During the recent war against Israel, Hezbollah used night vision equipment which had been supplied by Iran, as detailed in a new article by the Jewish Institute of National Security Affairs. Iran had obtained the equipment from the United Kingdom to "bolster Iranian efforts to combat heroin smuggling across the Afghan border as part of the UN Drug Control Program." The U.K. was extremely foolish to expect the Iranian tyrants to keep their promises not to divert the equipment to military use.

This is far from the only example of how excessive zeal in the drug war undermines the national security interest of democracies. A similar problem is evident in Latin America, as Mike Krause and I wrote in "A Foreign Policy Disaster," a chapter in the book The New Prohibition: Voices of Dissent Challenge the Drug War (Accurate Press, 2004).