A new day, a new extreme as the dark swarm of drug war-corrupted cops continues to swell.

From The Baltimore Sun:

Disarmed municipal police patrolled alongside armed state police Friday, a sight that brought some comfort to many in this border city, where municipal police are often equated with corruption and drug-fueled violence.
…

Members of the 2,300-strong municipal police force were ordered by the military to turn in their weapons to see whether any are linked with homicides and other crimes. More than 2,000 weapons, most of them 9 mm handguns, but also some automatic weapons and shotguns, are being inspected.

There's something terribly wrong when public safety necessitates the disarmament of the police. It's a bizarre situation that would never happen in a million years if it weren't for the infinitely corrupting influence of the war on drugs. Indeed, the drug war is more than mildly corrosive; it corrupts entire nations, beginning with the people placed in charge of preventing corruption.

The best evidence that everything is going to hell comes from the citizens of Tijuana, who couldn't be more thrilled about the disarmament of their police force:

Municipal police may get their weapons back within two weeks, Tijuana officials say, but many residents aren't demanding urgent action.

"This is stupendous," said Alfredo Arias, the manager of a restaurant in the tough neighborhood of La Libertad that was riddled by hundreds of bullets in a shootout last year between masked gunmen and federal agents.
…

Alberto Capella, president of Tijuana's citizens advisory council on public safety, said disarming the police had met with widespread support. "In some ways it's a necessary evil ... part of the cleansing we need to improve the department." he said.

I totally understand. The worst consequences of U.S. drug policy are suffered by innocent citizens in source countries, but I can think of a few good reasons to disarm some of the cops up here. Maybe the Mexicans are on to something. But even drastic steps like disarming police cannot quench the drug war's insatiable appetite for chaos and disorder.

We're seeing a steady escalation of drug trade violence across our southern border, and while many bloggers are concerned, most are content to simply propose building fences and such. Never mind that drug prohibition will always encourage well-financed drug traffickers to cut holes in the fence.

No, a fence isn't going to work. Unless it's a magic fence. A magic fence that knows how to end drug prohibition.

From The New York Times:

NEWARK, Jan. 8 — Mayor Cory A. Booker and his police director announced the formation of a new narcotics division today to try to defeat a stubbornly high murder rate, firmly linking the trade in illegal drugs to the city's persistent violence.

There's a link, alright. And in time politicians will come to understand that it is prohibition which makes drug-trade violence inevitable. Surely we can't keep addressing community problems with hollow rhetoric like this:

The new 45-person unit, led by a deputy chief, will tackle the city's drug trade as it if were a "ground war," he said.

So basically they're proposing a war on violence. It won't work. It can't work because drug-trade violence stems from an absence of regulation, not a shortage of armed police ready to kick doors in on an informant's tip.

In fact, temporary successes achieved through "ground war" tactics frequently increase violence as new competitors rush to replace those removed from the market by law-enforcement. Nor should anyone disregard the abundant collateral damage that occurs when armed raids are conducted based on tips from shady criminal informants.

The New York Times isn't responsible for making this argument, but they should at least acknowledge it. The discussion of drug-trade violence is incomplete and unproductive when the contributing role of drug prohibition goes unmentioned.

Help us spread the message: The New York Times accepts letters to the editor at [email protected].

I decided today to postpone my long-awaited trip to Bolivia and Peru because of uncertainty surrounding the situation with Bolivian visa requirements. As I blogged a few days ago, the Bolivian government announced New Year's Day that it would now require all American citizens traveling there to have visas (previously visas were not required for tourist visits lasting less than 30 days). Okay, so I'll get a visa, right? Wrong. When my DC-based colleague went to the Bolivian consulate there, he was given a visa application for me to fill out, but when he returned it, he was told no visa was necessary. When he reiterated his concerns, the consular employee gave him a copy of Bolivian consular service document saying because the embassy had not been officially informed of the change, the old rules were still in effect. Meanwhile, at least one US citizen responded to my initial blog by saying he had been turned away at the border. My contacts in Bolivia tell me nobody knows what's really going on yet and that the whole thing is being done in a seat-of-the-pants fashion. I could theoretically apply for a business visa, just to have some sort of guarantee I will be able to enter the country, but unlike tourist visas, I would have to appear in person at a Bolivian consulate. I haven't been able to find one of those in East Central South Dakota. So, to hell with this uncertainty. I was supposed to take off a week from today, but I'm bumping my departure back a month. I am not going to arrive at a remote Bolivian border crossing in the altiplano only to be turned back because the Bolivians don't have their act together. Instead, I'll wait and hope they get it figured out soon.

My favorite blog Drug War Rant frequently reports on my least favorite blog, the ONDCP's Pushing Back, a habit I intend to undertake myself, since Pete can't possibly find time to counter every last kernel of incoherent kookiness to be found there.

Unfortunately, the only way to learn what they're saying is to visit them and risk perpetuating this:

ONDCP would like to thank all of the loyal readers of Pushing Back for helping make this blog a success. Thanks in part to you, we are now averaging over 300,000 hits per month!

Yes, thanks in small part to spite-readers like us and in large part to ONDCP not telling the truth about its web traffic, their blog is a huge success according to them. As Pete Guither explains, their claims are not demonstrably false, but rather meaningless either way:

Note the use of the word "hits." It may be technically true that Pushing Back is getting 300,000 hits per month, if you use server terminology. In that case, every call of the server counts as a hit, so as a single page is loading it could call upon the server dozens or hundreds of times to load images, run scripts, etc. "Hits" may be useful for analyzing the way you organize your site to reduce server overload, but means very little in terms of the number of people who come to read your site.

In other words, ONDCP uses misleading rhetoric to claim that people like reading their misleading rhetoric.

And we've now found ourselves frequently visiting this blog in order to expose its erroneous claims of being popular. It seems a bit silly, but not as silly as ONDCP bragging about their site traffic when anyone can look them up at Technorati.com and see that every single link to their blog is hostile.

The conspicuous absence of friendly or even neutral links to Pushing Back is notable. It shows that reformers are the only ones reading it, but it also shows how many potential drug war supporters aren't interested enough to discuss the issue. It's a powerful example of former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson's observation that support for the drug war is a mile wide, but only an inch deep. Across the vast blogosphere, otherwise an epic political battleground, we can't seem to find much opposition.

In the meantime, I'll continue reading the Drug Czar's blog. So you don't have to.

With my departure for South America set for 10 days from now, the Bolivian government has put a hitch in my plans. Bolivian President Evo Morales announced yesterday that as of now, American citizens will need a visa to visit Bolivia. As the Associated Press reported:

LA PAZ, Bolivia -- The government of President Evo Morales approved a decree Monday requiring U.S. citizens to obtain visas to enter Bolivia. Morales said the decree "a matter of reciprocity." The U.S. government requires Bolivians to obtain visas to enter the United States. "We are a small country but we have the same dignity as any other," Morales said. The decree, approved during a Cabinet meeting, applies to other countries, including Serbia and Montenegro and Cyprus. In February 2006, Leonilda Zurita, a congresswoman belonging to Morales' Movement Toward Socialism party, had her U.S. visa revoked. Zurita said Washington cited an alleged link between her and terrorist activities, which she denied. Morales also cited security concerns for the rule. An American man has been charged with setting off bombs in two La Paz hotels in March. Two Bolivians were killed and seven people were injured, including an American woman. U.S. ties to Bolivia have been tense partly due to Morales' friendship with Presidents Fidel Castro of Cuba and Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, as well as by Morales' background as the leader of coca growers fighting U.S. attempts to eradicate their crops.

What the AP did not make clear is that the visa requirement for Bolivians to enter the US is a recent, post-911 move by the US reversing years of visa-free travel for South Americans coming north. The Brazilian government has also imposed a visa requirement for Americans now in this game of diplomatic tit-for-tat. Thanks, Mr. Bush. What this means for my trip is unclear at this point. The Bolivian consulate in Washington wasn't answering the phone today. One of colleagues in the Washington office will run over there first thing tomorrow morning to try to find out what the new requirements are and how fast I can actually get a visa. I am going first to Peru, which hasn't imposed a visa requirement, and it may be possible to get a visa there, but I don't know that yet. I'll keep you all updated on the situation. (Read the comment I've posted to learn a little more about Leonilda Zurita. - DB)

This editorial was published as part of our 12/29/06 "Mini-Bulletin." The entire bulletin can be read online here. One of the news items today -- not in drug policy -- was the filing of an ethics complaint by the North Carolina Bar Association against Mike Nifong, the now high-profile prosecutor in the case involving three Duke University lacrosse players who originally faced rape charges and are still charged with kidnapping and sexual assault. The complaint comes on the heels of a letter sent by a member of Congress from the state, asking the US Attorney General to investigate Nifong. No, I'm not about to express a wish related to this case. I'm not familiar enough with it to express what I would consider an informed opinion, and I wouldn't post such an opinion here in this drug policy newsletter if I did. But I do know something about prosecutorial misconduct in general. For example, that a 2003 report by the Center for Public Integrity, "Harmful Error," found that it is widespread but almost never punished. According to CPI, prosecutorial misconduct falls mainly in several categories:

• courtroom misconduct;
• mishandling of physical evidence;
• failing to disclose exculpatory evidence;
• threatening, badgering or tampering with witnesses;
• using false or misleading evidence;
• harassing, displaying bias toward, or having a vendetta against the defendant or defendant's counsel;
• improper behavior during grand jury proceedings.

(There's much more detail about these, of course, on the web site.) Another thing I know about prosecutorial misconduct is that the most common victim of it is black or brown, and poor, is not enrolled at a prestigious university, and doesn't have the best lawyers that money can buy. Media outlets, certainly national ones, almost never focus on their cases. Often they receive the arguably sound advice that innocent or guilty they should really not fight the charges, or the outcome will be much worse. And the Bar Association won't do anything about their cases, because there are just too many. Misconduct in the criminal justice system is by no means limited to the ranks of prosecutors. Police are also serious, perennial offenders. For example, a recent case in Hartford, Connecticut involved a retired police officer who was convicted recently of falsifying an arrest warrant. His colleagues came to his defense, arguing that this was common practice in the department. The judge gave him a special form of probation that will allow him to get his record expunged upon completion of it. The trial has myriad implications. First, there is confirmation by actual police officers, under oath, that police officers constantly break the law in order to make arrests. Second, the officers obviously felt comfortable enough with that fact to state it publicly, before a judge. Third, the judge was okay enough with this to give the officer a sentence that is a little more than a slap on the wrist, but not all that much more. How is police and prosecutorial misconduct to be stemmed if it is tolerated? And if it isn't, how can we in the public have faith in the outcome of any criminal case? One of my many wishes for the New Year is that fewer police and prosecutors commit misconduct, and that more complaints are filed against those who do.

One of the most widely ignored consequences of the drug war is its negative influence on the men and women who carry it out. Two disturbing stories from local papers illustrate the drug war's profound ability to criminalize our public servants.

First, a revealing story of police misconduct from The Journal Inquirer in North Central Connecticut:

A Hartford police detective arrested days after his retirement in 2004 on charges of falsifying an arrest warrant has been granted a special form of probation that could lead to his arrest record being expunged.

The decision came after a hearing in which [Sgt. Franco] Sanzo's lawyer, Jake Donovan of Middletown, called another retired officer who said that police frequently sign their names to warrants - and swear before judges - that they've seen things they haven't.

So basically Sanzo's defense was that this type of misconduct is a matter of routine at his department. And it worked! I don't know if I'm more shocked that a defense attorney would offer an argument so contemptuous towards the Fourth Amendment, or that a judge would actually be persuaded by an attempt to rationalize police misconduct.

The warrant at the center of Sanzo's arrest claimed that he and Officer Nathaniel Ortiz had witnessed people buying drugs from a convicted felon in Hartford's north end on Aug. 27 and 28, 2004.

However, police and prosecutor Dennis J. O'Connor say the warrant was based on false information, and that the convicted felon was actually in jail at the time Sanzo and Ortiz claimed to have seen him.

The warrant was used in a search of the felon's mother's apartment. Ortiz and another officer, William Ward, say they bought crack cocaine from the woman. She later complained to the Police Department that items were stolen and property destroyed during the search.

Gosh, I don't know whom to believe.

Next, the Santa Fe New Mexican tells the story of a highly regarded officer's descent into corruption:

What emerges is a portrait of a man who worked extra hours to keep drugs and criminals off the streets, a man who consistently testified honestly in court and would sometimes buy turkeys for needy families during the holidays. However, Altonji also increasingly gravitated toward what many involved in the criminal justice system say can be the most morally bankrupting assignment in all of police work: narcotics.
…

Today, he has been stripped of his badge and gun, and stands as the sole target of a federal grand jury meeting this morning in downtown Albuquerque to investigate allegations of money laundering, deprivation of civil rights and theft concerning a program receiving federal funds.

This story is all too familiar. To its credit, The New Mexican puts these events in context:

To nearly everyone involved in the criminal justice system, narcotics is a dirty business. To be effective, officers must learn to look, act and think like drug dealers, according to lawyers, current and former police officers, and others who work in the justice system. Consequently, officers continually work around large amounts of cash and drugs, and opportunities to take one or the other or both are frequent, they said.

"You've got to stoop down to their level," said a retired area narcotics detective. "You've gotta get slimy."

And that's the problem. Too many police officers have been allowed to become slimeballs in uniform. Too often, constitutional violations by police have been deemed necessary. Too often, criminal activity by police has been deemed anomalous. And too often, the perpetrators of these crimes are forgiven with remarkable haste, as the concept of judicial discretion that is essential to the administration of justice in a free society is brought to bear only in defense of public servants who abuse their power.

How petty a crime is drug possession compared to that of deliberately violating the Constitution?

According to the Associated Press, President Bush issued 16 pardons yesterday, including one sentence commutation. Six of them including the commutation were for drug offenses. (For those of you who are not familiar with this, a pardon can simply mean that an old offense is wiped off of one's record -- feels good, may help with employment and other matters, but the individual was already finished with any incarceration that was part of the sentence.) A commutation is when someone actually gets out early or finishes parole or probation early. According to the AP:

Bush also granted a commutation of sentence to Phillip Anthony Emmert of Washington, Iowa, whose case involved conspiracy to distribute methamphetamine. He was sentenced Dec. 23, 1992, to 262 months’ imprisonment (reduced on Feb. 21, 1996) and five years’ supervised release. Bush directed that Emmert’s sentence expire on this coming Jan. 20, but left the supervised release intact.

Please contact the White House to let them know that: 1) We're glad he's releasing Phillip Emmert; 2) One commutation is nowhere near good enough. The president should release more nonviolent drug offenders this year! Just a few of the more well known ones: Weldon Angelos, Clarence Aaron, Lawrence & Lamont Garrison.

Very early on January 12, I will board a plane in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and that night I will be sleeping in a hotel in downtown Lima, Peru. That will be the first of 21 nights in the Drug War Chronicle's Coca Tour 2007, which will take me deep into the indigenous Andean coca heartland (but not to Colombia, where, for the most part, coca production is not tied to ancient tradition but to the global cocaine market). I will be meeting with coca farmers, coca growers' union leaders, academics, harm reductionists, and government officials in Peru and Bolivia, as well, I hope, with US government officials in the embassies in Lima and La Paz. I will spend a week in Lima and the vicinity, then take a tourism break to visit Machu Picchu and the ancient Inca capital of Cusco. From there, it'll be a bus ride across the 12,000 foot high altiplano to the Bolivian border and on to La Paz. I'll spend 10 or 11 days in Bolivia, where I hope to travel to both major coca producing areas, the Chapare and Las Yungas. The road from La Paz to Las Yungas, from the heights of the Andes to the edge of the Amazon basin is known as "the world's most dangerous road." Yee-haw! In Peru, I'm working on setting up meetings with ENACO, the Peruvian government coca monopoly, as well as with DEVIDA, the anti-drug agency. Maybe I'll even have to try some of that coca salad President Garcia was praising this week. In Bolivia, I'll be talking to the Ministry of Coca, NGOs, and companies that produce coca products, as well as growers and union leaders. I will be blogging from the Andes throughout the journey. Stay tuned.

A new report proving that marijuana is America's number one cash crop has sparked significant interest around the blogoshere, mostly from fair-weather friends of our cause who recognize the absurdity of prohibiting a product of such enduring popularity.

Indeed, this news highlights the failure of prohibition, both for failing to eliminate the market, and for driving its value above that of various more popular vegetables.

But the fun part is reading what the anti-pot crowd has to say. The most entertaining entry in this regard is from Scott Whitlock at Newsbusters: Exposing and Combating Liberal Media Bias, who cites this story as evidence of a liberal media bias at CNN.

It's really funny. First, Whitlock complains that CNN correspondent Stephanie Elam refers to the drug as "our friend marijuana." Of course, Elam's remark is a nod to the fact that Americans spend more on pot than corn, rather than an admission that everyone at CNN loves weed. Whitlock includes the transcript, which makes this quite clear, but why let your own blockquotes get in the way of your argument?

Whitlock finds further evidence of "CNN's fondness for marijuana" in Elam's statement that marijuana legalization is "an interesting idea." Still, "interesting" is an interesting word in that it doesn't always indicate genuine interest. And when it does, interest is often not analogous to agreement. Perhaps Scott Whitlock only says something is "interesting" when he's really strongly in agreement with it, but I must admit that I've often said "that's interesting" when I actually just wanted somebody to shut up.

If CNN is pro-marijuana, that's great news and I can't wait for them to start making actual pro-marijuana statements on TV, but I still don't see what that has to do with liberal media bias. Liberals are more likely than conservatives to support marijuana reform, but there's certainly nothing inherently liberal about opposing the government's ill-conceived war on America's number one cash crop. The best evidence of this comes from Whitlock's own commenters, who come out decidedly in favor of legalization (though I suppose this could be the work of stoned CNN staffers masquerading as conservative blog trolls).

"Stoners Issue Report on Weed" from Christian blogger Jack Lewis comes in at a close second. Rather than lambasting the "liberal media" for reporting the story, Lewis attacks the report's methodology by not reading it and instead guessing what it might have been:

Not being a pot user myself, I had to go look up the price per pound for marijuana. What I could piece together is that the street value ranges from $2,000 to $5,000 per pound.
…

Since these are "Hey! Uh...like...legalize, like, marijuana, dude, okay?" types who are obviously cooking the figures to try to make their case, my bet is that they used the $5,000 price or something close. So ultimately we have the conclusion, not that the US produces more marijuana, but that marijuana prices are high enough (or at least the prices they used for their report) to make it more expensive than the cost for the corn and wheat we grow. That speaks more toward the stupidity of marijuana users than anything else.

For the record, the report's author Jon Gettman used a generously low estimate of $1,606 per pound. Reformers aren't the ones who inflate drug prices. That's a law-enforcement trick used to create the appearance that substantial gains have been made in the drug war.

It's amusing that Lewis has nothing to offer other than a weak attempt at refuting the study's conclusions. He implies unintentionally that this data would mean something if it were true. Well since it is true, what does it mean to you, Jack Lewis? We think it shows that marijuana prohibition has failed dramatically. I'm sure you'd hesitate to agree with that, but does it trouble you that prohibition has created a perpetual business opportunity for criminals?

Finally I checked out the Drug Czar's blog to see what ONDCP had to say about all of this. Surely, a thorough and deceptive "debunking" attempt awaited me. But alas, this story was bumped by the fascinating news that the Cullman County Board of Education in Alabama has decided to start drug-testing students who participate in extra-curricular activities.

Maybe they'll write something about this tomorrow. After all, it would be pretty silly to run the world's only exclusive pro-drug war blog and consistently fail to weigh in on the hottest drug policy stories of the day.

I swear, half their hits are just me trying to catch them doing something other than announcing when various school districts start a drug-testing program.

Here's the Drug Czar's blog gloating over the DEA's raid of the Local Patient's Cooperative in Hayward, CA:

The DEA took down another illegal marijuana dispensary in California. The owners were selling pot for profit under the guise of "medicinal use." Police seized pot cookies and expensive cars. More here (with video).

Notice the careful language used here. We're told that this was an "illegal marijuana dispensary" that used medical use as a "guise" to make money. As dispensary raids have increased in recent months, DEA has claimed each time that they're targeting clubs that engage in recreational sales. Similarly, ONDCP's blog post clearly implies that LPC was uniquely criminal in its conduct.

In other words, DEA and now ONDCP are tacitly condoning dispensaries that only sell to patients!

In both word and deed they are suggesting that dispensaries which follow California State law will generally not be targeted, despite the fact that federal law draws no such distinction. Obviously, this informal policy is driven not by compassion for the sick, but rather an acceptance of the political reality that the public won't tolerate continued assaults on patient access itself.

Unfortunately, DEA's willful ignorance of the nuances of legitimate medical marijuana use continues to undermine the value of this apparent compromise. Here's a quote from the SFGate.com article linked by ONDCP, which ironically undermines their whole point:

In the Hayward case, an FBI agent said in a sworn affidavit that officers staked out the Foothill Boulevard location five times in October and November and saw healthy-looking men entering and leaving the building each time, carrying bags the officers believed contained marijuana.

The only other evidence the agent cited to show that the dispensary was selling drugs to non-medical patients was a newspaper article saying police had found 10 times as much marijuana on the premises as the city's rules allowed.

That LPC's customers appeared "healthy looking" is a red herring. Most of the people in any medical setting appear healthy and California allows caretakers to obtain medicine on behalf of sick relatives. Furthermore, the apparent "health" of certain patients could as easily be attributed to their access to effective medicine. Hayward area patients with limited mobility might not be looking so good today.

LPC's excessive supply appears to be the only legitimate issue here and even that falls far short of justifying the conclusion that extra-medical sales were being conducted. Friends at Americans for Safe Access have explained to me that recent DEA activity has resulted more from poorly drafted or non-existent local regulations than from gratuitous improprieties on the part of dispensary owners.

With that in mind, consider what patient and activist Angel Raich had to say in an email:

"I can tell you that Local Patients Group was a really good co-op,
they served a high number of patients, they gave back to the patient
community, and the City of Hayward. This was the first medical cannabis co-op as you come into the SF Bay Area and many patients from the Central Valley and surrounding areas would travel for hours to get their medicine there and this raid has created a hardship for hundreds of patients. They will be missed."

Thank you Angel. If LPC's substantial supply reflects the needs of patients in the region, rather than profiteering by the club's operators, then the effect of the raid is to dramatically undermine legitimate patient access. Morally, there's a big difference between exceeding supply limits for the purpose of supplying patients, as opposed to engaging in recreational sales surreptitiously. Yet LPC's conduct was presumed to indicate the later and not the former.

In sum, federal authorities are admitting a distinction between medical and recreational sales, which shows that their position has been weakened. But they're failing to draw this distinction accurately and their newfound enthusiasm for busting "illegal" dispensaries has led to a recent increase in raids.

Federal charges mean that dispensary operators will have no opportunity to defend their adherence to state and local laws anyway, so the DEA's public justification for the raid becomes irrelevant after the fact. Meanwhile, reduced patient access shifts the burden to the remaining dispensaries, increasing their chances of running afoul of local ordinances and becoming the next target.

Ironically, Congressional debate over the Hinchey Amendment, which would solve this problem entirely, still focuses on whether marijuana is medicine; a fact that the DEA has already tacitly admitted.

Afghanistan is in flames. The Taliban are resurgent. The opium economy provides livelihoods for millions of Afghans. And now, US drug czar John Walters announces over the weekend, that Afghanistan will begin spraying the poppy fields with glyphosate, the same stuff we've been using with such great success in Colombia against the coca crops. (After six years of Plan Colombia spraying, the coca crop in Colombia is about the same size it was when we started.) The government of President Hamid Karzai has resisted the resort to poisoning the crops, citing the risk of water contamination and the possible destruction of adjacent legal crops. What it doesn’t say out loud, but which must factor into its calculations, is the impact an aggressive poppy eradication campaign will have on the political loyalties of the millions who depend on the opium trade to feed their families. The Taliban are already scoring points and winning new recruits by offering to protect farmers from the government and the "infidels." I find it illuminating that it was Walters, the American drug proconsul—not Karzai, the nominal head of the Afghan government—who made the announcement. It demonstrates not only the Afghan government's hesitation to embrace the widely-feared herbicides, but also the extent to which Afghanistan remains an American fiefdom. In fact, the Afghan government has yet to announce that it has agreed to the use of herbicides. But that didn't stop Walters.

"I think the president has said yes, and I think some of the ministers have repeated yes," Walters said without specifying when spraying would start. "The particulars of the application have not been decided yet, but yes, the goal is to carry out ground spraying. We cannot fail in this mission," he said. "Proceeds from opium production feed the insurgency and burden Afghanistan's nascent political institutions with the scourge of corruption."

Funny, that. They grow opium in Australia and France and India and Turkey, but they don't have problems with black market proceeds fueling political violence or corrupting the authorities in those countries. Oh—that's because it's a legal, regulated market. Walters' planned herbicide war against the Afghan poppy will not do anything to address that dynamic. And to the degree that it is "successful," it will only increase the profits of the traffickers and increase the flow of money to the Taliban (and, apparently, half of the Afghan government). Mr. Walters, you can have your war on terror or you can have your war on drugs. You can't have both and hope to win either.