The Drug Czar's Awesome Plan to Blame Hugo Chavez for Everything

Drug Czar John Walters went off the rails this week, suggesting that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez was somehow involved in the drug trade. According to Walters, the best evidence of this is the lack of any evidence. Read it, it's hilarious:

"Where are the big seizures, where are the big arrests of individuals who are at least logistical coordinators? When it's being launched from controlled airports and seaports, where are the arrests of corrupt officials? At some point here, this is tantamount to collusion," Walters said in an interview. [Los Angeles Times [4]]

Indeed, the Drug Czar is so confounded by the ongoing failure of international drug prohibition, he can only assume that entire nations are conspiring to undermine him.

The whole thing is just so crazy, The Los Angeles Times was forced to qualify his statements by pointing out that he couldn’t back them up with facts (emphasis mine):

Walters said the volume of Colombian cocaine moving through Venezuela, believed to represent at least one-third of Colombia's production, continues to increase with no discernible effort by Chavez government to impede it. He provided no statistics to back up his assertion.

Awesome. I nominate this reporter for a Pulitzer. You could add that sentence to the end of every paragraph ever written about the wild nonsense that spews forth out of John Walters mouth like a broken water main.

As Pete Guither points out [5], Walters's bizarre assertions are probably an attempt to blame someone -- anyone he can find -– for this:

MIAMI -- U.S.-directed seizures and disruptions of cocaine shipments from Latin America dropped sharply in 2007 from the year before, reflecting in part a successful shift in tactics by drug traffickers to avoid detection at sea, senior American officials disclosed Monday in releasing new figures. [News Tribune [6]]

Walters can blame Hugo Chavez as much as he wants. But the failure of international drug prohibition will never have anything to do with Venezuela's refusal to fight a futile drug war at the behest of bullying bureaucrats from Washington D.C. The drug war is failing because that is the only thing it knows how to do.