The never-ending drug war http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/43656

After 40 years, the "war on drugs" is about to become the longest continuous war in US history. In The Strength of the Pack, Douglas Valentine explains why dismantling the US$44 billion a year Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) juggernaut is unlikely to happen as long as the US attempts to maintain a world empire. This never-ending war has been a phony contest, an arm wrestle between two arms of the US state: the DEA and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Routinely, the DEA's attempts at prosecuting major traffickers in US courts have been dismissed on national security grounds, because the traffickers were CIA assets. As then-CIA director George Bush Snr explained in 1976, these cover-ups were legal under a 1954 agreement between the CIA and the Justice Department, which gave the CIA the right to block prosecutions and to keep its crimes secret — in the name of national security.