According to the 2/18/02 Financial Times (London),

"The US and United Nations have ignored repeated calls by the international anti-drugs community to address the increasing menace of Afghanistan's opium cultivation, threatening a rift between Europe and the US as they begin to reconstruct the country....

"European governments believe one of the reasons the US is "out to lunch on the issue", as one diplomat put it, is that Afghan heroin is not a significant player in the US drugs market, accounting for less than 5 per cent of consumption. Colombia, he said, was the focus of the US anti-drugs campaign. This is in sharp contrast to Europe, where Afghan heroin is viewed as a main source of the region's trade in hard drugs."

http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~pdscott/qdimu.html

I am curious: what's your point? I feel like you are trying to play "gotcha" with these quotes, but I think that you are missing my position, and further, just posting quotes about the failure of US drug policy isn't much of an argument, one way or another.

And, I would note, that the heroin in question was from Colombia, based on another story that I read concerning this arrest.

I'm not familiar with the rules of this game you call "gotcha," but it sounds interesting. Perhaps you'll clue us in on how to play.

What I'm trying to say with this quote is that your two posts saying "oh no! it's the drugs!" miss out on American complicity with the growing heroin trade. And yes, Columbia is a big part of that. And so are our "allies" the Northern Alliance.

"Gotcha" in this case is trying to post a quote that is supposed to be an argument in and of itself to demonstrate some profound point that, I suppose, is supposed to vitiate my post.

At any rate, you misconstrue my position, if you think I am saying "oh no! its' the drugs!"

My simple points are:

1) Drug profits are so vast that they can easily fund terroristic activities that otherwise would be quite difficult to fund, and that the irony is that the War on Drugs helps produce those profits, which, in turn, fund terror.

2) The point of the heroin in the suitcase ost was that given the amount of money one can make, it is far from surprising that people come up with the ideas that they do to get the prodcut to market.

I gotta tell ya Steven. Your blog gets the weirdest commentors of any blog I've seen. (WELL, OK Calpundit wins but that place is a loony bin by definition.)

Maybe it is too many drug posts. ;-)

P