The myth of narco-terrorism

This is interesting. We have a US Tunnel Task Force.

Based in San Diego, the team pools the resources of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the Border Patrol and Customs and Border Protection, and it draws support from a special U.S. military unit.

Now called Joint Task Force North, it has homeland security powers. Their work is pretty impressive but the problem is they spend the bulk of their time, energy and the taxpayer's dollar on discovering very sophisticated drug running tunnels that have almost nothing to do with national security.

Yes, drug runners who build tunnels that elaborate are generally organized criminals but they are no more a terror threat than they were before 9/11. The administration has used the war on terror to ratchet up the drug war at the taxpayer's expense on the pretense that the drug industry magically morphed into a terrorist threat overnight.

They even invented a cute name for it -- narcoterrorism. There is no such thing. Any more than there are eco-terrorists, or animal rights terrorists or peace terrorists. The latter are activists. Some of them are vandals but they're not going to release a bio bomb or fly a plane into a building. And drug dealers deal in drugs, not terror attacks.

Yes, you can argue that drugs finance terrorists, but that doesn't mean every drug dealer is one. The terrorists are just cashing in on the black market that prohibition and the drug dealers created. Terrorists deal drugs as a sideline to finance their operations. Drug dealers deal drugs full time as a business. It's not in their best interest to destroy their market with bombs and other means of mayhem.

Think about that before you buy into the line about narco-terror. Terrorists don't fund themselves by dealing beer but they might have if these were the days of Al Capone. Prohibition creates the profits that breed crime. The black market is the truest form of the free market in existence. It's the last place the underclass can still acheive the American dream of rags to riches through hard work. And don't be fooled by the movies, it's a hard job, dealing for a living.

And you're never going to stop them. As one agent states:

"Could they build a tunnel under the Rio Grande?" Marwood mused. "It really is just an engineering question. If the money is right for them, they can do whatever is possible."

And the money is there, all tax free. On the dark side of the business, since the market is completely unregulated and has no neutral authority to resolve disagreements, it claims its victims in violent territorial disputes and impure product. And so the war on drugs not only doesn't stop drugs, it also compromises national security. If the market was legalized, the Tunnel Task Force could be using its resources to catch real terrorists because the drug dealers wouldn't have to dig tunnels anymore.

[hat tip Tim Meehan]