War on Drugs is killing our soldiers

Afghanistan is going badly. "We're not going to win this war," said a top British general this month.

Well, pass the smelling salts.

The War on Drugs created Afghanistan's massive illicit drug trade. This trade funds the insurgency, corrupts the government and destabilizes society. But neither the United States nor the United Nations will acknowledge that the War on Drugs is anything less than a roaring success and so they refuse to discuss alternatives to the policy that fuels the whole bloody mess.

And victory eludes us? Well.

The debate about Afghanistan has always bordered on farce. Every serious observer -- including the country's president -- has said that Afghanistan's illicit drug trade, not the Taliban, is the greatest threat the country faces. And yet the drug trade has always been treated as a peripheral issue.

Discussion has been scant. It has also been ignorant and vapid. Even the Manley report said nothing intelligent about it. "Coherent counter-narcotic strategies need to be adopted by all relevant authorities," the report sagely recommended, leaving the identity of these marvellous strategies to the reader's imagination.

This failure has many causes, but a key one is the simple fact that the primary source of information about the drug trade is the UN Office on Drugs and Crime. For the UNODC, the criminal prohibition of drugs is not merely a tool of public policy. It is a cause, a crusade, a faith. One does not question a faith. One promotes it.

And that's what the UNODC does every year when it releases its World Drug Report.

For journalists and politicians the world over, the WDR is the definitive source of information about drugs and drug policy. Any time you read a news story or political statement about drugs, there's a good chance the WDR was used as a source.

To an extent, that's fine. The report has lots of solid data.

But it is primarily an instrument of propaganda. Its purpose is to praise the status quo, bury evidence of failure and frame the discussion so serious scrutiny of the War on Drugs never happens.

In the latest edition of the WDR, Antonio Maria Costa, UNOCDC director, boasts Southeast Asia "is now almost opium free." This is a model for Afghanistan, he writes.

What Costa doesn't mention is that the large declines in opium poppy production in Southeast Asia occurred at the same time as even bigger increases were observed in Afghanistan. This was not a coincidence.

Squeeze a balloon in one place and it bulges elsewhere. When cocaine production was driven down in Bolivia and Peru, it soared in Colombia. When methamphetamine production was suppressed in the U.S., it shot up in Mexico. It's predictable.

Opium has grown in Afghanistan since time immemorial, but it was never a major source of black market drugs. That started to change in the 1970s, when the balloon was squeezed in Turkey. In the 1980s and 1990s, the squeeze shifted to Southeast Asia and Pakistan.

And today, Afghanistan supplies 93 per cent of the world's illicit opium. For that, we can thank the very actions which the UNODC says are a model for Afghanistan.

Thanks to criminal prohibition, the report argues, "the drug problem was dramatically reduced over the past century." Proof lies in the fact that world production of opium fell from 41.4 tonnes to 12.6 tonnes between 1906 -- when the drug was legal almost everywhere -- and 2007.

There are several problems here. First, the figure for 1906 is almost certainly inflated, as many observers said at the time. Second, it ignores the fact that opium's role in medicine, which was huge at the beginning of the 20th century, steadily diminished.