Eradication

Fortune Magazine tags along with Afghanistan's minister of counternarcotics for a drug war victory party in which a huge stash of opium gets blown up with gasoline. Boom!

But afterward, as he is driven back into town in a black SUV with tinted windows, he seems restless, frustrated, perhaps a little defeated, as if he knows the morning's events were a set piece of political theater. As Kabul comes into view he points to a string of car dealerships and, with resignation, says that they are owned by traffickers. Passing a row of large, ornate homes -- commonly called "poppy palaces" or "narcotecture" -- he says drug money built them all. Then he sighs deeply, rubs his hands together, and stares through the darkened glass.

Cheer up, dude. At least you got to see a cool explosion.

As a child, my folks took me to see the magnificent trees in Sequoia National Park and I'll never forget it as long as I live. It's a precious ecosystem, housing the largest trees in the world as well as countless other unique plant-life not found anywhere else on earth. Not surprisingly, it's also a great place to grow marijuana and that could soon become its downfall:

In Sequoia National Park, $1 million has been spent since 2006 on marijuana plantation cleanup alone, and the damage done to Crystal Cave will be felt for years to come, said the park spokeswoman, Adrienne Freeman.

"We are continually discovering new species in that cave, and we are letting Mexican cartels threaten to wipe that out," she said. [CNN]

She's damn right we're letting them do it. We've surrendered the fate of irreplaceable national treasures to these drug traffickers, simply because we won't allow responsible Americans to produce their own marijuana on private property. The consequences of our failure are catastrophic, yet the solution is painfully simple.

It's really amazing to watch the police, the forest service, and the press just cringing and whining about this awful problem, without uttering a word about how we're going to save our forests from imminent destruction. They seriously don’t have a clue. You can read any of the dozens of recently published stories on this topic without seeing anyone even attempt to figure it out. Their only idea is to keep pulling up pot plants, as the growers plant ever more to ensure that some survive.

Fortunately, there exists one perfect solution to this problem. And it offers far more than the salvation of our precious wilderness. When we fix our marijuana laws, I guarantee you, we will solve problems we didn’t even know we had.

You lazy ass pot heads don't do anything but complain and cower behind your cheesy ideals!! Get off your ASSES and do something real!

Each August, like clockwork, you can expect to see announcements like this one about the success of this year's marijuana eradication efforts:

According to the Campaign Against Marijuana Planting, a multiagency task force managed by the state’s Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement, this year is already one for the record books. In more than 425 raids since late June, some 3.4 million plants have been seized, up from 2.9 million all of last year. And, officials note, they still have roughly a month and a half before the campaign expires with the end of harvest season. [NYT]

So, if more marijuana is seized each year, what does that mean? It means there's more marijuana every year. The harder you try to stop people from growing marijuana in the forest, the more marijuana they will plant. It's a very simple and predictable routine, such that one could easily republish last year's news coverage of this same phenomenon without changing a word and no one would know the difference.

The only variable in this equation is the finite acreage of our forests, which will eventually be destroyed under a policy that serves to increase rather than eliminate the practice of illicit outdoor marijuana cultivation.

Actually, come to think of it, there's a second variable here: our marijuana laws. If we changed them to allow personal marijuana growing on private property, then nobody would grow pot in virtually inaccessible patches of fragile wilderness. How many more harvest season eradication records will be set before that reality begins to sink in?

The widespread destruction of our national forests caused by illicit marijuana cultivation is becoming a bigger story every summer. The problem just keeps getting worse and it seems that Mexican cartels aren’t the only ones cashing in on it:

Forest Service law enforcement staff was doubled from 14 to 28 agents in California between 2007 and 2008, said spokesman John Heil, resulting in the eradication of 3.1 million marijuana plants in the last fiscal year.

Congress is responding too, with a recent $3 million supplemental appropriation secured by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) that allowed the Park Service to add 25 new law enforcement officers to its Pacific Region parks…[New York Times]

The more marijuana gets planted, the more jobs are created for people to cut down the plants, which causes still more marijuana to get planted. The harder you try to put a stop to this, the worse the damage gets. The cops doing this work won’t hesitate to tell you that there's more of it every year. We haven't even scratched the surface of how bad it's going to get:

"As more pressure happens in California, they're going to start looking at Oregon, Nevada and Idaho," said Krogen, of the High Sierra Volunteer Trail Crew. "Then they'll start looking at the Southeast too, closer to distribution."

Does anyone really believe that law enforcement is going to solve this problem? I'm sure going on treasure hunts in the woods is a popular assignment, but I have a hard time believing that these guys actually think they're accomplishing anything.

The bottom line is that legalization is absolutely the only option that exists for controlling where, how, and by whom marijuana is grown. I hope it won't require the permanent destruction of precious natural resources across the country to illustrate that fact. It never ceases to amaze me that all of this is happening because the government won’t let people grow their own marijuana.

As the call for legalization continues to reverberate louder than ever before, the hired soldiers in the war on drugs are seeking to defend their livelihood with arguments of unprecedented desperation and incoherence:

Legalization is not the solution, [statewide CAMP Commander Michael] Johnson said, given that most of the pot is being grown illegally on public parkland by foreign citizens who cannot be taxed. [San Francisco Chronicle]

You won't have to tax them because they'll be out of business. No one's going to buy some crappy weed that's grown illegally and destructively in our national forests if there's an alternative. The instant you allow California's legions of skilled and socially conscious marijuana growers to operate in a regulated and legitimate environment, everything ugly and uncontrollable about the state's marijuana industry will change overnight.

Just watch how he proves my point:

"I've been doing this for five years, and there just seems to be more and more of it everywhere," Johnson said. "We don't even bother with medicinal grows. What we're concerned about is the destruction of the habitat."

See how he admits that the "medicinal grows" are not what's causing the problem? That's because they're legal and regulated. It really isn’t any more complicated than that.

Remember back in 2007 when Bush's drug czar John Walters announced that cocaine prices were spiking and proceeded to do a proud drug war victory dance in newspapers nationwide? It was the high-water mark of his tenure in terms of positive press for the national drug strategy he'd championed shamelessly since taking office in late 2001. If drug prices were increasing, his argument claimed, then our campaign to rid the nation of drugs must be on the right track and our arsenal of brutal drug war tactics was being vindicated for all to see.

	John Walters

Well, it looks like the truth finally caught up with him. Ryan Grim has a fascinating piece at Reason laying out the plotline behind Walters's victory parade and it's really a remarkable window into the epic dishonesty that characterizes not only John Walters, but the foundations of the drug war itself.

I recommend reading Grim's account to understand how badly Walters manipulated the data to make his case, but what I find most troubling in all of this is the role of the press in enabling such a transparent and self-serving deception. This is the story of a man who had already jettisoned all credibility through an endless series of similarly dubious pronouncements. ONDCP's bogus theatrics were sufficiently notorious by this point that even the conservative Washington Times balked at the opportunity to break the story of the Bush Administration's self-proclaimed surprise victory in the war on drugs.

It was Donna Leinwand at USA Today who gave Walters a podium from which to deceive the American public about the success of his policies. Drug policy was – and remains – Leinwand's beat at USA Today, thus she could easily have included a counterpoint in her coverage from one of the many experts that would gladly take her call. Instead, she uncritically passed along the claims of a notoriously deceitful propagandist to the American public, igniting a firestorm of press coverage that fraudulently propped up the drug czar's political agenda.

If there's a lesson to be learned from all this, it seems not to have sunk in yet. Only a month ago, Leinwand was still promoting misleading claims about the success of the war on cocaine. It is, of course, perfectly appropriate to quote the leaders of the worldwide war on drugs as they endeavor desperately and predictably to highlight any and all miniscule data points that favor their fixations. But that should only be half the story. If you base an entire news report on something a drug war cheerleader told you, then your story won’t be true and the public that relies upon you for drug policy news will end up understanding less about the issue than if they'd never read your article to begin with.

Ironically, widespread disgust with John Walters and the entrenched drug warrior mentality he represented has likely helped set the stage for the present political climate in which the drug policy debate has finally gone mainstream. The case for reform is at long last embraced and amplified by the same media that once ignored it at every turn. Prominent journalists themselves are speaking out and saying things that used to be off-limits.

Still, all those who rejoice at the impending collapse of the great drug war juggernaut should not lose sight of the fact that only 2 years ago, a single man was able to freeze time with a simple lie.

This is big news:

TRIESTE, Italy (Reuters) - Washington is to dramatically overhaul its Afghan anti-drug strategy, phasing out opium poppy eradication, the U.S. envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan told allies on Saturday.
…
"The Western policies against the opium crop, the poppy crop, have been a failure. They did not result in any damage to the Taliban, but they put farmers out of work," [Richard] Holbrooke told Reuters after a series of bilateral meetings in Italy.

"We are not going to support crop eradication. We're going to phase it out," he said. [Reuters]

It's not everyday that a major international drug war program gets the rug pulled out from under it. Only two months ago, the plan was to increase eradication efforts by flooding Afghanistan's major opium producing regions with U.S troops. It was a terrible plan for lots of reasons, thus this sudden reversal is a surprising positive development.

Put simply, it appears that the State Dept. was trying to choose between escalating eradication efforts or eliminating them. After weighing their options, they eventually made the right decision. It would be nice to see a similar analysis applied to the war on drugs in its entirety.

Interesting piece from McClatchy:

WASHINGTON — As the Obama administration ramps up the Drug Enforcement Administration's presence in Afghanistan, some special-agent pilots contend that they're being illegally forced to go to a combat zone, while others who've volunteered say they're not being properly equipped.

In interviews with McClatchy, more than a dozen DEA agents describe a badly managed system in which some pilots have been sent to Afghanistan under duress or as punishment for bucking their superiors.

They're suing and it will be interesting to see how this turns out. Their argument is that DEA agents are technically civilians and can only be sent into a war zone voluntarily. Makes sense to me. Of course, I'm sympathetic to any argument that begins with "the DEA shouldn’t be doing this…"

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Did you notice anything missing from this conversation? Seriously, if we're concerned about the drug trade funding terrorism, the only answer is to fundamentally rethink our drug policy. This problem didn't just arrive on our doorstep last year. We've been fighting a hopeless and counterproductive war against these guys for decades and they're more powerful now than ever before. The solution is to do the opposite of what we're doing, not to make little adjustments or try a little harder.