Security & Strategic Review - July 2005

Merging the two US 'wars' - against drugs and against terrorism - as Washington has formally done after September 2001 might prove a self-defeating proposition. This is the contention of a US scholar, Steven Taylor, who argues that one of the stated aims of the war against drugs, to drive up the price of narcotics so as to discourage users, actually encourages the use of the drugs trade to fund terrorism. 'The cultivation of illicit crops used to produce illegal drugs,' he says, 'may be unrivalled as a ready-made source of funding for terrorist activities.'