This just cant be a good thing...
The D.E.A. now has five commando-style squads it has been quietly deploying for the past several years to Western Hemisphere nations — including Haiti, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala and Belize — that are battling drug cartels, according to documents and interviews with law enforcement officials.
The program — called FAST, for Foreign-deployed Advisory Support Team — was created during the George W. Bush administration to investigate Taliban-linked drug traffickers in Afghanistan. Beginning in 2008 and continuing under President Obama, it has expanded far beyond the war zone.
Rather than just summarize a 2 page article you can read yourself, I wanted to take a look specifically at the impact of drug prohibition on the crime the DEA feels needs to be ever-more violently addressed.
The Iron Law of Prohibition predicts a couple of things if and when a 'substance' which is popular is prohibited, but I want to just focus on this:
6. The law cracks down on the supply, driving the amateurs out of business and leaving organized crime in control, now with even higher profit margins and with connections to corrupt law enforcement. At this point the illegal market has attracted the people capable of making it an institution, including some who wear badges. Henceforth it will be all but impossible to eliminate the suppliers. Greater enforcement can shake out the less skilled or the less daring but merely raises incentives for those who remain. Greater enforcement (i.e., more regulation) can also affect the market in perverse ways: The iron law of drug prohibition is that the more intense the law enforcement, the more potent the drugs will become.
I want to set the "drugs will become more potent" bit aside and focus on the"raising incentives for those who remain".
The more the drug war is enforced, the worse it will get. It's already well out of control in Mexico. Corruption is absolutely rampant, violent cartels operate with impunity, they can hold their own against the Mexican military. And all because they are nurtured by the profits of selling illegal drugs. The more the drugs remain illegal, the more profit there is to be had. The more the risk of transporting drugs, the higher the profit margins and the more rewards there are for those who can "make it work".
So the DEA has got their own special forces teams stationed in a variety of places aiming to escalate the war on drugs even more. Few entities can so directly influence their future necessity like the DEA, actively making drug smuggling more and more lucrative with this unscientific approach, ensuring years and years and years of their cowboy antics and paycheck gravytrain.
Another point that is brought up in the article, the government is fundamentally blurring the 'war on drugs' with the 'war on terror'. I have called them Siamese twins since 2001 but it's interesting seeing the New York Times saying the same thing: people seem to be catching on now -
The evolution of the program into a global enforcement arm reflects the United States’ growing reach in combating drug cartels and how policy makers increasingly are blurring the line between law enforcement and military activities, fusing elements of the “war on drugs” with the “war on terrorism.”
I suppose we should be upset about such a thing, but we're quite focused on the economy right now; though the war on drugs eats many tens of billions of dollars per year and really doesn't accomplish much, we seem to want to just stick with it when we could be using that money a bit more productively.
But the war on terror AND the war on drugs are absolutely infamous for being large wastes of money and encouraging government fraud and waste.
The most important commonality between these two wars is that they continue — and will continue — for reasons having nothing to do with their stated justifications. Both wars ensure an unlimited stream of massive amounts of money into the private war-making industries which fuel them. By itself, the increasingly privatized American prison industry — fed a constant stream of human beings put in cages as a result of drug prohibition laws — is obscenely profitable. Add to these powerful profit centers the political fear that officials have of being perceived as abandoning any war before it is “won,” and these two intrinsically unwinnable wars — unwinnable by design — seem destined to endure forever, or at least until some sort of major financial collapse simply permits them no longer.
That said and in conclusion; it seems fitting to remind folks that all the drug smuggling profits propped up our economy for a year (2009).....so maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it's not all bad,
After all, it helped the banks.