What has the Drug War done for you lately? (Alvaro Vargas Llosa)

[struggle4progress]

Washington Post Writers Group
Shot in the Arm
by Alvaro Vargas Llosa
What has the Drug War done for you lately?
Post Date Wednesday, March 11, 2009

WASHINGTON -- ...As officials from around the world gather in Vienna this week to chart the next decade of the anti-drug effort, it may be time to rethink the entire approach.

Echoing the Prohibition era in the United States, illegality has engendered organized crime empires that, in order to supply narcotics, undermine the peace and institutions of many countries. The latest example is Mexico, where President Felipe Calderon has unleashed the wrath of the state against the drug lords. The war between the state and the cartels, and among the mafias themselves, has mostly taken place in northern cities such as Ciudad Juarez, Tijuana and Culiacan. Ten thousand people have been killed and drug-related corruption has been exposed at the highest levels, including the attorney general's office.

The anti-drug budget worldwide is staggering: The United States alone devotes more than $40 billion yearly to the effort. Yet whenever attempts to limit supply manage to raise street prices in one country, prices go down in other countries: In Europe, the price of cocaine has dropped by half since 1990. But the crackdown has reduced the purity of the drug, increasing the harm to people's health. According to the police, in Britain the purity has decreased from 60 percent to 30 percent in a decade.

Not to mention the consequences to individual liberty. Those who banned alcohol in 1920 felt compelled to amend the Constitution before they could pass Prohibition. No such amendment was ever presented to legitimize what Richard Nixon first called the "war on drugs" in 1971. The excesses committed in its name have created all sorts of social stigmas--including the fact that about 30 percent of black males in America spend some time in jail in large part due to drug-related offenses ...

http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=8c6683c9-996a-494a-b0f6-b314fcbd5b45

[Oldenuff]

1. It hasn't done a damn thing for me...but

It has made some folks rich beyond belief!I'll bet that we would all be shocked to hear just who those people really are.

Nevermind personal liberties....there are immense fortunes to be made! :sarcasm:

[Peace Patriot]

2. Common sense and facts are excluded from consideration in the U.S. "war on drugs,"

as they are in other bloody, unjust wars--Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam.

The U.S. "war on drugs" has done nothing for me, except to radicalize me further as to the real goal of puritan repression: illicit profit, whether by war profiteers, or the "prison-industrial complex," or the mobsters and corrupt politicians who directly cash in on whatever has been banned.

Oh, and it has bankrupted my country, turned it into a police state, imprisoned millions of my brothers and sisters in horrible jails, for long sentences, on non-violent offenses, and has caused the rapes, torture and murders of millions of people, here and abroad.

And it has not made a dent in the drug or weapons trade--it has greatly enhanced both.

Some benefits. Greg Palast aptly named our country an "Armed Madhouse"--in a book about the Bushwhacks and their wars on Iraq and Afghanistan. The "war on drugs" is very like being confined to a madhouse, run by the insane.