My Washington Times Piece On Fighting The Scourge Of Drugs: El Chapo Rots In Prison, But The War On Drugs Must Go On

The Washington Times published my piece on the scourge of drugs.

The capture, extradition from Mexico, trial and imprisonment of Joaquin Guzman, better known as El Chapo (Shorty in Spanish), was a major blow to the Mexican Sinaloa Cartel. The drug lord will spend the rest of his life in an American Supermax prison.

Those who advocate an end to America’s war on drugs say the effort to combat drugs is pointless and fruitless, and the imprisonment of Guzman will not stop or even slow drug trafficking.Meet the new boss, same as the old boss, as the saying goes. Or perhaps not.

Guzman was an extraordinary criminal. He was brutal, inspirational, clever, ruthless, organized, innovative and murderous. According to the U.S. Justice Department, the evidence at his trial showed that he was responsible for importing and distributing more than a million kilograms of cocaine, marijuana, methamphetamine and heroin into the United States.

Guzman used fishing boats, submarines, carbon fiber airplanes, underground tunnels and other methods to bring in the drugs, which were then sold to wholesale criminal distributors in New York, Miami, Atlanta, and other major cities and centers.

Guzman used violence to solidify his power. Witnesses testified that he ordered his hitmen to kidnap, torture and slaughter people who stood in his way, and he performed violent acts personally as well. In addition to spreading poison, Guzman also corrupted government officials.

We can hope that his replacement will be far less efficient.

Facing rampant drug abuse and increasing drug-related crime, President Richard Nixon announced at a press conference on June 17, 1971, that drugs were “public enemy number one.”

“In order to fight and defeat this enemy,” the president said. “It is necessary to wage a new, all-out offensive.”  

And so the war on drugs began.

The ACLU has repeatedly called for an end to the efforts to curb drug trafficking and the use of dangerous narcotics. The ACLU states that the war on drugs has cost more than a trillion dollars over the years and has had little or no effect on the supply of or demand for drugs in America.

The ACLU believes drugs should be a health issue rather than a crime. The ACLU believes America should use the money spent on fighting drugs to treat drug addicts. They and others state that the war on drugs is a failure, as after all these years, we have not eliminated drug trafficking, drug dealing and drug using. 

This, to me, would be akin to the idea of legalizing homicide simply because some people continue to get away with murder. 

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/aug/6/fighting-scourge-drugs/

George Will: Gifted Writer Chronicles The 'Vocabulary Of Mutilation Of Mexican Drug Cartels'

George Will in his column in the Washington Post covers Don Winslow's crime thriller The Cartel and the war on drugs. 

Don Winslow, novelist and conscientious objector to America’s longest “war,” was skeptical when he was in Washington on a recent Sunday morning. This was shortly after news broke about the escape, from one of Mexico’s “maximum security” prisons, of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, head of the Sinaloa drug cartel.

Guzman reportedly disappeared through a tunnel almost a mile long and built solely for his escape. Asked about this, Winslow, his fork poised over an omelet, dryly said he thinks Guzmán might actually have driven away from the prison’s front gate in a Lincoln Town Car. What might seem like cynicism could be Winslow’s realism. Fourteen years ago, Guzmán allegedly escaped from another “maximum security” prison simply by hiding in a laundry cart. With exquisite understatement, the Wall Street Journal reports that his recent escape raised “new concerns about corruption in Mexican law enforcement.”

You can read the rest of the column via the below link:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-gifted-writer-chronicles-the-drug-cartels-vocabulary-of-mutilation/2015/08/05/7547f5c4-3ada-11e5-8e98-115a3cf7d7ae_story.html 

My Crime Beat Column: Frederick Forsyth Offers a Fact-Based Story of An All-Out War On the Drug Lords In 'The Cobra'

I’ve been reading Frederick Forsyth since his classic thriller The Day of the Jackal in 1971.

I like that Forsyth uses his skills as a journalist to infuse his thrillers with true facts and details about crime, espionage, terrorism and war. Forsyth also offers a good, thrilling and suspenseful story.

His new thriller, The Cobra (G.P. Putnam’s Sons), continues in that fine tradition.

“There are two ways of doing this job, a news agency bureau chief told me once,” Forsyth wrote in a piece called Behind the Story: The Cobra. “You can not bother and get it wrong, or take the trouble and get it right. In my office, we get it right.”

Forsyth went on to write that the bureau chief was a good journalist who taught him a lot. And when Forsyth switched from being a foreign correspondent to novelist, the training stuck. Even though it is fiction, Forsyth says he tries to get even the smallest detail right.

“That includes the weird places to be visited,” Forsyth wrote in Behind the Story. “For The Cobra, a deep delve into the murky world of cocaine, smugglers, Coast Guards, cops and gangsters, there were “must go” targets. The HQ of the DEA in Washington, the back streets of Bogotá, the dockside dives of Cartagena. But the more I researched, the more I came across a recurring name: Guinea-Bissau.”

Forsyth called the African state a shattered, burned-out hellhole: the ultimate failed state. Of course, this hellhole is the perfect shipment point for cocaine going from South America to Europe.

It was while Forsyth was researching his novel there, posing as a bird watcher, that the country suffered yet another coup d’atat. Forsyth wrote that the airport and the borders were closed, so he was trapped inside and no one could get into the country.

“In the trade, it’s called an exclusive,” Forsyth explained. “So I borrowed my host’s mobile and filed a thousand-word summing-up to London’s Daily Express, for whom I do a weekly column.”

The intensive research paid off.

Forsyth’s new thriller begins with the American president determined to smash the illegal drug trade after coming into contact with the parent of a teenager who died from a drug overdose. The president decides to use a retired CIA officer known as “the Cobra.”

Paul Devereaux, 70, a CIA legend in the mold of real-life CIA legends James Jesus Angleton and Cofer Black, was sent into retirement because he was too ruthless for the CIA.

Devereaux skirts American law and gives himself more authority by declaring the drug smugglers to be terrorists. He is given carte blanche to take down a truly vicious and truly successful Colombian drug cartel known as the Hermandad — the Brotherhood.

The chief of the Brotherhood is Don Diego Estaban, an educated, cultured and aristocratic Colombian. By force of personality, Estaban was able to forge the other major cocaine warlords into a single and all-powerful syndicate.

To assist him in the battle with the Brotherhood Devereaux hires as his number two, Cal Dexter, a former Vietnam “tunnel rat” and bounty hunter known as the “Avenger.” Devereaux and Dexter both appeared in Forsyth’s previous novels The Afghan and The Avenger.

Devereaux and Dexter bring in Navy SEALs, the British Special Boat Service (SBS), and other specialized military units to stop the flow of the cocaine into Europe and the United States.

Dexter has the British and American naval special operations teams placed on converted merchant vessels that can track, isolate and sink the ships that are carrying smuggled cocaine. The teams place the crews and the cocaine cargoes in secret locations. Dexter also recruits a pilot who flies a British Blackburn Buccaneer and shoots down aircraft carrying drug shipments.

The Brotherhood are aware that their drug shipments are not reaching their destinations, but how, and who, are the questions the drug lords want answers to. Being violent and paranoid, they turn on each other.

”So if you’re interested, dear reader,” Forsyth wrote in Behind the Story. “It’s all in The Cobra. The dives of Cartagena, the U.S. Navy SEALs, their British equivalents, the SBS, the Global Predator UAVs, oh, and dear old Guinea-Bissau."

“And it’s all true. Well, okay, it’s not all true, it’s a novel,” Forsyth stated. “But it’s accurate.”

If you like fast-paced and fact-based thrillers, as I do, then I highly recommend Frederick Forsyth’s The Cobra.