LITTLE ROCK, AR – Arkansas Attorney General Dustin McDaniel met with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to ask Secretary Clinton to maintain funding for a program utilized by attorneys general across the country to combat drug trafficking.

McDaniel and a delegation of five other state attorneys general from the Conference of Western Attorneys General (CWAG) went to Washington to ask Clinton to commit the State Department to continued support of a CWAG initiative that provides training to Mexican judicial and law enforcement authorities engaged in fighting illegal drugs in that country.

“An essential way we as attorneys general can help to prevent international drug trafficking and the ills associated with it is by assisting other countries in their law enforcement efforts,” McDaniel said. “We’re grateful to be able to share with Secretary Clinton the success stories related to this initiative. We’re hopeful that through this visit we will be able to secure the funding to continue this program, which is helping to keep drug traffickers out of Arkansas.”

CWAG’s Alliance Partnership Program, funded by the State Department through USAID, has allowed attorneys general to provide technical assistance and legal training to Mexican authorities, who are often ill-equipped to deal with the criminal cartels that operate in their country.

Those cartels operations reach to Arkansas, where the volume of imported methamphetamine has increased, even as the number of in-state methamphetamine labs has significantly decreased as law enforcement agencies fight drugs on the homefront.

In 2008, four counties in the state were designated as High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas by the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. Those counties are Pulaski and Jefferson in central Arkansas and Washington and Benton in northwest Arkansas.

“We already have great cooperation among law enforcement officers ...