Heroin from Bush allies in Afghanistan now taking a heavy toll in Chicago

[NNN0LHI]

Thanks Junior. You are quite a fuggin' guy.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/oped/chi-0307160232jul16,1,6648923.story?coll=chi-newsopinioncommentary-hed

Chicago's open-air heroin markets - Curbside business begins at 4 a.m.

If computers could cry, the one holding my e-mail would have been weeping this past week because of the messages from all kinds of people who know the horror of heroin.

Last week I described sitting on a corner on the West Side of Chicago in plain sight of dope dealers as they peddled heroin as openly as vendors in ice cream trucks sell Popsicles. snip

Though many people still see heroin as an inner-city problem and its users as poor and black, the fact is many buyers of heroin are white and come into the city from the suburbs to score "blows," a $10 hit that is so pure it can be snorted like cocaine.snip

Four in the morning is the time that the street-corner heroin markets open in Chicago. By 6 a.m. it's rush hour. That's because heroin users, contrary to another myth, are often employed. The Vice Lords, who sell it on the West Side, and the Disciples, who control it on the South Side, see a wide variety of customers, many of whom are white, working-class people who need to get to their jobs on time. They are delivery people, bus drivers, postal workers, house painters, students, and here and there, a professional person on his or her way downtown. snip

Seven thousand miles from Chicago is Afghanistan, where opium production is soaring this year. Heroin comes from opium. And the biggest traffickers in Afghanistan, according to a recent Newsweek report, are the U.S.-supported warlords who helped us overthrow the Taliban. That deserves repeating: The biggest opium traffickers in Afghanistan are our allies.

These warlords are the international equivalent of the "generals" who run the Vice Lords and the Disciples. Meanwhile, desperately poor Afghan farmers have one way and one way only to feed their starving children in a country without jobs or infrastructure: They grow opium and sell it.

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[WhoCountsTheVotes]

1. Remember how Bush Sr. funded the Contras? Crack cocaine

Remember Air America and the heroin from the Vietnam War?

How is this any different I wonder?

[SpiralHawk]

2. kick

on account of general disgust with the Bush* administration and the horrors they are wreaking on America and the rest of the world.

Let the truth be revealed. May justice prevail.