I knew you wouldn't read any post about my thesis unless I tricked you into it. Got ya!
On Friday, a few lucky interns got to tour the UNODC's drug lab. Although I'm in the counter-terrorism division, the very top floor of our building houses a laboratory where UNODC chemists assist law enforcement officials with determining whether suspected drugs are, in fact, drugs. Example: Developing country X may not be sure if a package it has intercepted is cocaine. The country then sends a sample to UNODC for testing.
The tour was pretty much like every field trip you took in elementary school, but amped up 15 levels. Remember those visits to the aquarium where you got to play with urchins and sea stars in a touch tank? The UNODC drug lab has something similar. Here are just a few of the high-profile items I was allowed to get my hands on: an opium pipe, a block of opium resin, some LSD tablets, dried poppies, hemp seeds, mescaline, and a package of hallucinogenic mushrooms.
While I should have had the time of my life on the drug tour, I nearly had a panic attack halfway through. Unlike some hard-working Fletcherites, I haven't devoted much time to thinking about my thesis since beginning my internship - a decision I'm sure I'll come to deeply regret. As most of Fletcher knows, my main academic and professional interests are in all things drug-related. So, at the very least, I've stayed up narco news even if I haven't actually written a damn thing.
Here's one exciting piece of news: The US recently announced that it's going to try a new anti-drug strategy in Afghanistan that focuses on interdiction and alternative crop development instead of eradication. Based on what the representative from the UNODC office in Afghanistan said when he was in town a few weeks ago, alternative crop development is fairly effective (see smiling child below) - although the US shouldn't count on the strategy to completely eliminate the opium market. What's interesting for me is that the one US official with whom I've talked views the US change of strategy in Afghanistan positively because it's getting closer to the Plan Colombia model. However, Plan Colombia focused heavily on aerial eradication of coca fields and, at least in the early years, military aid. Is this really what the US is doing in Afghanistan?
I decided sometime in the spring that I'd like to focus my thesis on US counternarcotics efforts globally. Maybe comparing Plan Colombia with current efforts in Afghanistan could be one way to go...
