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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Via WQAD: New law could mean bad news for allergy sufferers

even if you’re not making meth, if you go over that limit — of one maximum strength pill per day — you will be arrested.

“Does it take drastic measures? Absolutely. Have we seen a positive result? Absolutely,” Sandoval [Director of the Quad Cities Metropolitan Enforcement Agency] stressed.

But for Tim, the law is going too far.

“I believe I’m a good citizen,” he said. “I don’t believe I’m doing anything wrong. And I believe they’re going after the wrong people.”

Sandoval says the law applies to everybody. So everybody needs to keep track of how much pseudo ephedrine is in the medicine they’re buying.

Tim Naveau went to several different pharmacies to buy Claritin-D.
-
He was charged with a Class-B misdemeanor.

The fellow in question bought Claritin-D for himself and then bought some for his teenage son. The combo effect was the possession of more pseudoephedrine than local law allowed. The result? Two months after the purchases the man was arrested.

First off, from an efficacy point-of-view, if Naveau had bought the drugs to cook up some meth, isn’t two months later a tad on the late side?

Second, and more importantly, it is insane to arrest a man for having purchased more than a month’s supply of allergy medication. I understand the ill effects of crystal meth, but harassing otherwise law-abiding citizens in this way is an affront. And for law-enforcement to adopt this type of attitude like those displayed by Ms. Sandoval are chilling. There are great number of “drastic” measure that could be adopted that might have “positive” results in terms of decreasing criminal activity. Random searches of residences, for example, might be quite effective in curtailing crime, but also rather problematic.

At a minimum, a more reasonable restriction on the amount of pseudoephedrine that can be purchased by a family in the Quad Cities might be a good idea.

h/t: OTB

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Via the AP: Mexico troops find hybrid marijuana plant:

Soldiers trying to seize control of one Mexico’s top drug-producing regions found the countryside teeming with a new hybrid marijuana plant that can be cultivated year-round and cannot be killed with pesticides.

[…]

“These plants have been genetically improved,” he told a handful of journalists allowed to accompany soldiers on a daylong raid of some 70 marijuana fields. “Before we could cut the plant and destroy it, but this plant will come back to life unless it’s taken out by the roots.”

The new plants, known as “Colombians,” mature in about two months and can be planted at any time of year, meaning authorities will no longer be able to time raids to coincide with twice-yearly harvests.

[…]

Yields are so high that traffickers can now produce as much marijuana on a plot the size of a football field as they used to harvest in 10 to 12 acres. That makes for smaller, harder-to-detect fields, though some discovered Tuesday had sophisticated irrigation systems with sprinklers, pumps and thousands of yards of tubing.

But don’t worry:  maybe if we spend several billion more we can stop ‘em!

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Via the LAT: Pot is called biggest cash crop - Los Angeles Times:

A report released today by a marijuana public policy analyst contends that the market value of pot produced in the U.S. exceeds $35 billion — far more than the crop value of such heartland staples as corn, soybeans and hay, which are the top three legal cash crops.

California is responsible for more than a third of the cannabis harvest, with an estimated production of $13.8 billion that exceeds the value of the state’s grapes, vegetables and hay combined — and marijuana is the top cash crop in a dozen states, the report states.

The report estimates that marijuana production has increased tenfold in the past quarter century despite an exhaustive anti-drug effort by law enforcement.

[…]

Nationwide, the estimated cannabis production of $35.8 billion exceeds corn ($23 billion), soybeans ($17.6 billion) and hay ($12.2 billion), according to Gettman’s findings.

Of course, the first thing to note is that the estimate (and it can only be an estimate) reflects the fact that prohibition drives the prices up, so we aren’t really talking about true “market” prices.

The second thing to note is what a failure our anti-drug efforts have been.  Marijuana is considered one of the easiest drugs to interdict and control and has been the primary focus of US law enforcement’s anti-drug policy in recent years, and yet here we are with a bumper crop.

Third, while I am not a proponent of use (nor have I ever used), I continue to fail to see that the expenditures that we make blocking marijuana (or, more accurately, tryingto block) growth, sale and use is anywhere near worth the money we spend.  On a pure harm to society basis alcohol is more dangerous.

The ONDCP’s response it typical:

Tom Riley, a spokesman for the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, cited examples of foreign countries that have struggled with big crops used to produce cocaine and heroin. “Coca is Colombia’s largest cash crop and that hasn’t worked out for them, and opium poppies are Afghanistan’s largest crop, and that has worked out disastrously for them,” Riley said. “I don’t know why we would venture down that road.”

First, the US, Colombia and Afghanistan are radically different from one another.  Second, marijuana, cocaine and heroin are radically different than one another and Third, in each case it is prohibition that jacks up the price of the crops in question. 

Given all three of those facts, Riley’s answer is a non-answer.

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Via the LAT: Pentagon resists pleas for help in Afghan opium fight

While the Pentagon and the Drug Enforcement Administration, or the DEA, have been at odds, poppy cultivation has exploded, increasing by more than half this year. Afghanistan supplies about 92% of the world’s opium, and traffickers reap an estimated $2.3 billion in annual profits.

“It is surprising to me that we have allowed things to get to the point that they have,” said Robert B. Charles, a former top State Department counter-narcotics official. “It we do not act aggressively against the narcotics threat now, all gains made to date will be washed out to sea.”

The bumper crop of opium poppies, much of it from Taliban strongholds in southern Afghanistan, finances the insurgency the U.S. is trying to dismantle.

The DEA’s advocates in Congress argue that the Pentagon could undermine the insurgency by combating the drugs that help finance it. Military officials say they can spare no resources from the task of fighting the Taliban and its allies.

Hmm. It seems like I read something over a year ago about the likelihood of this problem…

None of this should be a surprise. What should also not be a surprise is that members of Congress and the DEA think that there is a simple solution to this problem. Eradicating the crops is not an easy proposition–especially with the ongoing Taliban insurgency.

The current troop levels, further, are not adequate to such a task:

Outgoing Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has said that Afghanistan’s flourishing opium trade is a law enforcement problem, not a military one. It would be “mission creep” if the 21,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan were to turn their attention to opium, and it would also set a precedent for future combat operations, military officials say.

Of course, to say that this is a law enforcement problem, even if accurate, is to say that the situation is lost, because there is no effective state in Afghanistan, certainly not one that can assert control over the territory in question, to say it is a “law enforcement problem” is to say that nothing can be done about it. Also, based on our experiences (mixed results and all) in Peru, Bolivia, and Colombia it is clear that crop eradication and interdiction policies are far from just “law enforcement problem[s].”

Now, the degree to which we should follow those models is a whole other debate, but since that is the operative paradigm in US counter-narcotics policy, then the SecDef needs to be honest about what he is saying about the problem.

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Via Reuters: Group scraps attempt to smoke biggest joint

Via the AFP: ‘Golden Triangle’ opium production down 85 percent since 1998

Opium production is on the way to being eradicated in the “Golden Triangle” of Myanmar, Laos and Thailand after falling 85 percent since 1998, the United Nations said.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that I would wager that the difference is being made up by Afghanistan.

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Via the AP:  Mexico drug kingpin extradited to U.S.

Mexico extradited accused drug kingpin Francisco Rafael Arellano Felix to the United States on Saturday, making him the first major Mexican drug lord to be sent north to face trial on drug charges.[…]

After serving a 10-year sentence in Mexico, Arellano Felix was loaded into a helicopter to the Mexican border town of Matamoros, then flown across and handed over to Texas officials in Brownsville. He will be taken to California to face trial on charges stemming from a 1980 case in which he allegedly sold cocaine to an undercover police officer in the United States.

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