Traffick Jam

A month ago the Drug Enforcement Administration seemingly managed to reassert its relevance by demonstrating the role it can play in the name of the endless U.S. War on Terror. After last week's bust of international arms dealer Viktor Bout, despite shoving legality and morality to the wayside, the DEA likely thinks it has found its groove.

In the 1980s Ronald Reagan's administration illegally defied Congress. What came to be called the "Iran-Contra Scandal," a nexus of drugs, terror, Latin American proxy conflict, and covert operations involving the United States and Iran, seems this week to have been sampled and remixed for the twenty-first century.

Bolivian President Evo Morales has argued that the United States uses the drug war to advance its own political interests and discredit political opponents. But does the Bolivian Government do the same?

The United States government's recent "National Drug Threat Assessment 2011" targets international trafficking organizations even while it identifies domestic prescription pharmaceuticals as having the most destructive health consequences.

It is not surprising to hear that representatives of the U.S. State Department stationed in Tegucigalpa, Honduras believed since at least March 2004 that the wealthiest man in Honduras, and U.S. government ally, was involved in the cocaine trade.

In the 1940s U.S. Public Health medical researchers conducted appalling experiments on vulnerable populations in Guatemala. After last week's convening of President Obama's Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, the revelations are back in the news.

I wrote last week about the pharmaceutical industry's aggressive promotion of Intellectual Property Rights as part of U.S. government negotiated "free trade" agreements. This blog is an update.

As the U.S. government and pharmaceutical companies continue to aggressively protect and enhance the power and profits accruing to major players in the international drug industry, a genuine critical assessment of the sources of market distortion and criminality which endanger people's health is more important than ever.

Over the past two weeks, U.S. media airways have been dominated by the sad spectacle of elected representatives' refusal to govern, their repudiation of even the pretense of trying to seek agreement on issues of grave importance to people living in the country and many more affected by their actions around the world. However, despite unprecedented levels of acrimony, open hostility, and free-flowing expressions of contempt, one issue seems to continue to galvanize widespread support: the drug war.

President Reagan's justification for siphoning money out of the collective effort and into the pockets of the wealthy remains in vogue today. If the government pursues tax cuts and subsidies for the rich, so the pitch goes, everyone will benefit. The wealth at the top will eventually "trickle-down." It is unclear how the new government of Peru will respond.

The struggle over the reach of international drug control continues. Having failed in an earlier attempt to amend the primary international drug control treaty to protect traditional uses of the coca leaf by indigenous communities in the Andes, Bolivia has declared it will withdraw from the treaty so that it can rejoin to it with reservations. This attempt to expand the circle of people who can legitimately make use of coca leaves—and the hostile reaction to it—provides insight into the economic and political interests that dictate the terms of drug control.

Dr. Gordon Rohlehr explains that any meaningful definition of community must take into account those whose struggles and humanity often fall below the collective radar, people who live 'beneath the underdog'. The lesson he offers should be kept in mind when this Friday prisoners caged in California's supermax prison at Pelican Bay launch a hunger strike to protest the inhumane policies that prevail in the U.S. prison system.