If you've ever doubted that the drug war is a struggle between clumsy statists and criminal capitalists--and that the capitalists are winning - you might want to take a look at this article from the July issue of Business 2.0, "The Technology Secrets of Cocaine, Inc." As it recounts, in 1994 the DEA discovered that Colombian cocaine distributors had obtained the entire call-log from the phone company in the city of Cali, Columbia. The Cali cartel used data-mining software and a high-powered computer to determine who in their organization was in contact with the authorities, and eliminate them. Since that time, the Columbian drug cartels have only gotten more technologically sophisticated. The North Valley cartel has set up a sort of money-laundering intranet trading platform that renders their profits untraceable. And that's not all:

The drug lords have deployed advanced communications encryption technologies that, law enforcement officials concede, are all but unbreakable. They use the Web to camouflage the movement of dirty money. They track the radar sweeps of drug surveillance planes to map out gaps in coverage. They even use a fleet of submarines, mini-subs, and semisubmersibles to ferry drugs — sometimes, ingeniously, to larger ships hauling cargoes of hazardous waste, in which the insulated bales of cocaine are stashed. "Those ships never get a close inspection, no matter what country you're in," says John Hensley, former head of enforcement for the U.S. Customs Service. Most of the cartels' technology is American-made; many of the experts who run it are American-trained. High-tech has become the drug lords' most effective counter-weapon in the war on drugs.

Alas, the futility of this struggle hasn't deterred U.S. policymakers; waist deep in the big muddy, they continue to urge us on. In fact two battalions of US Marine Jungle Expeditionary Forces have recently received deployment orders for insertion into Colombia this coming February 2003. Here we go again...