Heroin

It's not just Marines pouring into Afghanistan this summer. As the Obama administration shifts its emphasis from poppy eradication to targeting traffickers, the DEA is expanding operations there big-time.

Things are getting very bloody in Afghanistan as thousands of US Marines pour into Helmand province, the country's opium capital, in a bid to drive out the Taliban.

Faced with a growing Taliban insurgency fueled by opium and heroin profits and inflamed by the destruction of farmers' fields, the US last weekend announced a dramatic shift in its Afghan anti-drug strategy. The US will abandon what has been a pillar of its anti-drug strategy worldwide: eradication.

With US and NATO policies for dealing with the Afghan poppy group undergoing quite radical shifts -- giving up on eradication, treating traffickers as terrorists -- Gretchen Peters' exposé of the links between the traffic in prohibited drugs and the Taliban and Al Qaeda couldn't be more timely or more informative.

It's summer in Afghanistan, and that means more fighting, more casualties, and this year, more drug war. Western militaries are now aiming directly at drug trafficking networks that fund the Taliban, and the Taliban isn't taking it lying down.

For years, heroin offenders in Louisiana faced draconian sentences of life without parole. The legislature changed that a few years ago, but didn't act to free the remaining "heroin lifers." It may get around to it this year.

These days, the treasure of the Sierra Madre isn't gold, but pot and opium. And nobody down there seems to feel like they need any stinking badges, not even the cops. In "God's Middle Finger," journalist Richard Grant takes a wild trip through the cordillera. Tired of dry old books about drug policy? Try this one for a change of pace.

Germany is about to become the latest country to move heroin maintenance from pilot program to permanent. In the US, we maintain our addicts behind bars.

Canada's Conservative government is hard-line on drug policy issues. It wants mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes and it is in court to try to block Vancouver's safe injection site. But now, it is funding a heroin maintenance pilot project--again.

The US general who commands NATO forces in Afghanistan wants to give NATO troops the authority to treat any drug traffickers as military targets. NATO is saying no, thanks.