Afghanistan and Opium: Ground Realities

As the International Security Assistance Forces (ISAF) reduce their military footprint, Afghanistan faces a threat from illicit narcotics trade that is likely to affect the long-term reconstruction and state building efforts. In the midst of political transition and an unstable security environment, Afghanistan is likely to descend into further chaos due to the illicit activity that funds insurgents, fuels corruption and undermines governance.

Corruption and insecurity in the region have created an environment that is ideal for illegitimate poppy production to expand and fund the insurgent activity (particularly Taliban) in the region. According to Transparency International’s 2014 Corruption Perceptions Index, Afghanistan is the fourth most corrupt country in the world (rank 172nd among 175 countries) marginally ahead of Sudan, North Korea and Somalia, while in World Bank’s 2015 Doing Business Report, it ranks a poor 182nd out of 189 countries. For the past 12 years, Afghan economy has been practically dependent on foreign aid. According to the Ministry of Finance, almost 100 percent of its development budget and 45 percent of its operating budget is externally financed, with the U.S. being the major donor.

Mexican army has taken control of major port in effort to combat drug cartel

This strategic port has been a major moneymaker for the powerful Knights Templar drug gang, which extorts millions from the city’s businesses and smuggles in meth-making chemicals from Asia.

View Photo Gallery — Lazaro Cardenas, Mexico, has one of the busiest ports in Latin America. But has business slowed since troops pushed out the drug trade?

But President Enrique Peña Nieto’s decision this month to deploy troops to Lazaro Cardenas marks a new attempt to sever the cartel’s economic lifeline by putting a stop to its criminal activities here.

In Mexico, self defense groups battle a cartel

An audacious band of citizen militias battling a brutal drug cartel in the hills of central Mexico is becoming increasingly well-armed and coordinated in an attempt to end years of violence, extortion and humiliation.

View Photo Gallery — In central Mexico’s hills, a battle against a drug cartel: An audacious band of citizen militias is making strides against the oppressive Knights Templar drug gang — something they say federal forces have not managed to do in a decade.

What began as a few scattered self-defense groups has spread in recent months to dozens of towns across Michoacan, a volatile state gripped by the cultlike Knights Templar, a drug gang known for taxing locals on everything from cows to tortillas and executing those who do not comply.

Understanding Pena Nieto's Approach to the Cartels

Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto's approach to combating Mexican drug cartels has been a much-discussed topic since well before he was elected. Indeed, in June 2011 -- more than a year before the July 2012 Mexican presidential election -- I wrote an analysis discussing rumors that, if elected, Pena Nieto was going to attempt to reach some sort of accommodation with Mexico's drug cartels in order to bring down the level of violence.

Such rumors were certainly understandable, given the arrangement that had existed for many years between some senior members of Pena Nieto's Institutional Revolutionary Party and some powerful cartel figures during the Institutional Revolutionary Party's long reign in Mexico prior to the election of Vicente Fox of the National Action Party in 2000. However, as we argued in 2011 and repeated in March 2013, much has changed in Mexico since 2000, and the new reality in Mexico means that it would be impossible for the Pena Nieto administration to reach any sort of deal with the cartels even if it made an attempt.

Mexico’s President Limits U.S. Role in Fighting Drug Trade

In their joint fight against drug traffickers, the United States and Mexico have forged an unusually close working relationship in recent years, with the Americans even regularly conducting polygraph tests on elite Mexican security officials to root out anyone who had been corrupted.

But shortly after Mexico’s new president, Enrique Peña Nieto, took office in December, American agents received a clear message that the dynamics, in which Washington has held the clear upper hand, were about to change.

le monde diplomatique: Drugs: the new alternative economy of West Africa

Cocaine politics

West Africa’s perfect global positioning between South America and Europe, and its endemic corruption, poverty and disorganisation, have made it the new drug hub. And drugs money is used to fund politics.

Brazilian cities hit by crack epidemic

Glassy-eyed, rail-thin and filthy, hundreds of addicts emerged from doorways and alleys as dusk came to the once-grand Luz district in the heart of this city.

After quick transactions with crack dealers, they scrambled for a little privacy to light up their pipes and inhale tiny, highly addictive rocks that go for about $5 each. The image was reminiscent of Washington or New York in the 1980s, when crack cocaine engulfed whole neighborhoods and sparked a dizzying cycle of violence.

But this time, the crack epidemic is happening in Brazil, alarming officials and tarnishing the country’s carefully cultivated image ahead of two major sporting events to be staged here: soccer’s 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics.

As drug industry’s influence over research grows, so does the potential for bias

For drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline, the 17-page article in the New England Journal of Medicine represented a coup.

The 2006 report described a trial that compared three diabetes drugs and concluded that Avandia, the company’s new drug, performed best.

“We now have clear evidence from a large international study that the initial use of [Avandia] is more effective than standard therapies,” a senior vice president of GlaxoSmithKline, Lawson Macartney, said in a news release.

How marijuana legalization will affect Mexico’s cartels, in charts

The decision by voters in Colorado and Washington state to legalize the recreational use of marijuana has “changed the rules of the game” for the administration of Mexican President-elect Enrique Peña Nieto in the U.S.-backed drug war, according to a report by the Washington Post’s William Booth.

“Obviously, we can’t handle a product that is illegal in Mexico, trying to stop its transfer to the United States, when in the United States, at least in part of the United States, it now has a different status,” Nieto’s top adviser, Luis Videgaray, told a radio station Wednesday.