I’ve been thinking about homeland security. I read about a bust at Kennedy Airport of twenty people who had been successfully smuggling drugs for decades.

My main concern was that these twenty people may have been discovered by some arm of the Homeland Security Agency. I hope it was accidental.

I have since checked and I find that the Homeland Security Agency has a department concerned with “counter narcotics” but Homeland Security hasn’t subsumed the Drug Enforcement Agency. The DEA is still independent.

This is good news.

Someone wise or someone politically powerful seems to have kept the DEA out of Homeland Security. Puritanism usually wants to lump drug interdiction with terrorist interdiction. Such a combination would be bad.

My reasoning is very simple. I can buy cocaine any day of the week, and heroin users can buy heroin any day. We know that commerce will successfully bring drugs across international borders everyday of every year indefinitely into the future. No DEA will stop, or slow down the relentless power of commerce.

The open channels of drugs coming into the U.S. could be effectively used by terrorists only if the U.S. government gave both groups, drug smugglers and terrorists, a reason for working together, like putting the Homeland Security Agency in charge of the DEA.

Fortunately the Homeland Security and DEA agencies are not merged and the drug smugglers who deal with big money are not likely to have an interest in the small time terrorist smugglers.