>How do you define what involvement means? To me >even taxing or protecting the producers makes >you part of the process and therefore equally >culpable as the man who smuggles it over the >border.

That, indeed is the central question.

When I look at who is responsible for the growing epidemic of tobacco addiction among children in Asia and Africa, I look to the multinational companies who are responsible for producing and exporting ciggarettes, and the banks and investors that finance them -- not to the tobacco farmers in Kentucky and North Carolina or the local governments that tax them to provide revenues for their schools.  Yes, theoretically tobacco farmers could choose to stop growing tobacco -- but that's not really a viable option when farms are going under and manufacturing jobs are vanishing and you can't support a family at the few McJobs left in the service sector in rural North America.   The corporations create and cultivate the demand, and conspire to continue to the supply on a massive level, so I hold them accountable.

I also don't blame the tobacco plant, which I've found has quite beautiful ceremonial uses -- smoking unadulterated tobacco to welcome the stones and offer prayers during a sweat lodge is quite different from going through a pack of Marlboros.

Nor do I blame the convenience store owner who sells packs of cigarettes to the people in his neighborhood who the tobacco companies have already hooked.

By the same token, I don't blame the coca farmers for cocaine trafficking -- I blame the organizations that produce, export, and distribute cocaine and the banks and land owners and corporations that finance the operations and launder the money.   To some extent I also blame the chemical companies that made a decision to get involved in a large scale in supplying certain petrochemicals in mass quantities to cocaine traffickers -- they are making their economic calculations at a macro level.

And so while I consider "taxing" coca farmers to be thuggish, I don't see it as involvement in cocaine trafficking.

As for the sources you cite, I too have a degree of respect for the BBC (as long as they aren't reporting on Britain's occupied territories in Ireland.)   The Council on Foreign Relations is pretty much a non-profit arm of the State Department in my mind.  As for GlobalSecurity.org, John Pike to me is the best source out there on the technical aspects of weapons systems and arms control, but has a tendency to accept State Department bullshit hook, line, and sinker when it comes to global political issues.   And the Dayton Model UN seems just to be rehashing ONDCP and State Department documents.

As for the massacre at Bojaya, I agree that it was an atrocity, and that the FARC had no business firing gas canister bombs in an area filled with civilians.  But I think it comes down to a question of intent.  The FARC was aiming for the police station and was willing to take the risk that they would miss their "military target" and kill the people they claimed to be protecting in the process.   The AUC on the other hand consciously sets out to target the civilian population and to force people off their land.  Both are evil, but the latter seems a far greater evil to me.