FREEDOM is not Left or Right, and on the issue of drugs, most Libertarians and not a few paleoconservatives are spot-on, compared to the salvation rhetoric and belief in benevolent psychiatric systems evident among many a liberal writer.
I'm amazed that activists, even those who want to decriminalize, often fail to understand the centrality of the Drug War and Prohibition to everything that is wrong with this this country, the world, and the reigning economic system.
First, the sheer idea that the state can IMPRISON you for things you ingest! What are RIGHTS, without the holiest right to your body and temple?
Don't give me no Nancy Reagan shit about the children. Minors are better protected from beer than they are from The Weed. Why is that?
Second, the HYPOCRISY of Prohibition: We live in an environment that markets Prozac as the official happy pill; tobacco for the masses; speed for five-year olds - it's called Ritalin and dispensed by public school shrinks; alcohol advertised and available on every ghetto corner; psychotropics literally forced down a million unwilling throats; caffeine as the fuel that keeps the work force running; massively addictive Paxil; the "little blue pill" on the teevee; speed in the guise of diet pills; antibiotics prescribed routinely for viral infections... all these are Good, eh?
Third, domestic repression and RACISM. In the business of generating public hysteria, Drug War was the prototype for the present War on Terror. Drugs as an excuse for draconian laws. Drugs as an excuse to put down out-groups and radicals, with planted evidence if necessary - such a long history! The first targets of Prohibition (cocaine, 1913) were Southern Black men, what a surprise. The politicians leading the charge were KKK. The next targets of Prohibition (alcohol, 1910s and 1920s) were Trade Unionists. Surprise, surprise.
For a century the police apparatus perpetually swells in size, drugs are the justification for any surveillance, today we see the end of the Fourth Amendment. Rich white junkies don't go to jail, they become President. Two million people in our state-run dungeons, double the number from just 10 years ago, the majority convicted for the drug trade, generally not involving violence. They serve as the forced-labor pool for microchip makers, keeping everyone else's wages under control.
There's another word for this: China.
Fourth, the pillar of covert POWER. Okay, so you're CIA and you want to micromanage the world on behalf of high finance. How do you recruit and finance a rebel army to ruin some nation far from American shores? How do you do it with money off the government budget? How do you keep the loyalty of mercenaries? How do you convince French gangsters on the docks of Marseilles to crack heads at your command? How do you get Laotians to follow your orders? You give them a free pass to run their wares into YOUR country, that's how. And while you're at it, you take your cut. Which is the lion's share. Sweet.
Same pattern for sixty years: The covert sponsorship of the drug trade by operators ensconced in U.S. state agencies, their propietaries and related spook cabals goes back to the Kuomintang in the 1940s, and runs the gamut through the Burmese heroin lords, the French Connection, the Turkish and Mexican armies (those old mainstays), the Vietnam heroin wave, the Colombia-to-Contra-to-Bushmob pipeline, the Afghan mujahedin heroin wave... And say hello to your old friends, Hekmatyar and Osama, Manuel and Pablo...
Did I mention the smack-dealing Pakistani ISI and its American-approved Frankenstein, the Taliban?
The above reads like a capsule history of the corresponding narcotic consumption patterns in the United States, does it not?
Best of all, every single one of these groups was splendidly anti-communist and God-fearing, whether Christian or Muslim, with an accordant influence on U.S. society, each with their own gangs and lobbies in the Land of the Free.
Okay, when the time comes and they've outlived themselves, how do you beat the Taliban for peanuts? First, before 9/11, encourage them - hell, pay them off! - to kill the poppy harvest. The last payment, a mere $43 million dollars, was delivered in May 2001. They thought it was great. Stupid Taliban. How properly Islamist of them to punish the growers, and the Mullahs felt solid enough in the saddle to try it.
Then, after 9/11, you can rain dollars down on the Afghan warlords. Send in your CIA men to cut the deals: "Just switch to our side," they'll say, "and you can start planting again." And the farmers celebrate.
Now the new heroin wave, from the land that no longer belongs to the Taliban but to Karzai and Khalilzad, can be bought in little plastic packages on the streets of Chicago.
Fifth, DEMORALIZING the damned. Look at the domestic victims of Drug War: groups that the Anglo elite wants to weed out: blacks, white deviants, leftists. Works out wonderfully and consistently, decade after decade... Given the rich history, at what point can we characterize the use of drug war as a control mechnanism on unwanted minorities and out-groups an intentional effect of the state's involvement in the drug trade and Prohibition?
The LSD wave, a special case, began in the CIA's MK-ULTRA mind control operations. Having once turned themselves on, these guys wanted to dose everyone they could! This caught on. Independent chemists went to work, and soon the kids were chewing acid like candy. This particular story is declassified, the stuff of academic scholarship. Has anyone noticed? (Martin Lee, Acid Dreams.)
Sixth, the fount of CORRUPTION in society. Prohibition turns cheap and common plants turn into cash on the vine. There has never been and there will never be an anti-drug effort that succeeds - short of a holocaust like the 1950s in China, when they just rounded up a million opium users and shot them in the back of the neck.
Every single case of Prohibition otherwise ends the same way: inevitably, some among the police, prosecution and border guards will sell to the highest bidder. The more the police crack down, the higher prices and profits will go. For every desperate youth they imprison, another enters the trade. The profit margin rises. Inevitably, the sheer force of money finds a crack in the law enforcement. Cops are no different than other people. It's a function of the human condition. With persistence, you will always find the one who sells himself, and build from there. If a key figure resists, he is bumped off.
Yes, the police do stage theatrical crackdowns, invariably on the competition to whoever the main gangsters are at any given time. Small-time operators are rounded up, victory is declared. Why does anyone think the United States is different from Colombia, in this regard? The principles of the Lansky-Luciano gang win in the end: Though mafias may rise and fall and be replaced, a Hoover can still insist for 30 years that there is no organized crime in these United States.
And the Kingpin of Crack, Papa Doc Bush, goes on teevee to promise he will put lots of crack dealers in jail. Lots and lots of crack dealers. Just not his blessed sonny boy, W.
It never changes. This is how Prohibition has always been.
Perhaps none of it was planned this way in advance. The parts of the Drug War machine simply came together over time, as logical developments. Regardless, it has turned into a system.
Everyone has their role. Every aspect of the profit-addiction-profit system is its own industry: the growers, the kingpins, the chemists, the smugglers and spooks, the street dealers, the politicians who cover the trade, the cops who are on the take, the honest cops who think they are crusaders collaring up the filth, the prosecutors and lawyers, the prisons and prison suppliers and prison employers, the think-tank whores who spread hysteria among the middle classes, the psychiatrists and counselers.
Seventh, we arrive at the top of the pyramid. There we find - as always - who else but the BANKERS?
So, say you need to launder an estimated $200-$400 billion a year in illegal drug trade revenues? Where can you hide such a sum?
Only in the mainstream.
You stick it in big friendly banks, or pass it off as legitimate corporate revenue. And then you watch it flow downstream, to Wall Street, multiplying as it goes. You know exactly who "just won't say no" to drug money deposits, and it turns out to be the financial system as a whole.
Where is the problem? The high kingpins are in the executive branch, and bankers are the chief spooks, from the Dulles Brothers to William Casey.
Business is a rough world, so we've been told for many a year. Profit margins on real production fall perpetually, yet growth remains a commandment. Now here is a business that multiplies its winnings at every stage of production. All you need to do is to inject the booty back into legitimate front entities.
Nineth, it's so great to be high! Wasn't it splendid? Now get ready to PEAK.
Dearest Bankers, when you and your buddies and their pals and the other gangs have passed off their proceeds as legal revenues, it adds to every wondrous money-bubble you fatten. Every drug dollar that goes into a stock-listed company factors many times over in stockholder value. At least, as long as the bubble keeps blowing and growing.
And why ever stop? You can leverage and option and triple-hedge to the stratosphere. Every dollar counts twice, then ten times, then thirty. The bubble keeps growing. Never mind that it pops! Won't I know to be first out of the market, before it does? (A common signal for a "correction" is the election of a Republican president. That's why they call it Smart Republican Money.)
Never mind how badly the bubbles pops! To those at the top, the ones who are hurt are mere animals. We rule, we just keep pumping it. And pumping it.
As my man Ruppert has said: America isn't high on drugs. It's high on drug money.
NOW ORDER THE BOOK "DRUG WAR" BY DAN RUSSELL
http://www.drugwar.com/dwindex.shtmMonumental. Novelistic. Paradigm-shifting. Deep and moving. Personal. Covers centuries. Academic. Tells the hidden history of America itself. Best book I've read in the last two years. Thank you, Dan Russell.
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