It's almost unbelievable the amount of insanity that goes into drug prohibition policy. Our friends at the Office of National Drug Control Policy certainly are the experts in this field, and are aiming for the corner on the market of insanity.

Just last week I commented on the funny math of the feds. This week? Further proof they can't add:

In the Federal News Service for April 28, 2008, John Walters, "We're not happy, obviously, that the amount of heroin coming out of Afghanistan has become kind of historic in its magnitude."

What he means to say is that, after decades of interdiction, within six years of having production virtually eliminated under Taliban rule (by February 2001, production had been reduced from 12,600 acres to only 17 acres), last year all records were broken for opium production. Further, Afghanistan is now, in 2008, making more opium than ever before... and that's with United States military patrolling the region.

Afghanistan + 6 years + Interdiction = Increased opium production. Somehow, the equation isn't working out as originally planned.

There's more, like Walter's banal repetition of the same mantra that cocaine availability is at its lowest levels for the past twenty years, despite most law enforcement agencies finding cocaine availability has not changed significantly (not to mention, if cocaine was getting so scarce, how did they manage to seize so much in the hyped 'Bryne Raid' day?). Walters is likewise in utter denial of the porous nature of our borders (even claiming that the U.S. government is interdicting up to 50% of the illicit chemicals being transported across the border!). Let's be blatantly honest here: if you can't keep drugs out of prison, how the hell are you going to keep them out of a whole country?

Not to fear! Insanity has a solution, which Walters states unequivocally: more money, more aircraft, more cops.

In criminology, they've called it the humpty-dumpty principle: just keep throwing more money and more people at the problem, and eventually it'll get fixed, despite there being no evidence that the solution is the correct one. You need to use the proper tools to solve a problem. So analyzing what tool you are using becomes very important, and unfortunately, one that the ONDCP hasn't bothered with for a while: in terms of reducing the harms of drugs, isn't prohibition like trying to fix a flat tire by hitting the wheel with a stone axe?