Cables Portray Expanded Reach of Drug Agency

[slimvictor]

By GINGER THOMPSON and SCOTT SHANE
Published: December 25, 2010


WASHINGTON — The Drug Enforcement Administration has been transformed into a global intelligence organization with a reach that extends far beyond narcotics, and an eavesdropping operation so expansive it has to fend off foreign politicians who want to use it against their political enemies, according to secret diplomatic cables.

In far greater detail than previously seen, the cables, from the cache obtained by WikiLeaks and made available to some news organizations, offer glimpses of drug agents balancing diplomacy and law enforcement in places where it can be hard to tell the politicians from the traffickers, and where drug rings are themselves mini-states whose wealth and violence permit them to run roughshod over struggling governments.

Diplomats recorded unforgettable vignettes from the largely unseen war on drugs:

(...)
In Guinea, the country’s biggest narcotics kingpin turned out to be the president’s son, and diplomats discovered that before the police destroyed a huge narcotics seizure, the drugs had been replaced by flour.


continued at
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/26/world/26wikidrugs.html?_r=1&ref=global-home

 

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opium is the opium of the masses

 

[slimvictor]

The D.E.A. faced even more intense pressure last year from Panama, whose right-leaning president, Ricardo Martinelli, demanded that the agency allow him to use its wiretapping program — known as Matador — to spy on leftist political enemies he believed were plotting to kill him.

The United States, according to the cables, worried that Mr. Martinelli, a supermarket magnate, “made no distinction between legitimate security targets and political enemies,” refused, igniting tensions that went on for months.

This article is interesting to me because it shows that the US government is willing to ignore any possibly "morality" and give up quite a bit of political leverage in order to go after people who deal with the drug supply. If drugs were legal, it is amazing to think of how it would change US foreign political policy, even those areas not clearly related to drugs.

Dictators claim support for the US war on drugs and gain political benefit (at a cost to the US).

But foreign rulers who believe in the freedom to explore consciousness (those few who might exist) will run afoul of the US, damaging their hopes politically and ruining the relations between that country and the US (thereby costing the US a potential ally).

The enemies of the US can sell drugs to get money, but if there were no war on drugs, their capital and means of economic propagation would be taken away.

The war on drugs is a lose-lose situation.