War on drugs a miserable failure – and more to come

This was truth-telling time for the Obama administration: On March 2, the State Department issued its annual International Narcotics Control Strategy Report for 2016.

As usual, the report reflected the extraordinary American obsession with playing judge and jury for the rest of the world, but inadvertently contained some extraordinary official admissions about the utter bankruptcy of US security policies and moral standing too.

The report admitted that decades of rhetoric and claimed efforts to interdict the enormous annual hard-drug flows from Mexico continue to fail – and fail miserably.

“Mexico remains a major transit country for cocaine and heroin and a source country for heroin, marijuana and methamphetamine destined for the United States,” it frankly admits. “An estimated 93 percent of all crimes went either unreported or uninvestigated in 2014.”

The US government has sent nearly $1.5 billion in training, equipment and technical assistance to Mexico to strengthen its institutions in the so-called War on Drugs.

Almost all of it has been wasted.

The US government estimates that Mexico’s opium poppy cultivation increased to 17,000 hectares from 11,000 hectares in 2013, which could potentially produce 42 metric tons of pure heroin, compared with 26 metric tons in 2013, the report noted.

US brought drug scourge to Iraq, too: According to the official narrative, scores of thousands of brave American soldiers fought, and many died or lost their limbs, in 13 years of continuous military operations in Iraq to bring peace, security and freedom from Islamic terrorism to that unhappy country.

But they also brought a vast explosion of hard-drug addiction, the State Department now admits. In the years that followed the US invasion of Iraq, the number of drug abusers grew fourfold across the nation, the narcotics control strategy report acknowledged. The report noted that a 2015 survey by the US government and the Iraqi Ministry of Health confirmed that four times as many Iraqis are using hard drugs as compared with 12 years ago.

And the US also lost the drug war in Afghanistan: As drug production continues to flourish in Afghanistan, the State Department now admits the US is losing its much-touted war on drugs in that country too.

“The cultivation, production, trafficking and consumption of illicit drugs flourish in Afghanistan,” the narcotics report said.

Not surprisingly, the report acknowledged that a symbiotic relationship exists between the insurgency in Afghanistan and organized narcotics trafficking. In fact, over the past 14 years, the US has spent $8 billion fighting opium production in Afghanistan – and that effort amounts to yet another monumental failure.

The report explained that drug traffickers provide weapons and funding to the Afghan insurgency in exchange for the protection of drug-trade routes, cultivation fields, laboratories and trafficking organizations.

It should be noted that before the Taliban government was overthrown by the US in 2001, opium production in that country was virtually eliminated. 

TRENDPOST: There is no end in sight to the mounting failures being notched by the US and its allies in one disastrous intervention after another, including this hat trick of failures in the war on drugs, coverage of which in the mainstream media has been minuscule. This is yet another example of a news trend that richly deserves widespread outrage and gets none. No coverage. No outrage. No change.