Who's the Terrorist?

Remember the White House asserting, back in late 2001, that if you use recreational drugs, you support terrorists? Just months later, that became the official line at the Office for National Drug Control Policy, which spent millions of taxpayer dollars spreading the message with two Superbowl commercials. The whole thing was ludicrous and spurious enough that even the law-and-order-friendly Weekly Standard objected, calling the campaign "crap," and countering that the ONDCP accusation could easily be turned on its head, like this:

Drug prohibition creates a business opportunity for terrorists — if you oppose legalizing drugs, you support terror, too.

No matter. Just days ago, John Walters, the federal drug czar, brushed off the old drug-users-aid-terrorists canard (hat tip to Martin Owens for sending the link).

In fairness, though, Walters added a creative new twist: marijuana is a plague for the environment. Who knew?

The nation's top anti-drug official said people need to overcome their "reefer blindness" and see that illicit marijuana gardens are a terrorist threat to the public's health and safety, as well as to the environment. John P. Walters, President Bush's drug czar, said the people who plant and tend the gardens are terrorists who wouldn't hesitate to help other terrorists get into the country with the aim of causing mass casualties. ... "Don't buy drugs. They fund violence and terror," he said.

The environmental damage that Mr. Walters bemoans stems from growers surreptitiously planting the allegedly non-native marijuana species in our national forests, and from the landscape-scarring irrigation systems and terracing techniques aimed at making the crop thrive.

Such concern for the natural world is stirring. I wonder, however, when Mr. Walters will scrutinize the environmental record of his friends, the nation's drug warriors. It is they, after all, who enthusiastically engage in (or simply fund, with your dollars) all manner of biological warfare, to try to eradicate drug crops in places like Colombia and Afghanistan.

At their behest, untold tens of thousands of gallons of chemical herbicides such as glyphosate have been sprayed indiscriminately on suspicious-looking fields, from the air. These substances, in humans, can cause

...damage to the stomach, heart, kidneys, lungs and skin, and [glyphosate] is reported to be the third most [prevalent] cause of pesticide illness among agricultural workers. 

Inevitably, kids are affected, too. In this documentary, the director of an Ecuadorian Epidemiology Center along the border with Columbia says he has noticed

"...a very, very intimate relationship between fumigation and illnesses. And this started to draw our attention, because suddenly the signs began to appear. Children with diarrhea, adults with respiratory problems."

A week after the fumigation,

"...the children started to break out in their skin, started vomiting, having diarrhea, headaches, losing their appetites, everything. Two weeks later, the children started dying." 

Reports describing the nasty, sometimes fatal ailments induced by glyphosate poisoning are available to anyone with the stomach to do a Google search. That would exclude the U.S. government, funnily enough, which simply keeps denying that serious health effects could result from the spraying of the herbicide.

According to a State Department spokesperson, "To date, no reports of alleged adverse health effects related to the spray program have been substantiated. Toxicology tests ... show that the herbicide mixture used for spraying, in the manner it is being used, does not pose any unreasonable risks of adverse effects for humans or the environment." 

I'll believe the spokesperson is sincere if he'll invite a glyphosate-laden cropduster to strafe his house with the stuff; and if he'll then subject himself and his family to, let's say, a year-long diet with roughly the same glyphosate content found in South American foodstuffs after the spraying operations.

As for John P. Walters: he is no doubt a friend of the environment. I can just picture him lounging on the lawn of his sparkling Beltway home on a Sunday afternoon, enjoying the sunshine, happily watching the bees congregating on the geraniums, and observing a couple of cheeky robins clowning around on the birdfeeder. The splendor of nature matters to him, and not just in his garden: he is adamant that we preserve the integrity of our public forests, which means fighting the violent terrorists who would sneakily cultivate marijuana plants there.

And you know: if his ardor for his job, his love for his country, his passion for the environment, means that thousands of men, women and children on some other continent are to be slowly poisoned with herbicides, well, unfortunately, you have to break some eggs if you want an omelette, right? In a war, you're going to have collateral damage, and drug wars are no exception.

So meander Walters' thoughts, I imagine — his mind unclouded by doubt, blessedly free from the notion that, just maybe, the biggest terrorist in miles around is the owner of a sparkling Beltway house with a geranium garden and a birdfeeder and a high-paying job with the federal government.

Comments

[K. Dale Boley]

Drug Czar: "the people who plant and tend the gardens are terrorists who wouldn't hesitate to help other terrorists get into the country with the aim of causing mass casualties".

That is the funniest statement about dope I have ever seen. Bar none.
I picture hippies with garden hoes lifting the wires at the border fence to welcome Mexicans and marching to the nearest mall. Like a band of brain hungry zombies. BRAINS!!!

[Swimmy]

Hmm, I'm not so sure. I'd trust a journalist above the obviously biased United States drug czar, but I'd trust all peer-reviewed literature above a journalist. From what I can tell by doing a quick internet search, there's a lot of anecdotal evidence that glysophate is dangerous and little to no scientific evidence. Of course, there's some other literature showing that long-term exposure of high doses is more dangerous. No telling how much those people are actually ingesting.