WASHINGTON — One war appears to be going well for the United States and its allies these days: the drug war. The availability of all major illegal drugs except Afghan heroin is flat or down, according to newly released global figures. So is drug use in the United States, the world’s leading consumer. And drug seizures are up sharply. No one’s saying the world’s drug problem is solved, only that it’s contained for now. ‘We seem to have reached a point where the world drug situation has stabilized and been brought under control,’ Antonio Maria Costa, the executive director of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, based in Vienna, Austria, wrote in an analysis of world drug trends that was released last week. Some experts chide Costa as reading too much into admittedly small fluctuations in short-term supply and ignoring grimmer long-term forecasts. But U.S. drug czar John Walters, the director of the White House Office of Narcotics and Drug Control Policy, shares his optimism. After years of global criticism for its gluttonous appetite for drugs, Walters said in a recent interview, ‘The U.S. is now being looked on favorably as an example of […]