If i could please make the point that i am placing no particular blame on any “person”.and, yes DWITTSF it is too broad a subject to encompass in a single article. it is also a subject that cannot be approched with any more emotion then the profiteers approach with. to distill my point: world economics is a simply a game played with the ideal of money. it’s just business…

Someone wrote recently, I can’t remember who, that America has been doing an experiment these last six or seven years to see if it makes any difference who we stick in the Oval Office.

Turns out it matters a whole lot. One man in the right position can bugger up so much it’s incredible.

Who among us has any faith left in the current political gang to make things better vis-a-vis the War on Drugs or anything else? Not many, I’d guess. Certainly not me. However, I would never underestimate how much worse things could get if we keep electing the kind of people we have been, or even worse.

First, the WoD started with good old Harry Ainslinger, and the ‘Reefer Madness’ crowd; of course, we all know now that the rationale was really racially and profit driven.

Also, like the ‘War on Terra,’ the ‘War on Drugs’ itself is a contradiction in terms–we would be equally (in)effective starting a ‘War on the Common Cold.’

As Sonny notes above, there is no mention of the cocaine trafficking element of the Iran-Contra scandal, where US govt officials were trafficking cocaine for arms, and which said cocaine ended up on the streets of US cities.

The military aspect is mentioned, and it should come as no surprise that ulterior motives came into play as to the armament and deployment of US troops throughout Central and South America; whatever good they have done has been more than offset by the (real) perception that these forces are very similar to the forces used by MNCs and right-wing dictatorships to prop up their business initiatives.

Also missing is the current explosion of poppy harvesting and heroin production in Afghanistan, which is either a direct failure of the current WoD, or else a secret directive that is allowing somebody to reap these massive profits.

Finally, the explosion of ‘legal’ drug marketing by Big Pharma was largely given a pass, via an anecdote that suggests they were a problem in the past, but somehow today are not. Check the stats, and you’ll see that prescription use of painkillers, antidepressants and sleep aids (not to mention ‘restless leg syndrome’) are all on the upswing. And, if you pay attention to the legal disclaimers, these drugs have many more potential side effects than good old cannabis sativa.

The bottom line is that the ‘War on Drugs’ is an abject failure in its stated purpose, but again, like the ‘War on Terror’ it has deeper, hidden purposes that have little to do with People, and everything to do with Power, and the cartels are small beer compared to the Politicians that are benefitting from both sides of this phony ‘war.’

Afghanistan poppy growing is a tough one, since it’s a poor country and it can be tough to find alternatives to growing poppy. But that problem ain’t gonna be solved militarily. It needs to be solved economically.

Per Central and South America: the cocaine cartels are truly a destabilizing force in many countries, and are often, as in Columbia, de facto competitors to the democratically elected governments. Terrorists and violent revolutionaries in those countries also grow and traffic in cocaine…. So American military assistance in those areas is maybe not unreasonable. It’s in everyone’s best interests to have stable, democratically elected governments in those nations.

The problem is that the feds have lumped marijuana in with the hard drugs. We can grow our own, we don’t need to buy it from the drug cartels! Also, it’s nothing like as addictive or destructive as cocaine or heroin. And why oh why can’t it be used medicinally? Heroin (morphine) is!

I don’t know about current corporate or governmental profitting from the drug trade, although nothing at this point would surprise me. I just need to see some evidence.

I’m more concerned with the disastrous effects of the War on Drugs here at home, which obviously concerns you too.

I know! Totally sucky use of maximum dictatorship. There’s gotta be at least three things that would take priority over making a small sub-set of the media read an article, including, as you mention, actually ending the war on drugs.

Along those same lines, making alcohol/marijuana not available to teens may drive them to find highs in other places. A son of a friend recently went to the ER after drinking a bunch of Robutussin DM in search of a high… maybe if he had milder drugs available, he wouldn’t try risky highs.

or the spinning (which, as I understand it, will soon be illegal)

The only western approved pleasure drug is alcohol, and that’s really tragic since people on it really do act like the people in reefer madness. It should still be legal (as all drugs should be) but it’s a perfect drug for the west becasue it reinforces our judeo christian caveman think that stipulates that punishment must follow pleasure. We drink, we repent. There is no repentence with pot.

Of course there’s way more to it. The war on drugs helps to reinforce the stark class divisions which exist in american society. Invariably addicts are fairly poor people with wrecked lives. You get to make a statement about how wrecked your life is by having a drug hobby. It is one of the more potent currencies of shame. Once drugs became legal its value as a currency of shame would quickly depreciate and the addicts would start disappearing. The problem, however, is that class lines would become more indistinct. This would be insufferable for those maintain class status on the basis of moral superiority.

What you have just read explains the war on drugs probably better than anything you have ever read or will read again.

http://www.repealday.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repeal_of_prohibition

Cheers! …and, um, Legalize It!!!111

– JahKnow

[I can show you the clip if you think I'm paraphrasing.]

Caffeine’s even better than alcohol. How would our two-income families work their four jobs without constant infusions of the java juice?

How would we keep going on our litle hamster wheels, making big bucks for our corporate masters (whose profits keep breaking new records), while we can’t even afford health insurance?

But if you think of it as a way of locking up minorities, it’s a screaming success. Note that the drug war started at the twilight of the civil rights era, when politicians could no longer blatantly spout racism. Instead they use code words about being ‘tough on crime.’ Note that minorities are disproportionately represented in drug arrests.

We should also note that Rolling Stone are a bunch of hypocrites who for a time were enthusiastically supporting the drug war and they even had compulsory drug testing of their employees. Don’t let them off the hook. They need to do an article like this every month for penance until sanity is restored to our country’s drug laws.

Here’s how the debate goes:

“We have the right to know these these things about our employees.”

“No, you don’t. You don’t, for example, have the right to know what sites I visit on the web at home.”

“Yes, but smoking pot is illegal!”

Ding! Ding! Ding! Discussion over!

Now everyone is a junior G-man in the War on Drugs, and if you object to your rights being trampled, why, you’re a dirty druggee with something to hide!

It’s well-known that the whole Drug-Free Workplace movement was started by Republicans as an adjunct to the War on Drugs; a way of widening the net, like when Homeland Security tries to use EMT personnel.