 The principle threat of the drug war and national security has to do with its role in stirring up large levels of violence and crime and corruption. In the United States now people ask what are the principle national security challenges in terms of violence and you know there's three Afghanistan, Iraq and Mexico. Now Iraq appears to have very little to do with the drug war. In Afghanistan we're roughly 50% of the gross domestic product, the GDP is involved with illicit opium and heroin and where you have the money funding both the Taliban and Al Qaeda as well as all sorts of other things, I mean obviously it plays a role in the national security situation. In Latin America we're dealing with countries that are traditionally very weak states, you have very weak institutions. The model imposed by Washington on the region has further weakened civilian institutions by creating a strong role for military forces who should not be involved in domestic law enforcement by prioritizing military and police assistance, providing very little support to justice sectors. When you pull billions of dollars of military aid into these countries then countries are going to use that money for violent means to suppress what peasants do very naturally. One of the serious problems with the war on drugs is that it diverts enormous amounts of money into the hands of a lot of very unsavory people. So the cartels who reap all the profits from this often use that money to corrupt the judiciary, to corrupt the police and to corrupt local politicians. So you have a dramatic destabilizing effect of illegal drug profits in some key producer countries whether it's in Latin America or whether it's in Central and Southeast Asia or wherever it may be. Organized crime functions via its ability to corrupt institutions across the board. So what you find is a situation where the police don't investigate and judges don't convict which is why you end up with a huge impunity rate for drug traffickers across the region and this further weakens the state. Because of increased border security in Europe cocaine traffickers just simply shifted their supply routes into West Africa. There's one country in West Africa called Guinea-Bissau and Guinea-Bissau in 2009 had a GDP of 800 million so it's one of the poorest countries in the world. It has an archipelago of islands and has essentially no government structure. There's no effective police force, there's no effective military and recent estimates suggest that 1.8 billion dollars worth of cocaine wholesale is annually going through Guinea-Bissau. The illegal drug profits will often flow into the hands of insurgents or terrorists or other militias and you know military or paramilitary groups and in doing so what you're effectively doing is fuelling conflict in already unstable conflict zones. You're providing a river of money that is used to buy arms and to fund armies and to fund wars and conflict so there are a number of countries where there are civil wars that are actively being funded by profits that are a direct result of the war on drugs. Central America Guatemala Honduras almost make Mexico look tranquil by comparison. What we saw in the past in Colombia, Bolivia, Peru, the Sandero Luminoso, I mean look in Southeast Asia so often drugs, the drug prohibition is empowering criminals, organized criminals, unorganized criminals, terrorist organizations, political insurgencies. Look what is happening, for instance in Afghanistan, they're producing far more heroin in that country than they did before we started our nine year long war in that country, far more. And today we have our soldiers over there that are burning poppy fields and spraying poison on it and every time they do they turn that particular farmer back toward the Taliban because what we're doing is we're destroying their livelihood. They estimated it would have cost $600 million to buy the entire crop. Instead that very year we paid $780 million to spray poison on it and they still had the largest bumper crop in history and the year after that larger and the year after that larger. We focus on the role that criminal organizations play in supplying illicit drugs. On the other side we also consider supply in term of production, a solution must be taken. If in certain cases alternative developments might be the most effective long term solution or if forced eradication is the only solution. If we look at the areas particularly Columbia where very focused and well developed and sustained policies have been developed in order to bring development to the rural areas we must say that they do work. UNODC data demonstrates that while seizures in the Andean region for instance have increased as increased interventions are applied to try to stop cocoa production in that region the levels of cocaine availability measured through price and purity demonstrate that in consumer markets such as Europe and the United States that essentially there has been zero impact. They have managed to kind of fill their reports with the odd victory and that gives the impression that something might be working it's not when they cut off one trade route another trade route appears when they fumigate a particular area that's growing cocoa it just gets planted elsewhere. In the case of Columbia it was it has been a very long standing area of spraying campaign in the case of Peru and Bolivia manual education during the past 30 years the amount of hectares cultivated have remained more or less stable so we can easily say that these campaigns have failed. Small farmers grow cocoa because they have no other economic alternative and you can eradicate their cocoa all you want unless they have something else to provide them with income they're going to replant cocoa and that's what has happened over and over and over again across the region. The economic impact on these families and on these thousands of peasant families is the biggest cause of poverty in these rural areas there has been no serious attempt to involve farmers organizations in defining their own destiny Bolivia is now the first country that has started to find ways to eradicate voluntarily. Alternative development as I was saying before is offering farmers an alternative production of coffee organic coffee that is also marketed with a brand or a cocoa or other produce in Afghanistan as far as I can remember one of the most successful potential product is cultivation and marketing of saffron. Alternative development policies have been limited have worked in some areas but in most areas it hasn't something like five cents per gram of cocaine will go to the farmers so but still within within their reality this is a lot this is a lot of money and it is a secure market they can always count on. How would you explain to someone that it's making two thousand dollars a year working on the drug industry or even a thousand dollars a year in the drug industry and it's putting their kids to school how are you going to tell them stop why don't you grow corn instead and make two hundred and forget about your kids going to school how do you say that how could you say I am gonna develop programs and I'm gonna give you money for you to move away from cocoa from cocoa growing when at the same time I'm spraying your land and your ground and the next day you're not gonna be able to grow anything you're gonna cripple Latin Americans with these double standards of policies that at the end of the day are going to cause more poverty they're going to expand trafficking. There are no agrarian policies that allow them to have access to markets and have fair prices for their products to compete on the world market so it has to do with the broader picture of agrarian policies and agrarian possibilities for peasants to find secure livelihood. One of the big problems with the so-called war on drugs is that the US government has given a lot of resources to drug war activities instead of channeling those resources to other activities that are probably much more important for those countries such as economic development and institutional strengthening. We need to be putting resources into strengthening communities in both the rural and urban sector and most importantly providing economic opportunities.