More drug war fun:
Coca cultivation is surging once again in this country’s remote tropical valleys, part of a major repositioning of the Andean drug trade that is making Peru a contender to surpass Colombia as the world’s largest exporter of cocaine.
Mexican and Colombian drug trafficking rings are expanding their reach in Peru, where two factions of Shining Path guerrillas are already competing for control of the cocaine trade.
The traffickers — fortified by the resilient demand for cocaine in the United States, Brazil and parts of Europe — are stymieing efforts to combat the drug’s resurgence here and raising the specter of greater violence in a nation still haunted by years of war.
“The struggle against coca can resemble detaining the wind,” said Gen. Juan Zárate, who leads the country’s coca eradication campaigns.
Maybe they’ll find some lithium so we have an excuse to keep this up for another decade. Is this the same kind of lithium we give out for depression, btw? Because we might need a supply of that if we actually start looking at our drug war and overall foreign policies.
MattF
Ah, Peru. The Shining Path, the “white people kill colored people for their body fat” legend. Good times.
cleek
yup. that’s the one.
it used to be an ingredient in 7 Up, aka. “Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda”.
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
Cocaine is a hell of a drug.
You can’t really use cocaine for the long-term treatment of depression because once you run out you’re in big trouble.
Daddy-O
Lithium…just what I need.
That’s what President Morales thinks, too.
The Dangerman
…and, when you get down to it, a large part of our drug war is protectionist, so that people will stay hooked on tobacco…
…and our energy policy is governed by the fact that if you say anything bad about coal, you lose those regions, too (and I’m comparing energy to a drug, too, because I need my monster HDTV fix, dammit).
Ergo, our drug policy is fucked, our foreign policy is fucked, and our domestic policy is fucked.
So, give me an extra large shot of Lithium soda, please.
licensed to kill time
@cleek:
Hunh. I did not know that. Why can’t they put the cocaine back in Coca-Cola and the laudanum back in over the counter patent medicines and let us buy it the old-fashioned way, from our friendly pfarmacist, dammit!
Daddy-O
@J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford: Not to get too technical, but I think the pleasure centers in your brain start to melt long before the supply of cocaine is exhausted.
They got plenty. Money’s the real problem. If you have too much and your access to that coke is unlimited, that’s the REAL problem.
sukabi
yes, John it is… btw, a shrink once told my brother (he’s bipolar) that if he lived in Texas he would be better off because there was a lot of lithium in the ground and it made it into the water… I laughed at his stupidity, because my ex-husband and I lived down there for years, and it didn’t stop my ex from going batshit crazy…
Hiram Taine
There is no policy more bipartisan than the drug war, it is supported almost to a man by both parties, the only dissenters are clearly insane, Kookinich and Paultard.
It will never end, even on very liberal sites there is a great deal of support for certain aspects of the drug war..
Think of the children, eh?
Face
That’s almost certainly going to read “The late General Juan Zarate……” in about 2 months.
burnspbesq
As long as there is demand, there will be supply. Adam Smith, bitchez.
Tonal Crow
The War on Drugs is America’s drug of choice. Too bad it eats our liberty, rots our brains, debases our politics, inflates our welfare rolls, and drains our treasury. Other than that, it’s a huge success.
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
@The Dangerman:
If you’re a smoker nothing will keep you smoking more than cocaine. One after another, all night long. Smoking is pretty much the only thing you’ll be able to keep up.
jharp
@J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford:
It is pretty easy to keep up the drinking as well.
El Cid
What we need is not to reduce the $18 or so billion dollar market in the U.S. which is destroying societies throughout Latin America [i.e., a switch like Portugal to treatment and decriminalization, causing lower use rates], but simply pay more to counter-insurgency and spraying in Colombia, bitching about how leftist governments aren’t following Peru in crushing and spraying the peasantry instead of finding new market uses for coca and how Venezuela isn’t cooperating enough with the DEA, etc., and have a better armed border.
LikeableInMyOwnWay
Lithium carbonate is found in nature, and it is the same compound that is used as a drug. It’s the most commonly mined source of lithium … The vast Chile lithium stores, now being extracted, are taken in the form of lithium carbonate in liquid, brine, form.
As I mentioned on another thread, Chile was named the Saudi Arabia of Lithium just two years ago, before the pentagon and NYT decided to cook up the horseshit Afghanistan mineral story last week.
wengler
Coca cultivation has been a part of Andean culture for thousands of years. The cocaine trade-and the response against it-has been disastrous for the people of these countries.
We really need to find a way to manufacture cocaine here and leave these people alone.
The Main Gauche of Mild Reason
Shrill blogger is shrill.
scav
This good economic indicator should perk up the market — the upper classes are spending again! The recession is over!
Patriot 3
@LikeableInMyOwnWay: We all need lithium now…http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUsyF8E2qd4&feature=related
Ivan Ivanovich Renko
The worst thing about the drug war (well, other than that kicking down doors and shooting pets in the middle of the night part) is that prohibition mitigates toward more and more concentrated forms of the drug– whatever that drug happens to be.
During alcohol prohibition, beer pretty much disappeared– it was a lot easier to move ‘shine or run rum or sail whisky across the Great Lakes. Cocaine– and “crack”– are the direct byproducts of this process; as is heroin.
Meh. Pass me that lithium pipe, willya?
Senyordave
Sometimes I retreat into my fantasy world, where we have a sane social policy regarding drugs. Where we realize that alcohol is a drug that causes far more direct harm than marajuana, and that almost all the indirect harm that marajuan causes is because we have an insane war on drugs.
Then I come back to reality, and an endless supply of politicans who are going to show how tough they are by locking up some 19-year old for three years for having more than 100 grams of pot.
wmd
We could halve the cocaine problem by stopping Wall Street bonuses.
just sayin’
MikeJ
So even when Kerlikowske explicitly calls for an “end to the war on drugs” we can still say that all politicians from both parties are evil and stupid.
arguingwithsignposts
If only there were some way we could turn coca into a renewable energy source. Cocanol, bitchez!
Joseph Nobles
Peru was devastated by earthquakes recently. The drug lords saw a great opportunity and moved in. Kind of like multinationals looking at America under the Bush Administration.
licensed to kill time
@arguingwithsignposts:
“I want to say one word to you, Benjamin. Just one word….Hemp!”
Lurking Canadian
@arguingwithsignposts: Yeah, but then we’d have too many people burning their lips trying to suck on your tailpipe when you’re stopped at a red light.
Brachiator
@Ivan Ivanovich Renko:
Not quite (maybe). Some historians claim that in some major cities, beer could still be found.
A 1931 Time Magazine article refers to “the Capone beer syndicate.” However, I take your larger point. A 1991 analysis of the failure of Prohibition notes:
As nonsense about the war on drug percolates up again, let me throw in another recommendation for Daniel Okrent’s great book about Prohibition, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition . Makes for great summer reading (but I’ve heard that pictures and charts don’t come out well in the Kindle edition).
cervantes
Lithium is an element. There is only one kind of lithium per se, but it is in a different chemical form in drugs and batteries. The quantity needed for bipolar disorder is so small that it’s not an issue, however. The big bucks in lithium mining is in batteries.
jl
I think we should all be very glad that there is ‘resilient demand’ for something, any damn thing, in the United States right now.
Ring up Bernanke, tell him jack up those interest rates pronto. Things is booming!
But, I thought some other Andean country was the most recent new Saudi Arabia of lithium. Bolivia? Ecuador?
Lithium, the guano of the brave new century. Hurrah!
A couple of decades or so after the civil strife in Afghanistan subsides (excuse the dhimmitude, I meant, after the US crushes the evil insurgents, whoever they are, like bugs slamming into a windshield,), brigades of Chinese and European engineers will be flown in, surrounded by armed guards, to devise gigantic open pit mines, to suck money out of the ground and stuff into the pockets of corrupt Afghan official and international mega-rich corporations. And, it will all have been worth it.
Some commie losers might think it better to figure out who the insurgents are, and strike a deal with most of them, and then invest some dough so in ten years some crumbum Afghan farmer can make a buck by selling some stinking dried peaches or something to other crumbums. Hell with that. That’s small change for chumps, and probably communist.
This is good news for Republicans.
Seriously, though, I read that most of the results of the recent Afghan mineral surveys have been very publicly available on gummint websites for over a year. So is this an attempted DoD PR operation?
There was a time long long ago when stories about the looming tungsten (or molybdenum, or manganese, or unobtanium, or the shaving cream atom) shortage, and how this meant that the US should move heaven and earth to buy off some miserable hellhole being hellholed by some miserable military dictator to be our ally. Or why we needed to back of South African apartheid. Or some such thing.
If this is a DoD PR stunt, must of found some gnarly old guy with a crew cut, short sleeve white shirt, pocket protector and slide rule who had been locked up in his office since the 1980s to cook it up.
Maybe they figured they could get some earthnik Apple fanatics on board the war effort. “Do you know what they use lithium for, you naive little squirt? Batteries! Yes, that’s right, batteries!”
wenchacha
I wish we could just get people to chew on plain coca leaves, like everybody used to do. I saw a Lonely Planet episode where Ian chomped on some leaves and just got a mild buzz and a numb mouth.
Sheeeeit, can you imagine the marketing of coca leaves as a new weight-loss program? “You’ll have energy to burn! Never feel hungry again!” And all of it without the obnoxiousness that is part and parcel of powdered cocaine usage.
Like many things, the processing of a natural substance that was not very harmful turned it into the devil’s candy. Now I will go for my afternoon caffeine pill break. How many should I pop?
trevorb
@sukabi: This was actually how lithium as a an anti-depressant was discovered,they showed that places that have high lithium in ground water have fewer bipolar patients.
Comrade Colette Collaboratrice
All of these problems will be solved when lithium is once again available on credit.
sukabi
@trevorb: they obviously haven’t been to Texas… on the other hand, if there wasn’t the concentration of lithium in the water, would the crazy be increased by a factor of 10?
Keith G
Oouuh, maybe its time to bring back disco.
ManyMost of you will not remember disco….middlewest
Don’t worry! Soon our police forces will have access to predator drones, and we’ll win the drug war once and for all.
Paris
Shining Path? Really? Commies? What century is this? Are you sure they haven’t converted to Islam?
El Cid
@middlewest: Finally — we can take out black children and elderly people at the wrong addresses from the skies! That way no cop can be sued!
Lysana
@<a href="#
comment-1829622″>Keith G:How young do you think the commenters here are?
Hiram Taine
@Keith G:
If you can remember disco, you weren’t there..
Hiram Taine
@MikeJ:
As far as I can tell that’s not what he said..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gil_Kerlikowske
MTiffany
@sukabi: Yeah, what those all-knowing faruds fail to tell you is that if you’re not bipolar, a good dose of lithium for a prolonged period of time will MAKE you bipolar. Which in a way explains a lot about Texas. It really is in the water!
Comrade Dread
But this just proves were winning the war and they’re on the run from Columbia, right?
johnny walker
Lithium is used as a mood stabilizer to prevent bipolar/manic depressive people such as myself from having so many mood swings. (In my experience it’s bad at this but makes up with a particular talent for at making you thirsty & drowsy)
It is not in fact an antidepressant, so don’t go chugging it down if you’re bummed out unless you want to stay that way.