The “war on drugs” is not a mere metaphorical war, like the “war on poverty.”
The biggest problem with the term is not the subject, but the object: Our forces don’t shoot at pills and pipes and chemicals and syringes.
They shoot at people.
Sometimes dealers. Often just users. Too often innocents … “collateral damage” in a war that seems never to end, because impossible to win.
But if the war seems bad in America — now a land with the world’s largest gulag — it’s far, far worse in Mexico, especially since President Felipe Calderón turned the military on his own people, in the vain hope of subduing the drug traffickers.
What did he get for his efforts? Blood, death and terror.
The body count is over 50,000.
I’ve long advocated drug legalization. I don’t need to elaborate the reasons, not after 50,000 deaths have been weighed in on the pro-drug war side, but I probably should mention a few notions that the drug-war mentality suppresses: individual responsibility, a rule of law, and peace.
In America, our politicians slowly awake to the truth that killing people to prevent them from ruining their lives with drugs is a fool’s mission. But few yet commit to actual change.
In Mexico, on the other hand, the top three candidates to replace Calderón — whose service is limited, by law, to just the one term — go a step further: All agree that the drug war has to be scaled down.
Little talk, so far, of legalization, but hey: The addiction to war is a tough monkey to shrug off.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
9 replies on “The Monkey on Their Backs”
For years we have been concentrating on the suppliers of the drugs. We will never win this war as long as millions of users in this country. We need to change the equation to punishing the users, and/or legalizing drug, controlling the sale and distribution, and taxing the drugs.
Our current “war on drugs” has been a complete failure both on the suppliers side as well as the user side.
The problem in Mexico is not the war on drugs, it is a culture of corruption that permeates all levels of society. That culture is enhanced, of course by the large amount of easy money that follows illegal drugs, but stopping the war on drugs, or legalizing them, will not change the culture of corruption. It will, perhaps, decrease the amount of money that flows into the coffers of the drug cartels as legal drugs will not cost as much (the question is, of course, will demand increase enough to offset the premium currently paid for illegal drugs.) And when people talk about a victimless crime they ignore the thousands of campesinos whose life is ruined by the production of cocaine. (It is estimated that the life expectancy of a worker in the cocaine industry is 18 months because of the chemicals used in production.) Or the lives that are ruined because of the human cost of association with families in addiction. While our current “war on drugs” is hardly a success, the alternative is unknowable, and once started is irreversible.
There is only one “drug crime:”
Prohibition.
All of the other hundreds of associated crimes descend, not from “drugs” — but from prohibition.
As does the Multi-Billion Dollar Anti-Drug Industry. And does the “war on …” um “… the consequences of prohibition.”
When alternative opportunities dry up from the policies of a government, the brightest and best of neighborhood, culture, or group attach themsleves to the opportunities left. Our government policies have fragmented the family by subsidizing the absence of a father, and then run manufacturing out of town as a reachable goal for unskilled labor. Hasn’t left much for the talented in the ghetto and poor neighborhoods to have a shot at some sort of decent success short of dealing drugs. Especially when they don’t make it as rock stars or basketball talents. So that is what they do.
And of course, while the petty dealing takes little skill, it also takes little overhead so it is easy to start. The talented then rise quickly and then it is difficult to extricate.
The drug problem is a consequence of lib-prog policies. The solution will never work if it is more of the same. It is a symptom. Nor will it work to try to just keep doing what we are failing at harder.
Also an inhuman imposition to make drugs legal while still continuing to undermine the family structure and continuing to make this country a hostile place for manufacturing to set up and then be a refuge for the unskilled.
So long as there are weak minded people who prefer to “medicate” themselves rather than deal with reality, there will be a drug problem. Making it legal to use will only create a new protected class of people who still won’t contribute to society, but will ask the rest of us to take care of them.
There are two basic concepts for dealing with a commodity that has so much profit associated with it. Both involve dealing with the profit aspect. One is to make it legal, which will allow current criminals and murderers to instantly become wealthy, but newly “legitimate” businessmen, just like happened with people like Joe Kennedy after Prohibition. It will also perpetuate the government’s profit motive by converting the current apparatus to an administrative, bureaucratic and tax-craving monstrosity.
The second is to make the price of being in the drug trade far too expensive to justify even for the most hardened cartel type. That would entail treating drug cartels as declared terrorist groups, such as we do with the islamist terrorists. This way, any money spent in the supply chain constitutes material support to a terrorist organization. Then we tell Mexico that they have six months to clean out the Cartels or we will do it for them. Massive air raids on known cartel locations, with plenty of bunker busters and daisy cutters, and we’ll see how much stomach the Sinaloa and other cartel boys like the new game.
Yep, that means killing a lot of people. But it will take far fewer than the 50,000 (that they have killed already) to upset the apple cart. So far, I have yet to hear anyone who advocates the legalization of drugs even hint at addressing the punishment of existing murderers of said 50,000 Mexicans, not to mention for the thousands who have wreaked such havoc on American society.
Tell me, Paul, what is your plan after legalization? Just want to give a full pardon to these murderers who make bin Laden look like an amateur?
OK – Legalize– but if I catch someone still selling drugs to children, will it also be legal to just shoot them?
Keep in mind that Nikes are legal but people still kill over them.
As it is now, we imprison the most capable coming out of the poverty areas, effectively removing them from the breeding pool. The government has little impact on the sowing of drugs into the neighborhoods. The private sector always is much more effective at meeting a market demand. If the government were in thge drug supplying business, then it would be but a short time before there were either availability or quality issues. No such problem with the free market. So the free market is providing multiple variants of Huxley’s Soma to a poplulace that has had family structure destroyed and opportunity removed.
If you know anything about niche pressure in evolution or the effect of selective breeding raising dogs, you know that it takes just a few generations to make marked changes in the gene pool. Dogs get breed for particular characteristics to meet AKC standards. The government is fulfilling the vision of Planned Parenthood’s Sanger, not by eugeniclaly killing, but rather breeding ineffectual citizens who will generate little of use to the country except predictable votes, by the war on drugs where they continually take the most capable out of the population and lock them up.
Government bred Eloi.