America's drug war: not helping overseas relations
An article by Matthew Lee of the Associated Press on www.yahoo.com touched on the current administration's war on drugs and the statement by the State Department that anti-terror allies to U.S. were falling short in their anti-drug efforts, and perennial foes were not cooperating with the U.S. to alleviate these problems. The department released its annual global survey of the drug war, and said that massive opium poppy production (the main ingredient in heroin) in Afghanistan continued to pose a major threat due to its links with groups such as the Taliban. It was stated that "There is strong evidence that narcotics trafficking is linked to the Taliban insurgency. These links between drug traffickers and anti-government forces threaten regional stability." Other allied nations, Pakistan and Colombia, suffer from many levels of corruption by small local officials and are not preventing drug production at a rate acceptable to the U.S. Members of the "Axis of Evil" Iran and North Korea also harbor and promote drug trafficking, according to the State Department. Iran was chided on its lack of enacting or enforcing laws to decrease demand that has resulted in what the report said "can only be called an epidemic of opiate abuse."
In class on March 1st we discussed the War on Crime that is being waged in America, and it is essentially a war on minorities and drug users. The result of this initiative has essentially left American prisons over-capacity, facilities releasing offenders early, and the disenfranchisement of felons (African-Americans were targeted when this law was passed). The political face of this campaign forces the government to try and regulate other countries and how they are dealing with drugs in their own country. I find it appalling that we choose to focus on the problems of other countries before our own. If the War on Crime is imperative to the success of the U.S., shouldn't we try and focus on preventing violent crime and allocate resources toward rehabilitation programs rather than being a watchdog on other countries and their drug problems? This article shows that our government is pre-occupied with what everyone else is doing rather than what we are doing here at home. As we discussed in class, American's are at a greater risk of being killed during violent crimes than members of other nations and have the highest incarceration rate among Japan, Canada, France, and England. Money that was earned by American tax payers should be used to remedy this epidemic by encouraging the use of rehabilitation programs to prevent repeat offenders and thus lower the incarceration rate. In closing, it was an interesting article, but I still have the opinion that the U.S. needs to do more "in home" work before it tells other countries how to handle their drug issues.