The the war on drugs has made the US a world leader in incarceration. It
is an excuse for voter suppression.It is a disgusting political scam
that targets poor minorities, it profits police through
forfeitures, it fills private prisons which
benefit from mandatory
sentencing,
it is a counter productive jobs programs, and it scores some cheap
votes for politicians while suppressing the minority vote. It is based
on racism, It is an evil program that takes
massive resources that might have been used for a civilized society.
... the war that America has been waging for the last 100 years against the use of drugs deemed to be illegal.
The war cannot be won, but in the meantime, at a cost of $20bn a year, it facilitates the transformation
of what was once a freedom-loving republic into a freedom-fearing national security state. The war on drugs and alcohol is a war against human nature
Working-age men who are out of the labor force
report low levels of emotional well-being, and a 2016 study by the National Bureau of Economic Research
found that nearly half of all working-age male labor-force dropouts - roughly
3.5 million men - took pain medication on a daily basis. Not surprisingly, they tend to die early. From
1999 to 2013, death rates rose sharply for nonHispanic white American men with high school degrees or less,
the group most likely to have left the labor force recently. So-called deaths of despair - suicides, liver cirrhosis, and drug
overdoses - accounted for most of the increase. Foreign Affairs, May/June 2018
Virtually all constitutionally protected civil
liberties have been undermined by the drug war. The Court has been busy
in recent years approving mandatory drug testing of employees and students,
upholding random searches and sweeps of public schools and students,
permitting police to obtain search warrants based on an an anonymous
informant's tip, expanding the government's wiretapping authority,
legitimating the use of paid, unidentified informants by police and
prosecutors, approving the use of helicopter surveillance of homes
without a warrant, and allowing the forfeiture of cash, homes, and
other property based on unproven allegations of illegal drug activity.
Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow page 61.
[The "War on Drugs"]... As a method of social control and
political subversion it has been very effective in putting away
troublesome poor people and feeding federal pork to the prison
lobby. Meanwhile, there has never been the slightest attempt to
interfere with the operations of the large and powerful US
financial institutions handling the profits, part of which are
regularly remitted to US politicians, in the form of campaign
contributions from the US banking industry. pg 369...
As the Indians of Chiapas well know, and as he poor of South
Central Los Angeles also well know, "drug war" is a code phrase for
social control and repression.
Whiteout: Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair pg 381
A heroin epidemic is on fire all across
America. Heroin deaths shot up from 1,779 in 2001 to 10,574 in 2014 as Afghan opium
poppy fields metastasized from 7,600 hectares in 2001 (when the War in
Afghanistan began) to 224,000 hectares currently. William
Edstrom (10/17/2016)
The Drug War is the New Jim Crow (a bumper sticker)
Our drug policies are not working. Remember, prohibition of
alcohol in the 1920's didn't work either, and it caused great harm
by creating organized crime in the United States. We need to adopt
"harm reduction" policies that will reduce drug use, save a lot of
money, greatly reduce urban violence, and improve our national
security. John
Mertons For US Senate
The total number of people using drugs in Portugal has
actually fallen by more than a third since the country began focusing
on treatment programs instead of punishment. GoodNewsNetwork
"Can any policy, however high-minded, be moral if it leads
to widespread corruption, imprisons so many, has so racist an effect,
destroys our inner cities, wreaks havoc on misguided and vulnerable
individuals, and brings death and destruction to foreign countries
? " Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize Winner, Economics
A sensible person ... might wonder why we criminalize the
use of cocaine and heroin, not to mention marijuana, while we tolerate
and even celebrate alcohol consumption. Of course, we learned long ago
that prohibition of alcohol was bound to fail. So a sensible person
might propose that we consider ending prohibition of drugs like
marijuana, cocaine, and heroin, which pose much less threat to the
public safety than alcohol, or at least reduce harsh penalties for
their use. But sensible people have had little influence over the
nation’s drug policies.
Listening to bureaucrats and politicians boast about the
drug war, you have to wonder what they’re smoking. The war on
drugs has been one of the biggest public policy disasters of the
last twenty-five years. It has not reduced drug use; it has instead
increased violent crime attendant on illegal drug trafficking, and
police corruption, just as the prohibition of alcohol increased
criminal activity and graft in the 1920s. It has eroded civil
liberties, particularly constitutional protections against
unwarranted searches and seizures. The war on drugs has greatly
exacerbated the terrible problem of gun violence. The illegal drug
trade not only creates violence; it pays for bigger and better
guns. It has helped finance the arms race in the streets.
The war on drugs has also created a crisis in prison over
crowding. People are sent to state and federal prison for long
terms, five, ten, or twenty years, for nonviolent, low-level drug
offenses."
Sleeping with Extra-Terrestrials: Wendy Kaminer
Congress covered up the fact that illegal drug deals were at
the heart of the Iran-Contra story, just as the CIA has been deeply
involved in drug trafficking for decades. It's a situation that
continues today in Mexico and Afghanistan, and the reality is that
our economy is secretly deeply embedded in the global drug trade.
Jesse Ventura: American Conspiracies pg 113.
"As our Knowledge of the Cold War grows, the list of drug traffickers who served the CIA lengthens to include
Corsican syndicates, Chinese Nationalist Party irregulars, Lao generals, Haitian colonels,
Honduran smugglers, and Afghan warlords." Alfred W. McCoy, In the Shadows of the American Century.
"The War on Drugs has all the characteristics of a
closed society; the absolute powers claimed by the authorities, the
attempt to silence critics rather than engage them, and, of course,
the human costs that inevitably result _ our failure to deal with
addiction, the violent crime our drug policies have spawned, and
more." George Soros writing for the Drug Policy
Alliance.
Twenty years of the "war" on drugs have packed our prisons
to the bursting point, created a vast population of the criminalized minority poor, and
diverted desperately needed resources from other pressing social needs. Yet America's drug crisis is further from
solution than it was a generation ago, indeed, it remains the worst in the developed world" Elliott Currie:
Reckoning (1993)
Iowa Independent: The Progressive magazine reports that
you think
marijuana should be legal and available next to beer in liquor
stores.
Is that true? What about cocaine and methamphetamine?
Sen. Gravel-Alaska: It sure is true. When are we are going
to learn. We went through the Depression and we realized how we
created all the gangsters and the violence. When FDR came in he
wiped out Prohibition. We need to wipe out this whole war on drugs.
We spend $50 billion to $70 billion a year. We create criminals
that aren’t criminals. We destabilize foreign countries. With
respect, to marijuana, Doug, I’ll tell you what: Go get
yourself a fifth of scotch or a fifth of gin and chug-a-lug it down
and you’ll find you lose your senses a lot faster than you
would smoking some marijuana.
Independent Iowa: Yeah, I’m 37, I think most people in
my generation agree with that point on marijuana. What about
cocaine and meth?
Sen. Gravel: We need to legalize the regulation of drugs.
The drug problem is a public health problem. It’s not a
criminal problem. We make it a criminal problem because we
treat people like criminals. You take a drug addict, you throw him
in jail, you leave him there, and he learns the criminal trade so
that when he gets out you have recidivism.
Full interview here: http://www.iowaindependent.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=131
Between police salaries and prison operations, the
so-called War on Drugs is one of the most lucrative industries in
the US today. Maybe that's why the Pentagon, big banks, and major
pharmaceutical companies all seem to be involved in making sure it
never ends. From brasschecktv Video: http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/910.html
U.N.: Opium Trade Soars in Afghanistan 26 Jun
2008 Afghan opium cultivation grew 17 percent last year, continuing
a six-year [US] expansion of the country's drug trade and
increasing its share of global opium production to more than 92
percent, according to the 2008 World Drug Report, released Thursday
by the United Nations.
$15B narcoterrorism war to be outsourced 14
Sep 2007 The U.S. Defense Department has invited five contractors
to bid on elements of a new, multibillion dollar effort to combat
[expand] the global flow of illegal drugs allegedly used to finance
terrorism. Awarded by the Pentagon’s Counter-Narcoterrorism
Technology Program Office in Dahlgren, Va., the contract vehicle
has a potential value of $15 billion over five years. One
participant is ARINC, a Maryland-based provider of airline
communications systems
When evaluating the 'War on Drugs' consider the Prohibition
that led to the 18th Amendment.
Gary
Webb—San Jose Mercury News, Pulitzer Prize
winner. In 1996, I wrote a series of stories that began this way:
For the better part of a decade, a Bay Area drug ring sold tons of
cocaine to the Crips and Bloods gangs of LA and funneled millions
in drug profits to a guerilla army run by the CIA. The cocaine that flooded in
helped spark a crack explosion in urban America….The story was
developing a momentum all of its own, despite a virtual news
blackout from the major media. Ultimately, it was public pressure
that forced the national newspapers into the fray. The Washington
Post, the New York Times, and the Los
Angeles Times published stories, but spent little time
exploring the CIA’s activities. Instead, my reporting and I
became the focus of their scrutiny. It was remarkable [Mercury
News editor] Ceppos wrote, that the four Washington Post
reporters assigned to debunk the series “could not find a
single significant factual error.” A few months later, the Mercury
News [due to intense CIA pressure] backed away
from
the story, publishing a long column by Ceppos apologizing for
“shortcomings.” The New York Times hailed Ceppos
for “setting a brave new standard,” and splashed his
apology on their front page, the first time the series had ever
been mentioned there. I quit the Mercury News not long after
that….Do we have a free press today? Sure. It’s free to
report all the sex scandals, all the stock market news, [and] every
new health fad that comes down the pike. But when it comes to the
real down and dirty stuff—such stories are not even open for
discussion. (click
for more)