Reply #21: Jesus, what a load of crap!

[High Plains]

1. Reagan administration officials were in cahoots with Contra drug runners bringing cocaine into the country. Remember your hero Ollie North?

2. The Reagan administration's blockade of South Florida cocaine trafficking corridors did not reduce the cocaine supply, but merely diverted the traffic into Mexico. Suddenly, what had been traditional, family-run, small-scale pot smuggling operations blossomed into the fabulously wealthy and horrifically violent Mexican drug cartels we know these days.

3. Despite the arrest of Noreiga, Panama remains a major drug money center.

4. "Criminal, Cuban-affiliated regimes"!?!? I assume you are referring to the Sandinistas, and man, are your reactionary colors showing. Why don't you talk about the coke smuggling out of Ilopango Air Base in El Salvador? And tell me about the "significantly reduced" cocaine smuggling in Guatemala these days, why don't you?

5. The increased penalties for crack cocaine were conceived in hysteria and bigotry and served to imprison tens of thousands of Americans, almost all of them black, for years and decades. Meanwhile, crack continues to be used by hundreds of thousands of Americans.

6. Farmers have been growing coca in the Andes for thousands of years. The president of Bolivia, a former coca farmer himself, seeks to preserve his country's traditions while working with the US to fight against the cocaine traffic. Venezuela grows no cocaine, but has signed a deal to import coca products (flour, pastries, tea, toothpaste) in a bid to broaden legal coca markets. Each leaf that goes to legal markets is one leaf that doesn't go to the cocaine trade. The fact that Chavez and Morales are socialists isn't really relevant as far as I can tell.

7. I'm suprised you didn't mention Red China's role in making America a nation of heroin addicts.

Get thee back to the John Birch Society, from which you have obviously strayed.