DRUG QUEENS, OLLIE NORTH & AFGHANISTAN

It was not at all reassuring to drop in on CNN last night and find that ageing figure of other splendid American external policies, Ollie North, interviewing the lady boss of the DEA -- The Drug Enforcement Agency -- in some picturesque landscape in a rural area of Helmand province in Afghanistan (from which my son returned after six months of harrowing duty.) It had been freshly 'reconquered' (and of course would soon enough return to its earlier status.)

The lady in question wore some sort of bulge about her middle, presumably bullet-proof, and, prompted by Ollie, managed to smile wanly as she said that her visit was made in the hope of 'interdicting' the opium crop in that part of the world.

Why?

For several thousand years opium, or its derivative, morphine (laudanum) has been the analgesic of choice. Like most other 'natural' drugs -- coca leaves, quinine, etc. -- opium will not harm you. Their chemical derivatives -- heroin, cocaine, atropine -- can and will kill you if you use them to excess. Nor is addiction to opium per se in any way harmful. It is a peaceful drug, and in my parents' house in London there was no social approbrium of any kind attached to its consumption: as Sherlock Holmes well knew, or Harold Acton, that remarkable historian, who died peacefully in his nineties after life-long use.

One would think that the United States, which invented Prohibition and its accompanying gang wars, would have learned something since the early 'Twenties. But not so. Nor has President Calderon in Mexico yet learned the lesson. Ban something, anything, and its price will go up; and if it is made scarce, the wrong sort of people will make more money. What has happened in Ciudad Juarez just across the border, is a direct result of the DEA's 'war on drugs'.

The end-buyer (oh, what a surprise!) is largely an American. A report in BOMB, that chi-chi mag in the Big Apple, details the platinum-haired art-dealers and others of the trendy set, passing the powder about with the hors d'oeuvres. It is sold right on school property. To the User, no harm comes -- one day his nose will rot, but he wasn't worth much to start with.

Before the DEA it was otherwise. Opium at least was available at a reasonable price in your local pharmacy, which kept a register, and sold no more to any addict than the quantity his addiction called for. We knew who smoked it, because we saw him at dinner parties: not zonked out, but fresh from writing, say, Kubla Khan.

The US Embassy in Bogota is the second largest in the world. We have so much diplomacy in Colombia? No. Because the DEA is there, living the life of Reilly. Meanwhile, the speedboats from Colombia drop off their commercial cocaine a few hundred meters from my beach. Our local drug sub-king, Edwin, owns the town I live in. His twelve-year-old son drives a car on the highway and on the beach in front of my house. Both are illegal of course, but no one will say boo to Edwin. He's just a local business-man. But he and the rest of them make their money straight from the DEA.

In Persia, opium was (and is) a source of poetry and pleasure; in New York, the only poetry lies in the money made by the dealers and the only pleasure lies in the swank of those platinum-haired twits as they snort. What was not a problem in my youth is now a Problem writ large. Who created it? the Prohibitionists.