The “Law Enforcement” War on Drugs

The U.S. government indicted 50 top members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (or FARC) yesterday on charges of conspiracy to manufacture and export illegal narcotics to the United States (the full indictment is here).

FARC is a left-wing paramilitary group dedicated to the overthrow of the Colombia government. They have been battling the Colombian government since the 1960s and their tactics have been horrifying. But the U.S. is not involved directly in that fight although U.S. military forces have been training Colombian forces for years. This is what I called the “war on drugs” in a previous post.

But the indictment of the entire rebel leadership takes this “war” to a new level. First of all, it further demonstrates the remarkable extraterritorial scope of U.S. statutes criminalizing drug trafficking. Second, the indictment criminalizes (for drug law purposes) the entire Colombian civil war. In theory, if the Colombians capture a FARC leader in their civil war, they can now extradite him to the U.S. to stand trial for drug crimes, rather than charging him with human rights abuses or treason or whatever. This seems a bit odd, and potentially counterproductive.

Finally, the law enforcement approach to the war on drugs is markedly different from the “war” approach to the war on terrorism, as this indictment symbolizes. The U.S. government is using its criminal laws, and presumably all of its criminal procedure protections, in its attempt to knock out a dangerous opponent, FARC. Why can’t it do the same to Al Qaeda?

Then again, given the apparently never ending hopeless task of winning the war on drugs, perhaps the law enforcement approach is not all that attractive after all.