The United States is going to give the government of Columbia $1.5 billion of aid in their war against drugs.
Now, on the surface, this might sound to you like a bad idea. You don’t think some of Columbia’s military and political leaders might get the idea that the more drugs Columbia supplies to the United States, the more money they are going to get for new equipment, training, and fringe benefits, do you? Or do you think that their reputation for honesty, integrity, and diligence is such that after a few years of aid, they will announce to the world that the program has been a success and therefore no more American money is needed?
It is pretty well documented that the small successes early on in the war against drugs contributed to the over-all failure of the same war. When the FBI and other government agencies cracked down on the most visible agents of drug trafficking in the early 1980’s, the prices of many of these drugs went soaring, which caused a huge number of new sellers to appear. Furthermore, the really smart dealers went deeper underground to avoid detection and became ever more entrenched and sophisticated, and almost impossible to stamp out. The result is that drugs are now far more profitable and widely available than ever before.
Isn’t that kind of shocking? If a private business set out to accomplish something that cost hundreds of billions of dollars over more than twenty years, it would probably have the good sense to sit down at some point and try to answer the question of whether it was moving closer or farther from it’s goal. If it found that, after twenty years, it was farther away from its goal than ever before, I tend to think they would stop wasting their money and come up with a new plan.
But this is a government plan of course. Ironically, the very people who most decry government waste in other areas of the economy– conservatives and Republicans– are the most enthusiastic about spending a few hundred billion more on the same self-defeating program.
And now they are pouring $1.5 billion into a corrupt Columbian government to ensure that even worse results can be obtained. You see, when the Columbian army is not busy stamping out drug dealers, or fighting an entrenched guerrilla movement, it tends to spend a lot of time and effort assassinating human rights activists and peasants.
Nice to know that now they will be able to violate human rights with state of the art equipment.