Drugs and Terrorism

The link between drugs and terrorism has been examined through a variety of lenses and, depending on one's perspective, the nature of this complex relationship can vary substantially. Most notably, politics has proven to be an influential factor in how the relationship between criminal organizations is understood and portrayed.

Tracing the American wars on crime, drugs, and terrorism, criminologist Gary LaFree has highlighted the role of presidential politics in shaping societal attitudes toward these three issues. After President Nixon's declaration of “war” on crime in his 1970 State of the Union Address, he carried the war metaphor to a second front by declaring drugs as “public enemy number one.” The public visibility of the “War on Drugs” was elevated under President Ronald Reagan through his creation of the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP). Under President Bill Clinton's Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, penalties for drug trafficking and violent crime were enhanced with an appreciation of the interrelated nature of these two problems. Most recently, the “third war” was formally declared by President George W. Bush on September 20, 2001, in a nationally televised speech to Congress in which he declared a “War on Terror” in response to the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Since 2001, the boundaries between these three distinct wars have dissipated. In particular, the war on terror has evolved in such a way that reflects a conviction that narcotics trafficking plays a central role in funding terrorism. Taken to its extreme, the Bush administration's ONDCP spent tens of millions of dollars on a year-long series of highly controversial public service announcements (PSAs), including a $3 million television advertisement aired during the 2002 Super Bowl, portraying drug users as terrorist financiers. Central to the ONDCP's approach, the association between drugs and terrorism was portrayed as a direct one-to-one correlation; if you buy and use illegal drugs, you are funding terrorists like those who carried out the 9/11 attacks. While this series of PSAs oversimplified the association between drugs and terror and was widely viewed as a failure, subsequent efforts have laid out a more nuanced association between these criminal enterprises.

Notably, Mark Kleiman proposed five mechanisms through which drug trafficking can potentially promote terrorism: (1) supplying cash for terrorist organizations; (2) creating chaos and instability in countries involved in the drug trade to create a conducive environment for terrorism to flourish; (3) generating corruption in law enforcement, military, and other government institutions and intimidating other members of the society from speaking out against terrorist activities; (4) creating cover and common infrastructures between drug traffickers and terrorist groups; and (5) generating competition for the finite amount of law enforcement resources and intelligence attention. According to Kleiman, an appreciation of these mechanisms is important in order to intervene [Page 255]effectively at a systemic level while simultaneously understanding that there are times when the interests of ideology-driven terrorists and money-driven drug traffickers will diverge.

Expanding on the potential divergence between drug trafficking and terrorism, recent writers have expressed skepticism of the government's portrayal of the extent of the connections between these criminal enterprises given their distinct aims. For example, Alex Schmid argues that the conflation of the war on terror and the war on drugs does a disservice to both. In support of his skepticism regarding the nature and extent of the relationship between drug traffickers and terrorist organizations, he points to several key differences between these criminal organizations that should deter collaboration.

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