The War on Drugs, harsher penalties for abusers and dealers, no tolerance policies...it is almost a staple of upstanding citizenry everywhere to support the idea of the eradication of drug abuse in society. Drug prohibition is never questioned as being a good and moral idea by decent, law abiding people. It is most certainly considered a necessity that government and law enforcement do everything they must in order to halt the flow of drugs to our streets if you want to be considered a good, moral Christian.
It may shock you to know the reality that lurks behind the policies of drug prohibition. It should not be a shock to know that the occurrence of drug abuse in this country has not been quelled in the least...the evidence of that is abundant in spite of the outrageous amounts of tax money spent on drug prohibition measures. Approximately 6 billion dollars a year are taken from tax payers to fund the war on drugs and yet here we are, still sitting in a cesspool of lives ruined from addiction and incarceration. There are no shortage of illicit drugs to be found and there is no shortage of those supplying it or using it...what is a rational explanation for this after 41 years of pumping untold amounts of money and manpower in to this bottomless pit?
The only reasonable answer is that there is no real attempt to stop drug abuse and prohibition has never existed as a means to the end of bettering society. It should have been readily apparent following the prohibition of alcohol in the early 1900's and it should have been a lesson that people never forgot...but such is the nature of forgetting history and by necessity, repeating it. Prohibition began with such proponents backing it as the WCTU, the Women's Christian Temperance Union. Anything but the demure and upstanding ladies their title might make them seem, this organization was notoriously racist, were staunch supporters of the KKK and eugenics. The modern elite would be proud of them today...they believed in the controlled breeding of human population.
The results of Prohibition were disastrous, leading to a market, once controlled by your average businessman, being controlled by murderous gangs of thugs enabled by corrupt law enforcement. Why should today's prohibition be any different? Well it isn't...perhaps these days we are less likely to run into types like Al Capone cashing in on the forbidden substance than we are to find inner city street gangs, but that is where the dissimilarity ends. Law enforcement and government are still the corrupt enablers of the drug trade.
Harry J Anslinger-
He was the Assistant Prohibition Commissioner who was later appointed as the first Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics which, incidentally, was an agency under the control of the Treasury Department. From the beginning, drug control policies were linked hand in hand with monetary gain.
Anslinger in conjunction with Du Pont, a petrochemical company and William Randolph Hearst, notorious for giving rise to "yellow journalism" propaganda, led a crusade against marijuana in the early 1930's. The target of this campaign was not an attempt to stop it's use recreationally, but an attempt to halt it's production as a competitor against paper and petroleum producers as a cheaper and more abundant substitute for those products. It is the propaganda of that day which still persists in the minds of the public when they think about marijuana.
As much of a joke as an old film called Reefer Madness might be now...it is shocking how well these ideas about a fairly innocuous, wild weed has shaped the public opinion of it now. The public is still told that marijuana causes all manner of social disability, an inability to function as a responsible adult, brain damage, lack of self control, lung cancer, addiction etc.. None of those claims have ever been scientifically sound but to suggest that they are not to your average person on the street, 74 years after that silly film, is equivalent to saying "i am a pro-drug, pot head heathen.".
The CIA and it's Long Drug Love Affair-
The CIA has been caught in the midst of drug smuggling so many times that if that entity were a single average citizen they might be termed the most notorious drug dealer in history and imprisoned for life...but this is the CIA and they are above such laws. The CIA has been involved in smuggling opium from China to Thailand, from Vietnam and Cambodia to the US, and assisting Laotian drug lords.
It has been a regular practice for the CIA since the 1950's to fly drugs out of Japan and the Middle East in to the US...if there is a question as to how such a steady stream of illicit drugs make it into a country with such strict policies against it, here is the answer. The DEA, military, and State Department all have their part as well in enabling the CIA's black market monopoly on drugs. Agents have repeatedly blown the whistle on this kind of activity within their ranks but it continues to this day because the CIA, just like the maffia of the Prohibition era has a tendency to "whack" their enemies and competition.
Drug running is a high level business. The idea that the strung out, unkempt, seedy man on the street corner is the problem is an extremely naive one. It requires an international and powerful force of operations to succeed in laundering money from the billions of drug sales made from the top down...it requires the directive of international banking systems to make a monster machine like this run smoothly. Presidents and vice presidents have been firmly invested in the business of dangling the forbidden substances, which their own laws control, in front the public... creating drug awareness campaigns which amount ot advertising their product, rather than exposing the dangers of the drugs themselves.
"If George Bush is prosecuted, and goes to jail for the crimes he committed when he was the Drug Kingpin of the 1980s, this will be the single most important historical event in decades. It will define a realm of possible action that many people right now feel is impossible, or unfathomable - that it would ever happen. It can happen, it must happen. This is the responsibility of the American people." - Jeffrey Steinberg
The Bush's have a history of connectedness to drug trafficking and drug lords. As a result of Bush Sr.'s secretive arms trade with Iran, thousands of tons of drugs were exported to the streets of America. The total sales of illicit drugs in the years following were in the hundreds of billions, half of which occurred in the States. Bush Jr and his brother Jeb were videotaped picking up kilos of cocaine in Florida
In this country, one in every 18 males are in prison. 70% of those in prison are minorities. We have the highest documented incarceration rate in the world. While violent crime rates have remained steady...drug charges have skyrocketed and the War on Drugs is cited as the force behind this.
We have to come to a simple conclusion...a war against drugs in this country is not about keeping people off of drugs..it's about greed, it's about a need to control the masses, it's about eugenics. There is no coincidence involved in the fact that the highest incidence of drug use and incarceration on drug offenses occurs in the inner city, the poor areas of the country, the areas in which house minority groups...mostly black minority groups. It's easy for people to sit back in their comfortable suburban, white town where "things like that don't happen" and blame a culture you have not been exposed to or raised in...but make no mistake, this inner city disease is a planned one...it's just one more way to reduce the number of capable, thinking individuals who have historical reasons to distrust their rulers.
You are in no way safe from the atrocity of the so-called War on Drugs if you are not a minority though...it may be your well educated,young middle-class white child who one day takes a ride with someone carrying a few bags of marijuana and ends up spending the rest of their life paying for laws designed to make criminals of everyone they can. Do we really believe that the end of prohibition of drugs is going to lead to worse than we have in this country right now? Are people not capable of making decisions about what they choose to put into their own bodies whether or not the government intercedes to add to the unfortunate results by making it a crime punishable by losing years of one's life behind bars? Have we ever known the prison system to rehabilitate drug users? How far in the future is the day when your own home is broken into by overzealous militant police forces searching for a gram of weed because your ex girlfriend, coworker, friend, or some other grudge -holding person made an anonymous claim that you had drugs?
We need to rethink what it means to support this never-ending "War on Drugs"...because so far, the casualties have been human lives, not drugs.