Obama, U.S. Drug Policy and Muslim Terrorism
By wchung | 12 May, 2009

Changing our drug policy may be the easiest way to defeat Muslim terrorism.

 

As much as I admire President Obama as a leader with the clarity of vision to tackle problems at their roots, I’m not sure if even he has the courage — or maybe the foolhardiness — to tackle the true roots of Muslim extremist terrorism.

I’m talking about our insane drug policy.

Yes, it’s our irrational insistence on continuing to criminalize narcotics use that is pumping tens of billions of dollars each year into all the wrong coffers. Among them is the Taliban and al Qaida, who reap an estimated $500 million a year from opium crops in Afghanistan alone.

According to the New York Times, the Taliban get this money not only by directly raising opium crops but also by extorting protection money from Afghan opium farmers. Part of this money is used to pay for the large numbers of IUDs that regularly kill and maim our troops as well as innocent civilians. Part of it is funneled to al Qaida networks to fund terrorist activities in other countries, including Europe and the U.S.

The U.S. will send 20,000 more soldiers into Afghanistan’s opium regions in hopes of choking off this money supply. Good luck. We have been using that kind of brute-force tactics here in our own country, as well as in neighboring countries, for the past 30 years. All we’ve managed to do is keep street prices high enough to enrich vast armies of professional criminals.

Opium represents 60% of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product. To think that we have the resources and the will to crush that much economic activity in a rugged country on the other side of the world is, in itself, the epitomy of hubris. It’s also the product of the brute-force mentality that has been typical of U.S. foreign policy the past half century or so.

It’s time we injected some rationality into this problem that is killing U.S. soldiers abroad and victimizing our own kids at home. Not to mention creating employment for international criminal syndicates.

A tough visionary leader can end this vicious cycle of maintaining insane drug laws that create illicit markets to be tapped by criminal syndicates who reap obscene profits, then in effect financing the protection of those criminal franchises by pouring money and personnel into “fighting” drugs, thereby keeping their street value high enough to make them obscenely profitable for syndicates willing to use violence and bribery to control the market.

The only sane way to address the problem is to treat drug users for what they are — sick people needing medical and social services. Not only would it instantly sap drug use of whatever wrongheaded glamour and appeal it may now possess, it would let us license the efficient production of narcotics and control its distribution to those who register as patients. There would be no profits except the taxed kind earned by tobacco and liquor companies. It would save our streets from crimes committed to feed drug habits, give more help to unfortunate addicts and even boost our tax revenues, all while saving us tens of billions a year in a futile drug war that only rekindles bad memories of Prohibition.

A U.S. leader with the popularity of a Barack Obama may be able to do it. I suspect he understands. But it’s an open question as to whether he can clear the decks enough at some point in his presidency to undertake what could be the easiest way to make the entire world safe from terrorists and criminals. Of course, he could also fry by touching what some have called the third rail of American politics.

It’s a sad comment on our society that demagoguery still holds so much dread for our leaders. It’s all the more sad because destroying drug profits may be the only way to crush Muslim terrorism.