Investor's Business Daily, October 3rd, 2007
Drug War: After years of propaganda from pro-legalization policy groups claiming the war on drugs is unwinnable, new U.S. data show an emerging victory over the illegal drug trade. When will the naysayers admit this?
The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy on Tuesday announced a turning point 14 the war on drugs. Cocaine prices in 12 U.S. cities skyrocketed as high as 67% in the first six months of 2007 over 2006, with shortages reported in 37 U.S. cities. Purity fell 11%. The only conclusion to be drawn from this is that drug lords are losing the war.
"After 25 years of cocaine coming into the U.S., there has never been this kind of disruption of this magnitude for this long," Drug czar John Walters told the New York Times.
Walters credited Mexico's aggressive entry into the drug war as pivotal. "The kind of momentum we have going into this, we have not had before," he said. Speaking to IBD on Monday, Walters said victory is within reach. With Colombia and the U.S. pressuring the drug lords, Mexico's crackdown leaves them no place to run.
But hard evidence of victory isn't good enough for the network of nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs, that manipulate the press and even now downplay any good news on drugs.
Larry Birns, director of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, told the Washington Post that the new data were "somewhat illusory" and dismissed it all as "seasonal blips." He's never held any position other than the one suggesting that victory is impossible.
At the Center for International Policy's Colombia Program, analyst Adam Isacson argued that the progress wasn't real because new drug lords always replace the old: "My fear is, even if Mexico is quite successful at taking down the Sinaloa, Gulf and Tijuana cartels, something is going to replace them. That's been the history of the drug war," he told the L.A. Times.
Other groups, like the Center for Economic and Policy Research, the Washington Office on Latin America, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Drug Policy Alliance, all make the same defeatist claims about winning the war on drugs in the press and in studies.
Not surprisingly, many of these groups are funded by left-wing billionaire and Democratic Party influence George Soros, who's made no secret of his opposition to the drug war. They form an unofficial network of NGOs that shape the news.
That's a big reason why this victory is so muted in the press.
Walters told IBD that winning the drug war is possible. The way to do it, he said, is to destroy transnational drug organizations, rather than round up every petty dealer. "It's much easier for law enforcement to stomp on cockroaches than to fight wolves," he said.
Destroying big organizations confiscates drug stocks, disrupts supply lines, breaks infrastructure, removes key personnel and yanks cash from the hands of drug lords. If drug organizations were businesses, how many could survive with their CEOs busted, their merchandise destroyed, their bank accounts emptied, their supply routes blocked or their executives doing hard time?
It wouldn't hurt to look at the larger agenda of these media-dominant defeatists who play down any sign of victory in this drug war.
With big funding at stake from patrons like Soros, whether the NGOs are dispassionate experts as portrayed in the press is questionable. Like Congressional Democrats who refuse to recognize victory in Iraq, they put partisan interests first to deny a victory that is growing, and real.
