Afghan opium conundrum, but in both her conservative past and her liberal present she has been a strong voice on the issue. The summer 2000 "Shadow Conventions" in Philadelphia and LA, in fact, which Arianna spearheaded, adopted opposition to the drug war as one of the three primary issue tracks. Nothing in this post should be interpreted as implying that the Republican Party is good on the drug issue either. Just in case I'm about to get slammed as "right-wing," look a little bit up on this web page in the "Higher Education Act Reform Campaign" block for a photo from the press conference we organized where ten Democratic members of Congress spoke. Or click here for a picture of me and outspokenly liberal Congressman Jim McDermott chatting last year at our Seattle event. And just in case anyone thinks we're soft on the Taliban -- be aware that we condemned them back in 1997, when the UN and the Clinton administration were working on funding them.