Top Ten Drug War Stories of 2003

With the American public's attention firmly directed toward the daily events of the Bush Administration's "War on Terror," the US-led and exported "War on Drugs" continues to exact crippling costs to taxpayers, minority groups, the environment, civil liberties and struggling democracies around the world.

While terror alerts rise and fall and states struggle to fund their law enforcement budgets, the total number of marijuana arrests far exceed the total number of arrests for all violent crimes combined, including murder, manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery and aggravated assault.

As the Drug War enters its 90th year, it continues to be characterized by contradictory laws, arbitrary enforcement, massive wealth and racial disparities, questionable covert operations and general media timidity.

Here are 10 of the top stories from Drug War 2003:

1) Afghanistan is now the world's leading supplier of opium for the heroin trade. Under the Taliban regime, which banned opium, annual production bottomed out at 77 tons in 2001, produced only in areas controlled by the Northern Alliance. American military, as part of its "War on Terror," allied with Northern Alliance warlords to overthrow the Taliban regime and keep Al Qaeda at bay. Afghan opium production has since skyrocketed to about 3,600 tons of opium this year, or 75 percent of global production.

Early in December 2003, US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld traveled to Afghanistan and publicly embraced warlords Abdul Rashid Dostum and Ustad Attas Mohammed, for calling off armed struggle with the fragile government in Kabul headed by Hamid Karzai. Abdul Rashid Dostum was rewarded by being named Deputy Secretary of Defense for the Karzai government.

Dostum has been described as a "war criminal" by groups such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, for killing thousands of civilians in the Afghan civil wars of the 1990s and for his merciless treatment of prisoners and, occasionally, his own soldiers.

2) While the United States declared war on Iraq for supposedly harboring biological weapons, the US-funded War on Drugs in Colombia plans to use an untested pathogenic fungus -- fusarium oxysporum -- to wipe out coca. Critics say the plan proposes illegal acts of biological warfare, poses major ecological risks to Colombia -- one of the world's most bio-diverse countries -- and will increase suffering, by wreaking havoc with human health, water quality and food crops.

3) On February 12, a federal jury in Philadelphia awarded $1.5 million in compensation to two narcotics agents -- John McLaughlin and Charles Micewski -- who claimed their boss -- the Pennsylvania attorney general -- retaliated against them because they uncovered a drug-trafficking ring that diverted profits to a CIA-backed Dominican presidential candidate.

Pittsburgh's Tribune Review reports: McLaughlin and Micewski said they had uncovered a Dominican drug-trafficking ring operating in Philadelphia, New York and other Eastern cities that funneled drug profits to the Dominican Revolutionary Party, which they claimed was supported by the Central Intelligence Agency and State Department.

4) Switzerland's Addiction Research Institute calls tobacco the number one killer addiction, responsible for 71 percent, or 4.9 million of the world's 7 million annual drug-related deaths. About 1.8 million deaths, or 26 percent, were attributed to the use of alcohol, while illicit drugs caused about 223,000, or 3 percent, of all worldwide drug-related deaths.

5) The FBI's annual Uniform Crime Report reveals that police arrested an estimated 697,082 persons for marijuana violations in 2002, or nearly half of all drug arrests in the United States. This amounts to one marijuana-related arrest every 45 seconds.