Dunno why I blanked out on that--but I did. That whole year was kind of awful.
Thanks,
tom

... US of A also shared a penchant for hanging victims from bridges:

http://www.tulsareparations.org/images/freport_17_0001.jpg

As long as the US government is in the business of subsidizing tobacco farmers it has absolutely no moral ground to stand on vis-a-vis marijuana and other drugs. The tired little myth about gateway drugs ignores the real gateway drug, alcohol.
You legalize illegal (thank you Randolph Hearst and the Dupont family) drugs, it won't matter who governs Cuban or Mexican space. They won't have any cash to be naughty with. Same thing with the Middle East; no oil cash and they'd all still be firing at each other with those picturesque long rifles, and no money for wahabi madrassas.
But drugs won't be legalized. There is an entire incarceration industry, profitable one to, developing in our free land. Where will all those wardens and guards go if they don't have prisoners to herd?

Borders are made to breach, go around, or infiltrate. Maybe we could take a tip from the Byzantines? They understood they had to minimize their exposure to main force combat . As long as the demand is in North America, we face main force combat in the form of illicit narco trade from down South.

Those that think Maginot Line think in linear square block terms and having read your posts on cyber warfare, I know you have a better idea? : )

I don't believe in fighting unwinnable wars, especially when metaphorical 'wars' (the 'drug war') become irregular, nasty, actual ones. As you note, this war, like Carry A. Nation's, is unwinnable.

That said, whether or not the US chooses to end the prohibition and try regulation as a more efficient alternative, there is no illicit network analysis capability (i.e., the ability to discover and roll-up the network entities) in use to address these problems, either in the intelligence or in the criminal agencies who have concerned themselves with it. That's odd, because it's an illicit network problem, per se, and not amenable to 1985 credit card marketing analytic techniques. (I was actually briefed by one agency that proudly stated that it used a regression modeling piece of COTS costing $300; this was their idea of advancing the analytic arts in the service of their mission.) The criminal side of our drug distribution suppression efforts is led by, basically, gumshoes; the intelligence side lacks the math and the leadership. (The chief technology officer of our leading criminal and CTI agency told me that he personally, and in respect of his staff, had no professional capability to even evaluate (much less develop) any technology that would have, for example, identified the 16 of the 20 9/11 hijackers that were identified in federal databases. This means, of course, that nothing has changed in regard to discovering illicit, harmful networks operating in the plain view of our government databases. The analytic technology that *would* have identifed the 16 exists outside the US government.) We buy a lot of big computers, though, and everyone is building "fusion databases". This is like issuing shiny rifles to infantrymen and wishing them luck, while we wait for someone to invent bullets, the concept of which our USG procurement people do not understand. "Fusion databases" also have the virtue of taking forever to build, so they great for civil service and military career path management, and being comprehensible to people without a quantitative analysis background.

30+ percent of global GDP is probably illicit now, and effected -- actually dependent upon -- illicit networks. The drug economy, as in the case of other illicit economies, is historically interesting because it survives and prospers now in plain sight. In 1970 illicit activity existed off-grid; today it is all on the grid. Illicit networks always leave electronic, observable residue. However the scale of the electronic landscape in which it moves freely without detection is such that traditional analytic methodologies disguise the bad guys and grant them cover in the electronic forest. Trying to roll up network entities that exist across 3, 4, 5 degrees of separation by using surveillance and analysis techniques from the 1970's is foolish and wasteful. The network is the threat; the network is the force multiplier. We do not solve for networks in our intelligence, criminal, and national security analysis efforts. The few analysts and executives who understand this will tell you, off-line, that they might be identifying 1-2 percent of their target populations.

I hate getting old. It allows me to remember when I was at war someplace else, and President Nixon was declaring war on drugs back in America in 1971. Since then, I am told out of every four people locked-up around the world, one of those is for a drug related offense in the U.S. - that's astounding, and one would think after forty years we'd get it that our policies that pass for strategy don't work?

I can remember when Turkey was singled-out as the greatest threat to America with its opium production. We actually worked with the Turkish government to nationalize and control it and thus diminished the threat - or did we? Alas, the production simply moved over to Thailand and Burma (Myanmar), as part of the Golden Triangle, and now of course has been superceded by Afghanistan.

What this tells me is as long as there is a demand, a demand driven by something people physically crave; have to have to function, or think they do, the illicit drug trade will flourish and reveals to me it is a very flexible and difficult trade to take apart - kind of like terrorism - cause and effect.

Further, our war on drugs has become somewhat similar to the defense industry - a racket of sorts in that it fuels our own economy by employing federal law enforcement, the legal profession, prison guards, federally subsidized and ineffectual rehab centers, along with providing huge amounts of laundered money to banks, which all, in itself, likes the status quo to some degree or another.

The bottom line is that the problem is not exclusively at our border, though it needs to be controlled more intelligently. America's problem is that it has two addictions: one is an appetite for substance abuse, and the other is the addiction to prohibition.

After forty years of failure and actually increasing the problem from a domestic one to a foreign policy issue with our neighbor(s) down south, for a fraction of the billions we have spent on eradication, interdiction and incarceration, we could have invested in education, dedicated treatment facilities that would actually solve many of the problems, along with decrimalizing certain portions of it such as marijuana, while at the same time modifying the judicial and penal system.

This of course like counter-insurgency takes time, intelligence, and national will, but in the end focuses our main effort toward where our enemy is weakest - to those that must have their product.