Executive Branch

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.

America's drug war in Latin America is a bipartisan affair. The Obama administration is negotiating with the Colombian government to create a major anti-drug base there to replace the one in Manta, Ecuador. Oh, and it also has nice force projection capabilities.

Mexico's prohibition-related violence is very ugly, and it's not just the narcos committing atrocities. The Mexican military has been accused of more than 2,000 human rights abuses, ranging from theft and robbery to rape, torture, and murder as it wages war on the so-called cartels.

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.

Here comes the National Guard! The Obama administration is planning to send 1,500 National Guard troops to the Mexican border to support drug war law enforcement there.

Relations between Bolivia and the US just got a little rockier as the Obama administration declined to restore trade preferences, citing Bolivia's "encouragement" of coca cultivation, and Bolivian President Morales responded with hard words.

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.

With movement to reduce or end the sentencing disparity between federal crack and powder cocaine offenses growing, the Obama administration has come down firmly in favor of eliminating the disparity altogether.

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.