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Put this in your pipe and smoke it
By Geof Wollerman
gwollerm@mscd.edu

Ever since Sept. 11, 2001, policy makers and administration officials have been linking illegal drug use – particularly marijuana – with terrorism. For example, a new exhibit at the Drug Enforcement Agency’s Museum & Visitor’s Center is titled “Target America: Traffickers, Terrorists, & You.” Officials argue that terrorists receive funding from the drug trade, and citizens who use drugs therefore contribute to terrorism. And they are right. Sort of.

The link between terrorism and the drug trade is undeniable. But the link between terrorism and any black-market trade is undeniable. Moises Naim, editor of Foreign Policy magazine, depicts in his recent book, Illicit, the complex, nearly untraceable infrastructure of today’s black markets, how criminal organizations operate in the 21st century, and the way terrorists use international law, or the lack thereof, to hide their intricate funding schemes. Naim notes that the 1993 World Trade Center bombing was possibly funded by “illegal interstate cigarette distribution, store coupon scams, and counterfeit T-shirt sales,” and that the perpetrators of the 2004 Madrid railway bombings “also ran a business in counterfeit compact discs.” He concludes that these “ties illustrate a convergence in the organization of terrorism and illicit trade that is born of both necessity and opportunity.”

But the connection between individual drug users, especially pot smokers, in the United States and terrorist bombers in the Middle East is incidental at best, and outlandish at worst. If my stoner buddy thought that stopping smoking joints would cut into terrorists’ bankrolls, I’m sure he would give up the green in a second.

But we’re not really talking about pot, are we? That’s not how the terrorists get rich. We’re talking about hard drugs, such as heroin, amphetamine and crack cocaine, and the people who buy those drugs. It’s a distinction worth making, but only with a small clarification: Those people are generally addicts, and when you’re an addict, you don’t care about anything but your next fix – not where you live, not what you eat, and certainly not 21st century geopolitics. You just want to get high.

For officials to assert that street users are somehow to blame for our terrorist woes is absolutely ridiculous – and shameful. Matthew Briggs, who works with the Drug Policy Alliance, an organization that advocates drug law reform, was quoted on AlterNet in September 2004 as saying it was as if the drug czar’s office was hiding “their failed war on drugs behind the war on terrorism.”

I probably wouldn’t take issue with any of this if there weren’t a noticeable spike in marijuana busts since 2001. Across the country, from medical marijuana users and growers to small-time possessors in urban areas, people who light up are getting locked down – and for what good? War and terror still abound. Drugs are, according to my best sources, still plentiful. But at the same time, the DEA asserted in 2003 – in defense of the drug war – that 95 percent of Americans didn’t do drugs. Of course, that same year a Harris poll found that 95 percent of Americans believed in heaven. Coincidence?

The new, tacit connection between drug use and terrorism might be shameful, but not as shameful as the billions-of-dollars war that our government continues to wage against marijuana users in the United States. With a faltering economy, nuclear-ambitious countries on the rise and an entangled conflagration in the Middle East, you’d think a small population of people who watch television and consume snack food would be the least of our concerns – hell, they’re probably helping the cause.

In blaming drug users for terrorism, officials also tend to publicly ignore the fact that terrorists make money, as Naim points out, from other business ventures: knockoff clothing, human trafficking, and bootleg DVDs, books and computer programs. In fact, after reading Illicit you might discover that even if you don’t use illegal drugs, but still purchase “early-release” copies of The Fast and the Furious, you’re no better than the crackhead down the street. In light of the way terrorist-sponsoring regimes are using the high price of oil for political leverage these days, driving a gas-guzzling sport-utility vehicle might be the worst offense of all.

There are numerous things all of us – not just drug users – could be doing to lessen the hold terrorists have on our way of life. Of course, in the long run, this means giving up some of our ways of life. But my stoner buddy shouldn’t have to feel anymore guilty about his joint than you should about your car.

The War on Drugs has been superseded by the War on Terror and reduced to a War of Words: tough-sounding rhetoric backed by weak connections and volleyed at a general public who left the battlefield long ago.