Inge Fryklund talks about U.S. soldiers caught in Afghanistan’s poppy wars
As a Chicago prosecutor in the 1980s, Inge Fryklund witnessed drug prohibition play out in the American courtroom. Decades later, as an adviser to U.S. military deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan, she learned how the poppy trade in Afghanistan was complicating U.S. counterterrorism efforts and fueling the insurgency.
Her experiences led her to become one of Oregon’s fiercest drug prohibition adversaries — and she’s not the only person who’s worked in law enforcement to come out in favor of across-the-board legalization.
After returning from an assignment in Afghanistan in 2013, she joined a group called Law Enforcement Against Prohibition and now sits on its board of directors.
LEAP was founded in 2002 by five police officers in Medford, Mass., who, after a lifetime of police work, concluded the war on drugs was causing more harm than good.
Today, LEAP has more than 150,000 members in 127 countries.
“Almost all of us are former law enforcement,” Fryklund said. “Former prosecutors, judges, police, probation officers who have seen the war on drugs close up and personal and have concluded that the downsides simply outweigh any positive benefits.”
The group is not in favor of drugs but advocates for a system of legalization and regulation that it believes will end drug-related violence, reduce crime rates, keep children safer, reduce addiction and use tax dollars more efficiently.
When Fryklund’s not advising U.S. troops overseas as one of the world’s foremost experts on Afghan governmental systems , she’s advocating for drug legalization in the U.S. Her commentary appears in various online publications such as The Huffington Post , and she travels the state, giving lectures and testifying in favor of legalization. During the campaign for Oregon’s Measure 91, she played an integral role and was a featured panelist in a televised debate at Portland State University’s Lincoln Hall in October.
Fryklund spoke with Street Roots earlier this month from her home in Bend about illegal poppy production in Afghanistan, the militarization of U.S. police and the disproportionate cycling of minority groups through the U.S. justice system.
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Emily Green: Tell me about how you first got involved in the war on drugs. What was your perspective on illegal drug use at that time?
Inge Fryklund: This goes back to around 1984 when I became an assistant state’s attorney, which is another term for district attorney, in the office of Cook County (Chicago). I worked night bond court a lot, and during that time, my thinking was, “Drugs are bad. These people were using drugs, so — so much for them.”
When you’re in a high-volume courtroom, you keep moving things along as fast as possible. But there were things I noticed that sank in over time. One of them was that the population of people coming through the bond courts, most of them on minor drug cases, was disproportionately black — some Hispanic, almost no white. The statistics are that the profile of drug use across races is very similar. But here, it looked as though the criminal justice system was coming down a lot heavier on the minority population. Second, I saw an awful lot of repeat customers coming through the bond courts. People get arrested, they bond out, serve a few days, back on the streets, and then they show up again next week, or they’re in on some minor theft charge. So there was this continual churning. Also, when I would look at the rap sheets, you might get a couple of pages of arrests and some convictions, much of it drug related, and I knew that these people were never going to get a job in the legitimate economy, having that on their records. So part of what we were accomplishing through all of these arrests and convictions was cycling people back into the drug economy; that was really the only career path open to them. And this settled in my memory over time: “Why are we doing this? We’re doing the same thing. They’re doing the same thing. Nothing changes.”
A year or so after that assignment, I was assigned to spend the summer in the domestic violence court. We could have closed the court if it hadn’t been for alcohol. That’s what was driving most of the family violence. There was very little nexus between drug use and domestic violence.
Chicago’s the poster child for what happens when something illegal is in high demand: prohibition of alcohol in the Al Capone years. Alcohol is a substance with problems, but when we tried making it illegal, the whole thing was worse. I began to think drugs — yes, there’s some problems with usage, but the fact that it’s illegal is what’s creating the violence, the gangs shooting each other over drug turf, the murders, the stray civilians getting accidently killed in the middle of all this mayhem, and it was helping to foster an underclass, of mostly men, who had no other real options.
As years went by, I was reading more about the effects of incarceration – what does it do to children to have a father not in the picture? He’s either unmarriageable because he’s got no income, or even if he is married to the mother of the children, if he’s off in jail, here’s the child without a father in the household, so there’s all kinds of social pathologies. It all just seemed to come back to drugs.
E.G.: Can you talk about poppy production in Afghanistan today and how it fits into the global drug supply chain?
I.F.: Prior to about 1980, there was very little poppy production in Afghanistan; it was mostly in what’s called the Golden Triangle, Burma, Thailand. Mostly through U.S. efforts and some economic development, production of poppy was pushed out of there. The supply may have been pushed, but the worldwide demand did not change. Simultaneously, the Russians invaded Afghanistan, and with the social breakdown and lack of government during all those war years, and a pretty good climate for growing poppy, all the production moved over to Afghanistan.
In 2000, the Taliban prohibited poppy growing, and that sure enough stopped it, because I think they cut off heads. In retrospect, it looks like what they were doing was stockpiling and cornering the market, which made more profit for them. Then in 2001, the U.S. comes in. Afghans thought there was finally going to be some peace and quiet and economic development. We, maybe with good intentions but misguidedly, brought a lot of the warlords who had been fighting in the 1990s back into government. I think the general population hoped that they would all be gone, but we brought them back in because they caught on real quick that all they had to do was say, “We’ll fight al-Qaeda for you.”
Governance fairly quickly started falling apart again, and all this time the worldwide demand for heroin poppy continued. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime statistics, figures from 2009 , was that the worldwide ultimate street value of what came out of Afghanistan was about $60 billion, and when there’s money like that, people are going to get in the business. As breakdown in governance in Afghanistan continued over the last decade, with little economic development, poppy is a cash crop for many farmers. They grow wheat to eat and poppy for the local savings account.
We made some haphazard efforts to eradicate poppy, and the Taliban has stepped up to protect farmers. They also reportedly tax the poppy trade about 10 percent. As governance is deteriorated and the insurgency has grown, the cycle has kind of fed on itself. And heroin poppy is a piece of it, although relatively little of the profits stay inside Afghanistan. And with something illegal — partly because we’re there and we insisted it be illegal — it’s led to a great deal of governmental corruption. I remember 2011-12, I was working in southwestern Afghanistan along with the (U.S.) Marine Corps, and what I heard from the Marines is that local Afghans were paying $150,000 a year to buy the position of local chief of police. So illegality was driving governmental corruption and crime in Afghanistan and helping to fuel this whole insurgency.
E.G.: What effect is U.S. drug policy having on its counterterrorism efforts?
I.F.: I think it’s making things more complicated. There are a number of myths about this. One is that the poppy trade is what funds terrorism. When I was with the Marine Corps, I kept asking people, “What does it cost for the insurgency to stay in business?” The highest estimate I ever got was about $350 million a year. This is peanuts. We’re spending billions. The insurgents don’t have much equipment. They’re all carrying their own AK-47s, mostly not in uniforms, a lot of them don’t even have boots; they’re wearing flip-flops. So it’s a low-budget operation, and yes, they get money locally wherever they can get it, and since poppy is the main cash crop and the word on the street seems to be very consistent that they’re taxing it 10 percent, there is some funding of the insurgency. But if there were no poppy, I think the insurgency would do just fine.
There is so much money that goes to the insurgents coming out of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia – there’s plenty of international money. But the drug trade undermines governance. Afghan citizens seem to be quite well aware of all this. They know that local police chiefs are buying their position, and on the street level, police are, in turn, extorting citizens at checkpoints. I don’t know how many different times I saw a report of Afghans saying, “Gee, it was really nice of the Americans to build this road for us, but we can’t drive on it because the police have put up these road blocks and extort us, and we have no idea how much money we’re going to have to pay. At least the Taliban were pretty reliable at 10 percent.”
The insurgency is not so much a direct result of the drug trade as the drug trade is driving failures of governance, which in turn are driving a lot of the anti-government insurgency.
E.G.: Are we seeing the kind of drug-related violence from cartels in Afghanistan that we’re seeing in Mexico and Central America?
I.F.: No, because the trade is different. The poppy’s produced by a lot of individual farmers. Representatives of local drug trade pick up the product from the farmers, bundle it; a lot of it goes out through Pakistan, some goes the northern route through Tajikistan and into Russia, which is one of the big customers. But it’s mostly moved by local tribesman.
It reminded me so much of Chicago drug gangs. Here’s the Afghan network, and we were literally mapping these things out when I was with the Marines. They’re fighting over a couple square miles of territory, so they were simply defending their drug turf. The term “insurgents” or “Taliban” gets used as a generic (designation) for people with a whole lot of different reasons for fighting.
From their perspective, this is simply trade. They* were importing Toyota parts and exporting heroin poppy. They had nothing against the Americans. Their only political agenda was their own independence. This was a business, and it was well enough organized, except for these small local networks fighting over the territory. There weren’t the cartel problems. Now once the product left Afghanistan, I don’t know how much violence there was connected with that.
*Editor's note: Fryklund clarified it is members of the Baloch ethnic group moving Toyota parts in and drugs out; other Afghanis handle collection and transit within their own turf.
E.G.: To your knowledge, have we lost any American service members to conflict that rose out drug turf disputes or anything like that?
I.F.: During the six months I was in Helmand (Afghanistan’s largest opium-producing region) with the Marines, I was going to two or three ramp ceremonies a week as bodies were being sent home — people who had been killed in fighting around there. And as near as I could tell, most of the local tribesmen had no interest in the U.S. one way or the other. We’re on the other side of the world, and they didn’t care. But they were fighting with each other. If we decided that they were insurgents and started to clear an area out, and people were tenaciously holding onto their drug territory, yeah, that’s how we got casualties. It’s hard to point to any particular death and say, “This one is due to the war on drugs,” but if we weren’t there, getting into the middle of their turf wars, and if our policies did not promote this massive corruption within the ministry of the interior, people would not be having an insurgency against their own government. So I am quite sure there were deaths of American service members in Afghanistan that would not have happened had it not been for the war on drugs.
E.G.: How much Afghan heroin makes it to the United States?
I.F.: It’s coming more from South America, along with the cocaine. The violence we see there is cartels fighting each other. And boy, every time somebody like El Chapo Guzmán gets locked up, it’s just piggy move-up within the organization. People are fighting each other for who’s going to come out on top.
A lot of the violence we see in Mexican cartels and Chicago street gangs is due to gang and cartel members fighting for dominance. I learned back in the 1980s in Chicago that a drop in the violence may be nothing to cheer about. It usually meant that one larger gang had established dominance — probably more dangerous, as they then had more muscle to extort locals.
The violence in Mexico is out of control. If this were happening outside suburban Portland or Washington, D.C., I think we’d change our drug laws real fast. One of the papers I wrote several years ago, on the reason drug illegality has hung on as long as it has in the U.S., is that most of the violence and corruption is outside the U.S. It’s in the transit countries and the producer countries.
I personally think there’s a real moral question about us insisting Mexico keep drugs illegal, while their stuff is simply supplying our market. It undercuts their democracy. Their citizens cannot vote and say, “Hey, enough of this! Let’s stop the illegality” because (of) the foreign aid that we offer and our military assistance. We’ve got a big club to hang over them. That undercutting democracy around the world — in Afghanistan and Mexico, Central America — I think is another of the big damages caused by the war on drugs that people in the U.S. mostly don’t think about.
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E.G.: Why aren’t more police officers, who see some of the same aspects of the drug war that you’ve seen, in favor of ending prohibition? Are they afraid they’ll lose their jobs?
I.F.: Police departments are benefiting from the war on drugs. For example, the federal 1033 Program , which is the Pentagon giving surplus military equipment to local law enforcements specifically authorized to fight the war on drugs. And they added the war on terrorism more recently, but there isn’t that much terrorism going on in Oregon, or anywhere else domestically for that matter, so it’s the drugs. And police departments are getting equipment that I’d previously seen only in Iraq — MRAP, these mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles; it’s like a tank.
And what’s become of community policing, Officer Friendly? Instead, some of those pictures coming out of Ferguson, Mo. – people weren’t that geared up when they were driving around in Afghanistan, and there’s something wrong when our police are taking this “us-them” view toward the local population. There’s no excuse for this sort of equipment. A lot of it is used for serving drug warrants. Instead of just quietly going up to somebody’s house, we’re going to knock the door down. And if you’ve read stuff by Radley Balko , the number of people injured and killed by police trying to serve drug warrants and getting the wrong house, this is contributing to police militarization and lack of trust between police and local populations.
E.G.: Do you think you’ll see the end of drug prohibition in your lifetime?
I.F.: Oh yeah. As far as marijuana goes, I would bet that in 10 years’ time, we are going to look back on this and think, “What in the world were we thinking?” And given that there is a worldwide movement, especially led by Europe, to address some of the harder drugs, I think that’s going to come too. We’re moving in that direction, and it looks to me like in the past couple of years, there’s been quite a sea change. We see that in Washington and Colorado, the sky did not fall. Now we’ve got Alaska and Oregon about to go into production. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, teen use has not increased any place where it’s been legalized, so saying the kids are going to get into it is counterfactual. Highway accidents are not up in Colorado. We’re getting to almost a critical mass of evidence and experience, and people are going to calm down about this.
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