Firstly, I came upon this thread in search of conversations pertaining to insurgency and gangs. Coming from the thread titled "Commonalities and lessons learned between gangs and insurgencies"...

My thought was to find some leads as I try to compile reports, etc on possible lessons for COIN from anti-gang efforts. It has been really thought provoking to see a thread essentially going the other way and looking at how to bring COIN lessons to anti-gang efforts. Upshot for me...clearly many people who know better than I think there is sufficient commonality and potential for lessons learned, so I'm going to keep looking into this...any help is always appreciated, btw. Meantime, I'm going to follow some of the leads mentioned in this thread and read reports linked or referred to...

With regards to the questions surrounding the war on drugs, what has really happened in Colombia, etc, I thought the recent Economist has some pretty interesting stuff. (They contend COIN victory in Colombia, failure at anti-drug goal.) I don't have a dog in this fight, or perhaps more accurately I'm gonna keep my dog out of the fight. But the contention that many of the problems discussed here in this thread get fixed by starting with legalizing drugs...it is an idea seemingly dismissed out of hand. Is that a good thing?

Failed states and failed policies: How to stop the drug wars
from The Economist: Full print edition

Prohibition has failed; legalisation is the least bad solution

A HUNDRED years ago a group of foreign diplomats gathered in Shanghai for the first-ever international effort to ban trade in a narcotic drug. On February 26th 1909 they agreed to set up the International Opium Commission—just a few decades after Britain had fought a war with China to assert its right to peddle the stuff. Many other bans of mood-altering drugs have followed. In 1998 the UN General Assembly committed member countries to achieving a “drug-free world” and to “eliminating or significantly reducing” the production of opium, cocaine and cannabis by 2008.

That is the kind of promise politicians love to make. It assuages the sense of moral panic that has been the handmaiden of prohibition for a century. It is intended to reassure the parents of teenagers across the world. Yet it is a hugely irresponsible promise, because it cannot be fulfilled. ...