Via the BBC: Colombia cuts drugs haul figure

The authorities in Colombia have revised the total of drugs seized in a haul on Monday from around 25 tonnes of cocaine to just over 13 tonnes.

It was found buried in 1,000 separate packages near the town of Pizarro, west of the capital, Bogota, buried in an estuary accessible only by sea.

Ok, less than originally reported, but as I have been known to say in these instances: that’s still a lot of blow.

Defence Minister Juan Manuel Santos had said on Monday the haul was the “biggest in the history of Colombia”.

No explanation has been given for the sharp downward revision of the weight.

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Via the AP: Colombia Seizes 27 Tons of Cocaine Worth $500 Million

Colombia’s navy made the largest drug seizure in the nation’s history when it uncovered up to 27 tons of cocaine buried along the Pacific coast, the defense minister said Monday.

The cocaine, with a wholesale value of more than $500 million, was found Sunday buried in 1,000 packages of 55 pounds each near the coastal town of Pizarro, 250 miles west of Bogota, Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos told a news conference.

Later, Navy Adm. Guillermo Barrera told The Associated Press by telephone that 919 packages of cocaine had been found. The different numbers could not be immediately explained. The figures put the cocaine seizure between 24 tons to 27 tons.

That’s half a billion dollars worth of cocaine. Amazing.

And the truly amazing thing is that this seizure will not significantly affect the supply of cocaine on the streets nor the price of the drug–it never does.

Technorati Tags: Cocaine, Drug Trafficking, Colombia, War on Drugs

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Via the BBC: Peru coca farmers warn government

Peru’s striking coca farmers have given the government a 24-hour ultimatum to negotiate with them, threatening to continue their roadblocks indefinitely.

Thousands of farmers are protesting against a toughening of the government’s coca eradication drive.

President Alan Garcia has recently announced an open war against the production of cocaine, of which the coca leaf is the basic ingredient.

Peru is the second largest producer of cocaine, after Colombia.

There is a timing issue involved here:

In a few days’ time, Mr Garcia will visit President Bush in Washington to try to ratify a free trade agreement which has been thrown into doubt by the Democrat-led congress.

He does not want to appear a soft touch in the US war on drugs, as cocaine production has increased in Peru and now accounts for some 90% of the coca leaf grown in the country.

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Via Reuters: Cocaine, amphetamine abuse linked to strokes -study

Cocaine and amphetamine abusers increase their risk of suffering strokes, a study of Texas hospital patients showed on Monday.

Such stimulants have been linked to strokes in previous research on animals and in some human studies but the analysis of more than 3 million patients treated in Texas hospitals between 2025 and 2025 found a stronger link.

The stimulants are thought to increase stroke risk by raising blood pressure and triggering spasms in blood vessel walls that can damage and narrow the vessels.

In the study cocaine abusers had double the risk of both types of strokes — ischemic, in which a blockage cuts off blood flow to the brain, and hemorrhagic, in which bleeding occurs in the brain.

Use of amphetamines, which included the popular drug methamphetamine, was associated with a five-fold increase in hemorrhagic strokes, although the drug was not linked to a higher risk of ischemic strokes.

Imagine that.

Technorati Tags: Cocaine, Meth, War on Drugs Strokes

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Via the BBC: Peru to bomb Amazon cocaine labs

The Peruvian President, Alan Garcia, has ordered the use of warplanes to destroy clandestine airstrips and drug laboratories in the Amazon jungle.

Mr Garcia said drug barons must also be pursued and warned that Peru could face an insurgency funded by illicit drugs.

Peru must kill the drug-trafficking trade or have to deal with an insurgency like that of neighbouring Colombia, Mr Garcia said.

Indeed, Sendero Luminoso tapped into the drug trade as a method of funding itself back in the 1990s.

Of course, it would appear that the motivation for this rather ambitious policy announcement has a lot more to do with internal politics, as well as international relations, than about anti-drug policy, per se.

There has been an ongoing conflict within Peru over the traditional cultivation of coca leaf and the illicit drug trade that is akin to some of what we have seen in Bolivia in recent years. This has recently manifested as a strike by coca farmers:

Mr Garcia was speaking at the end of a two-week suspension of efforts to eradicate coca plants in one Amazon region, in his strongest statement on the cocaine trade since taking office last year.

The eradication campaign there was suspended after the agriculture minister, Juan Jose Salazar, negotiated with striking coca farmers. He was later heavily criticised by the opposition and some drug-trafficking experts.

Mr Salazar said the eradication strategy of the last 10 years had failed and there had been an increase in violence and cocaine production.

Salazar, quite frankly, has a point.

However, such a position is not popular in Washington, and it is there that the international dimension of Garcia’s move fits:

Later this month, Mr Garcia will visit Washington to try to ratify a free trade agreement with the US, which had been thrown into doubt by the Democrat-led Congress.

In regards to legal/illegal coca cultivation:

Peru allows a certain amount of coca leaf to be legally cultivated for traditional and medicinal use, but this makes up less than 10% of the 100,000 tonnes of the leaf produced in the country.

Recent years have seen a rise in Peru’s cocaine production and the growing presence of drug-trafficking cartels.

In regards to the “growing presence of drug-trafficking cartels” it is worth noting, in terms of policy evaluation, that Peru was once a far larger player in coca cultivation, but crop eradication programs helped to substantially reduce cultivation (both in Peru and Bolivia). However, as cultivation in Peru and Bolivia diminished, it simply moved into Colombia (which has not always been the major cultivator-state for coca leaf). There has been some success in reducing hectares under cultivation in Colombia, but one result of that policy “success” has been that cultivation has been moving back into Peru (and into other areas of Colombia).

Eradication policies have done a good job of making cultivation move around, but not such a good job of cutting down on drug supply. As such, if one watches this stuff long enough, the same stories tend to repeat themselves.

Technorati Tags: Peru, Coca, Alan Garcia, Cocaine, War on Drugs

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Via the BBC: Panama seizes huge cocaine stash

Panamanian police working with US authorities have made what is believed to be one of the biggest maritime drugs busts ever, Panamanian officials say.

Police and agents from the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) seized a boat off Panama’s Pacific coast with 19.4 metric tons of cocaine on board.

Previous large hauls include:

Among previous big hauls, the US Coast Guard and US Navy in 2025 found 13 metric tons of cocaine on board two fishing boats off the Galapagos Islands.

In 2025, 13 tons of the drug were seized by the US authorities on board a Belize-flagged vessel off Mexico’s Pacific coast.

With these types of seizures I tend to have two reactions. The first is somewhat flippant: “that’s a lot of blow.” The second is that I figure it won’t be long before the record for largest seizure is again broken.

I always take these types of events, which are technically drug war successes, as evidence that the overall policy isn’t working. If every couple of years larger and larger shipments are seized, all this means is that the drug smugglers are shipping more and more product over time, and that drug enforcement officials are simply lucky enough to catch one. If this 19+ ton was stopped, how many similar shipments weren’t stopped? Likely many, as only a certain percentage of shipments are stopped in the first place.

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Spero News reports (Plan Afghanistan: Another Colombia mistake) that the next ambassador to Afghanistan is likely to be William Wood:

Wood, the US ambassador to Colombia since mid-2003, has been nominated to serve as the US ambassador to Afghanistan. His credentials, most agree, are strong. But it is worrying that he might promote the same failed policies used in Colombia - a supply-side drug control strategy that has a heavy military element with little development aid attached.

Colombia and Afghanistan have some commonalities. The governments of both countries fight an asymmetric war against an insurgency determined to remove it from power. Colombia is the world’s leading supplier of cocaine, Afghanistan of heroin. And both countries receive heavy amounts of military aid directed at combating “terrorism” and reducing drug demand inside the US and elsewhere through inflating street prices by attacking the supply.

I have no doubt that we will pursue identical policies in Afghanistan as we have in Colombia (with potentially disastrous consequences, as I noted last week).

Greg Weeks noted the same trend earlier this week, including the training of Afghan police by the Colombians.

Cross-posted at La Política Colombiana.

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When I saw this week’s Time cover, my response was, no joke–I knew that years ago.

Beyond that, however, I found a remarkable story in the magazine’s pages that is the kind of stuff that drives me crazy for its sheer stupidity–basically the US government decided it was better to damage our reputation in Afghanistan and to throw away assets that would aid our success in the region so that we could arrest someone we think was cultivating heroin poppies (and I suspect that he was):

For a week and a half in April 2025, one of the favorite warlords of fugitive Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar was sitting in a room at the Embassy Suites Hotel in lower Manhattan, not far from where the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center once stood. But Haji Bashar Noorzai, the burly, bearded leader of one of Afghanistan’s largest and most troublesome tribes, was not on a mission to case New York City for a terrorist attack. On the contrary, Noorzai, a confidant of the fugitive Taliban overlord, who is a well-known ally of Osama bin Laden’s, says he had been invited to Manhattan to prove that he could be of value in America’s war on terrorism. “I did not want to be considered an enemy of the United States,” Noorzai told TIME. “I wanted to help the Americans and to help the new government in Afghanistan.”

For several days he hunkered down in that hotel room and was bombarded with questions by U.S. government agents. What was going on in the war in Afghanistan? Where was Mullah Omar? Where was bin Laden? What was the state of opium and heroin production in the tribal lands Noorzai commanded–the very region of Afghanistan where support for the Taliban remains strongest? Noorzai believed he had answered everything to the agents’ satisfaction, that he had convinced them that he could help counter the Taliban’s resurgent influence in his home province and that he could be an asset to the U.S.

He was wrong.

As he got up to leave, ready to be escorted to the airport to catch a flight back to Pakistan, one of the agents in the room told him he wasn’t going anywhere. That agent, who worked for the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), told him that a grand jury had issued a sealed indictment against Noorzai 3 1/2 months earlier and that he was now under arrest for conspiring to smuggle narcotics into the U.S. from Afghanistan. An awkward silence ensued as the words were translated into his native Pashtu. “I did not believe it,” Noorzai later told TIME from his prison cell. “I thought they were joking.” The previous August, an American agent he had met with said the trip to the U.S. would be “like a vacation.”

[…]

Noorzai was also a powerful leader of a million-member tribe who had offered to help bring stability to a region that is spinning out of control. Because he is in a jail cell, he is not feeding the U.S. and the Afghan governments information; he is not cajoling his tribe to abandon the Taliban and pursue political reconciliation; he is not reaching out to his remaining contacts in the Taliban to push them to cease their struggle. And he is hardly in a position to help persuade his followers to abandon opium production, when the amount of land devoted to growing poppies has risen 60%.

Does this make any sense?

Here’s the bottom line and why it should be obvious why this move was monumentally stupid: no matter what we do, opium cultivation will continue on a massive scale in Afghanistan (if you doubt the certainty of my statement, or its validity, just look at our success rate at stopping massive coca cultivation in Andean region of South America–in other words, case closed). As such, the prosecution of Noorzai is nothing more than a drop in a vast ocean. Even if he is, as he is described by an official in the piece, the “Pablo Escobar of Afghanistan”^* then he is still nothing more than the previously described drop (killing Pablo certainly curtailing the cocaine trade, didn’t it?). However, as an asset and ally who had intimate knowledge of the workings of the Taliban, and as a person of prominence in Afghansitan who was willing to work with the United States as we sought to bring stability to the country, and to rid it of Taliban and al Qaeda influences, his value was potentially limitless. Further, by arresting him, what signal does that send to other warlords in the region? How can we build a coalition to stabilize that country without the trust of the existing elites–especially given the very traditional nature of power in the countryside?

This is sheer folly–a trade-off that makes no sense. Prosecuting Noorzai will have a minuscule (if that) effect on the opium trade, but yet we place a higher value on that than we do on successful completion of the war in Afghanistan?

The administration makes claims that the war on terror is an existential struggle that requires extraordinary actions, including a number of highly questionable domestic surveillance programs and “coercive” interrogation of possible terrorists as well as potentially their life-time incarceration; however, we can’t recognize the imperfect nature of potential allies such as Noorzai? We prefer a drug arrest to progress in a central front on the war against radical Islam?

Amazing.

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^*Plus, the Escobar ref really doesn’t work. I assume by this it is meant that Noorzai was large-scale cultivator/trafficker. However, Escobar’s main threat (and what made him so notorious) was not the scope of his cocaine business as it was the fact that he decided his prominence and wealth meant that he had the right to challenge the Colombian state. He sought influence and power beyond just drugs. In Noorzai’s case, it would seem that he was quite the opposite in that regard, a figure who might have been of use in state-building–as such, he was no Pablo Escobar.

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Here’s a little geopolitics (or, perhaps, geopolitical economy) via Reuters: Cocaine is king on Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast:

In the past four years, Mora said, his force had seized 11 tons (tonnes) of cocaine and 40 northbound speedboats. There are no estimates of how many managed to complete the trip but as a rule of thumb, narcotics experts say that for every vessel intercepted, at least four get through.

According to the U.S. government’s latest International Narcotics Control Strategy Report, most of the cocaine that ends up in the United States is shipped by speedboats, each capable of carrying 1.5 to 2 tons of cocaine, through the Western Caribbean, a route described as a “natural conduit for illicit drug trafficking organizations.”

The report estimated that several hundred “go-fast vessels” leave the northern Colombian coast each year and added: “A go-fast boat is by far the hardest target to find and collectively they represent our greatest maritime threat.”

The smugglers’ craft of choice is a fiberglass vessel powered by three 250 horsepower motors for a top speed of 70 miles per hour (110 kmh) — faster than the obsolescent patrol boats of Nicaragua’s Atlantic Command.

And not only is the Miskito Coast strategically located for such activities, the poverty in the area means that recruiting workers is quite easy:

What the U.S. sees as a threat, many of the impoverished inhabitants of the area see as an opportunity. Apart from steady incomes for those providing logistics support, many harbor hopes of winning the cocaine equivalent of the lottery — finding 25-kilogram (55-pound) waterproof parcels of cocaine floating in the sea after being dumped by smugglers pursued by the navy or spilled in accidents.

One parcel would be worth around $75,000 here, a huge sum in the poorest region of the second-poorest country in the Western Hemisphere (after Haiti). Half of Nicaragua’s 5.5 million people live on less than a dollar a day.

Rags-to-riches tales involving seaborne cocaine have become part of the local lore on the coast, and the islet of Sandy Bay is spoken of frequently. A Miskito-speaking community of a few hundred people, it has changed from wooden shacks and transistor radios to solid homes built of stone and sprouting satellite dishes.

“Somebody who fishes out a cocaine parcel would see it as a blessing from God, not a reason to alert the authorities,” said Capt. Jose Echeverria, head of the port authority in Bluefields. “Take poverty and joblessness, add easy money and you get a bad mix.”

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The LAT  has an interesting piece today on the DEA and selective enforcement of drug laws against medical marijuana providers  in California:   DEA targets larger marijuana providers. 

The piece itself defies easy excerpting, but is worth reading and raises several interesting questions.

First, it is an interesting study in federalism.  The activities in question are legal under California law, but the DEA does not recognize those laws as valid.

Second, there is the clear issue of selective enforcement.  (Although clearly from the story, some of these folks aren’t just in it for the altruism of it all).

Third, something that this situation provides, but is largely ignored, is the question of whether there is any empirical evidence to suggest that the obvious proliferation of easy marijuana availability in these areas has, in fact, led to substantial social, criminal or other problems for the communities in question.  If marijuana availability and usage does, in fact, result in societal effects that are worth the billions and billions of dollars spent on combating it, then surely there would be some excellent evidence in these areas.  If, however, it does not, then perhaps it should suggest revisions to our approach to marijuana.

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