Reply #22: I f this wasn't already obvious to most of us it should have been.

[peruban]

I live in Fort Lauderdale and we have Port Everglades here, after 9/11 that place got so locked down you couldn't go near it without three forms of ID and you know what? - there were just as many drugs in the streets as there were before. If all the added security why not more drug busts? It's like I've always said about the war on drugs, it not a war on drugs, it's a war on competition. The U.S. have always wanted to implicitly control controlled substances. When that failed during prohibition they simply regulated it. And that is what will eventually happen with drugs because its not a criminal issue at heart, it's - and I'm sad to say it by invoking John Stuart Mill here - it's a matter of liberty. People aren't ready for that level of liberty and personal responsibility but that's how true liberty works in a nutshell. It's an economic issue and we live in an economically powered civilization. Until the economic supply and demand for drugs has been addressed and somehow regulated there will always be implicit operations between nations for control of the trade. It's an issue that goes as far back as Homer's Iliad and the Trojan war, dispute over trade routes.

Thoughts?