In your main leader and your briefing on drug wars you focus on solutions rather than causes of the global problem (“How to Stop the Drug Wars” and “On the Trail of the Traffickers,” March 7, 2009). Perhaps this is as it should be, except for one of the potential causes you do not mention even in passing: political warfare. Not so long ago it was perfectly respectable to argue that drugs were part of a Communist plot. In his well-received Red Cocaine: The Drugging of America (Atlanta, Georgia: Clarion House, 1990), Joseph D. Douglass Junior offers evidence tying China, the Soviet Union, and their surrogates, including Czechoslovakia and Cuba, into international narcotics trafficking against the west in general and the United States in particular. Now, I am not suggesting that such plots were as successful as Douglass and others argued two decades ago, but it is hard to dismiss the evidence that they existed. What about today, though? Can we believe that drugs are no longer part of political warfare?