The Power of the Dog (Power of the Dog, #1)

by Don Winslow

Now there’s a tasty irony, Keller thinks—Air America boys who once flew heroin for Thai warlords now spray defoliants on Mexican opium.

Yeah, Art thinks, it’s a Mexican operation. We Americans are just down here as “advisers.” Like Vietnam. Just with different ball caps.

All Third World slums are the same, Art thinks—the same mud or dust, depending on the climate and the season, the same smells of charcoal stoves and open sewers, the same heartbreakingly monotonous scenery of malnourished kids with distended bellies and big eyes.

That the hardest thing in the world isn’t to refrain from committing an evil, it’s to stand up and stop one.

The Americans take a product that literally grows on trees and turn it into a valuable commodity. Without them, cocaine and marijuana would be like oranges, and instead of making billions smuggling it, I’d be making pennies doing stoop labor in some California field, picking it.

“We came to you,” Javier says, “because we thought that if you could see the truth, you would go home and tell it. The people in America—if they knew the truth . . . they would not send their money and their soldiers to do this.”

Billions of dollars, trying unsuccessfully to keep drugs out of the world’s most porous border? One-tenth of the anti-drug budget going into education and treatment, nine-tenths of those billions into interdiction? And not enough money from anywhere going into the root causes of the drug problem itself.

And the billions spent keeping drug offenders locked up in prison, the cells now so crowded we have to give early release to murderers. Not to mention the fact that two-thirds of all the “non-drug” offenses in America are committed by people high on dope or alcohol.