Interdiction

Iran complains that the West is ignoring opium production in Afghanistan, and some US Marines inadvertently help Tehran make its case.

Three police agencies in Philadelphia teamed up to nab the largest stash of cocaine ever found there. But all impact on the market from the bust is bound to be gone in a matter or weeks if not less. Should we be excited?

US drug czar John Walters accused Venezuela of "colluding" in the cocaine traffic, an accusation Venezuela did not take lying down. Meanwhile, Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez says he chews coca, much to the dismay of the Miami Herald.

In the latest installment of the Chronicle's occasional series on the day-to-day workings of the drug war, we go to Florida, where a drug interdiction exercise disguised as a traffic enforcement effort, some sheriff's radio shenanigans, a suspicious Bible, and a drug dog left one Key West man wondering what hit him.

Faced with a booming trans-Atlantic cocaine trade aimed at insatiable European markets, some European countries have formed an organization to coordinate efforts to block it.

A committee of the European Parliament has called for a pilot project for diverting illicit Afghan opium to the licit medicinal market.

The UN announced last week that Afghan opium production had increased yet again. Now, pressures to combat it with aerial spraying and increased Western military involvement are mounting, but the experts say that's a path to nowhere.

Despite his publicly expressed reservations about the DEA -- and the demonstrated failure of the war on drugs -- Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega is bellying up to the counter-narcotics assistance trough. He wants a billion dollars from Washington to fight the Central American drug trade.

Two years ago, drug czar John Walters trumpeted rising cocaine prices as evidence the drug war was working. But the overall trend is toward lower prices and higher purity, and Walters doesn't want to talk about that.

Peru is currently the world's second largest producer of coca and cocaine, and the coca growers' movement there is gaining steam, but it still faces many hurdles, some internal, some external.