the reason behind the US "war on drugs"

[whatsinaname]

Since I've been old enough to understand the government and drugs, one questioned has been burning in my mind...

Why the hell does our government (the US) care so goddamn much about drugs??



I have come to two conclusions, both of which i think are true.



1) People on drugs tend to question things more...they
THINK. While they might sit for hours on end listening to
grateful dead music, druggies in general don't fall into the media trap
of paying attention only to whats on the news, radio stations,
newspapers, etc. You know, the Michael Jackson/Martha Stewart
shit that we're bombarded with night and day,whilst thousands of
innocent lives are taken in our "struggle to bring democracy to the
people of Iraq".



2) The war on drugs is a civil war....it pits our own citizens
against one another. Us drug users on one side going "what the
fuck is wrong with you people", and the non-drug advocates on the
other, constantly afraid that some crackhead is going to rob them, mug
them, rape them, whatever. Look at how any type of drug user is
protrayed by our government (AND by for-profit media........same thing
folks)...we're a bunch of mindless drones! our only main goal in
life is to get our dope, whatever that may be!!! How could the millions
of us who haven't tried illicit substances supposed to react to the
image being protrayed by the government!!!



IT'S FEAR.



and by filling the non-drug users with fear, they have nobody to turn to BUT their government....

"if it weren't for these police officers, we would be robbed nightly but horny, drug-seeking scum looking for their next fix!"



now, they NEED that government. They wouldn't feel safe without
it. Which means that they will be very much more open to the
ideas of strict records kept for any financial account....increased
security at airports...the police force having the right to
search/question/hold anybody at anytime for ANY LENGHT OF TIME as long
as it is the name of "national security" (patriot act.....)....they're
willing to sacrifice their freedom for the feeling of security...a
feeling they would need a hell of a lot less if they weren't afraid of
the citizens of their own country.



Any thoughts??





Edited by: whatsinaname

[whatsinaname]

Edited by: whatsinaname

[unico_walker]

The war is never meant to be won, if it was all profits from it would dry up.

Drug dealers profit, the government profits, private industry profits, everyones a winnar!!11

[transit]

"It's not a war on
drugs, it's a war on personal freedom, keep that in mind at all times, thank
you." ~ Bill Hicks </span>

[Phungushead]

I've thought about the fact that when you're on drugs, you question
stuff more (what's that rumor? Get caught with 100 hits of acid,
and you can get charged with conspiracy against the government, or
something like that).



Also, the government is greedy... they can't tax sales of illegal
drugs, so they're basically losing money. I heard somewhere that
if the US gov't got control of marajuana trade, it would become
legal. They'd probably tax the crap out of it as well. In
that case, instead of "the War on Drugs", they might as well call it "the War
for the Drug Market" . Ulterior motive in disguise maybe.


Edited by: phungushead

[Woodman]

Originally Posted by whatsinaname

Since* I've been old enough to understand the*
government and drugs, one questioned has been
burning in my mind...
Why the hell does our government (the US) care so
goddamn much about drugs??

Ahh! That's an interesting question.

I've had a theory about this for quite some time. I'll
summarize it here, and try not to make it too lengthy:

There is more than sufficient statistical evidence to
prove that enforcement of drug laws have had a
"controlling & regulating" affect rather than a
deterrent effect.

So, now your original question evolves to become,
"Does our government maintain covert control
and regulation of the drug trade?" And if so, " WHY?"

There is a plausible motive to be found in the
mentality of entrenched bureaucrats who believe that
people too stupid to understand the "Big Picture".

An established government cannot afford to allow a
rouge entity that they cannot influence (be it an
organized crime syndicate or a foreign drug cartel) to
gain widespread political and cultural support;
influencing the people to the point where they might
rise up and threaten the status-quo set by the
establishment.

In the mind of a bureaucrat, the "Patriot Act" can be
taken to newer clandestine levels under the premise
that the US should covertly control international drug
trafficking, instead of allowing a hostile entity (like
"Al-Quida") from gaining access to such commerce
and using it as a mechanism to further an agenda of
destruction against us and our allies.

Do I believe this is a is a widespread conspiracy,
enacted secretly by our government?...No!
Because if too many people knew then it would be
too hard to keep the lid on it.

However, I DO believe there are small groups of
career bureaucrats (perhaps limited to only a few
departments within our government) who act as the
central authority over the controlling mechanisms
that were intended to enforce drug laws.

In this way they control the drug trade, while their
colleagues in government either turn a blind eye to,
or simply refuse to believe, the deception.Edited by: Woodman

[ihateourfreedom]

I watched a multipart series on the History Channel called "Illegal
Drugs and How They Got That Way," I found it on a filesharing program.
It was pretty well made and critical of US drug policy. I recommend
everyone watch this.



There are a lot of conspiracy theories about drugs, sometimes
warranted, but since most people in government are fairly conservative
(and ignorant), isn't the most likely explanation that they are simply
afraid of what they don't know, and sincerely believe that drugs will
(and are) turning our citizens into uncontrollable criminals?

[drwoo]

There is a book about the history of drugs both legal and illegal called "Forces of Habit" I haven't got a change to read it yet still waiting for it from the library, but it sounds like a really interesting book once I get it and read it I will post a report about it.

[Woodman]

Originally Posted by ihateourfreedom

There are a lot of conspiracy theories about drugs,
sometimes warranted, but since most people in
government are fairly conservative (and ignorant),
isn't the most likely explanation that they are simply
afraid of what they don't know ...

Where did you get THAT from?

I don't know about you're government background ,
but in my experience most people in government
(outside of the military) are either moderately or
vehemently LIBERAL! But that is of little importance
as the drug war is NOT a partisan issue.

The ignorance that you mentioned is not confined to
any political party, but it is only a tool by which the
architects of the "Drug War" further their own
interests.

People are constantly manipulated into supporting
restrictive legislation that can be used (alternately,
and albeit covertly) to regulate the consumption and
distribution of drugs.

This restrictive legislation acts as a controlling
mechanism, and provides the profiteers who
engineer the "Drug War" with a legitimate authority
over control of a world-wide drug trade.

[drwoo]

Originally Posted by Woodman

I don't know about you're government background ,
but in my experience most people in government
(outside of the military) are either moderately or
vehemently LIBERAL!

Out of curiosity are you speaking of policy makers? or like mnost people in the government refering to social workers, probation officers, people who work at the social security officy or welfare workers and people of that section of the government? Becuase In my experience most of the policy makers where I am from are conservative, but then again I am from a red state.Edited by: drwoo

[wgoff]

my theory on the war on drugs revolves around good ole uncle same having his hands in everyone (other countries pockets)... lets take bill clinton for example..... his war on drugs was primarily a war on crack or coke... why when coke has been used since the 50s... but he wisely used the media to make it seem as if there was a widespread epidemic of crack being distributed to our children in schools.... why would he do that? most of the coke we get comes from columbia..... well in that particular country the country iself does not have total control of its land...in fact a high percentage of the country is *controlled* by rebels......ironically the section where their oil pipeline is..... much of the rebels income to resist comes from cocaine sells and most of which is sold to the US... so if the US were to eliminate or greatly diminish the use of cocaine here.... this would severely limit the rebels ability to fight...enabeling columbia to retake back over that part of their country......and regulate the oil line.........my theory is the war on crack was an attempt to defeat the columbian rebels and find a plan *b* for oil instead of constantly relying upon the middle east

[peanut butter]

most drugs I have seen probaby do alot of what they say it does, but they blow things out of proportion, I also knowthat people who are under the influence of certain drugs are a danger to themselves and others, of course we know how alcohol is legal but drunk peoplekill and injury thousands every year, so if alcohol is so dangerous why not make it illegal?


I was reading about ghb being made illegal, yet it is a substance that is found normally in our tissues. I even read how meat has substantial amounts of this, I don't understand except maybe the drug companies don't want us to have alternatives to sleep aids that they promote which probably act in similar manner then of course gbh is metabolised normally and I have read people who use it to help them sleep feel refreshed unlike sleeping drugs.


of course I know absolutly nothing about it, only reiterating what I read. I cannot however imagine the government being so dogmatic about substances our bodies naturally produce. I can only imagine the strong influence, and I emphasis strong influence, of the drug companies plays a big major role here in banning helpful, easily accessible substances, like banning typtophan in the usa, or gbh, and ephedra.


so if they ban substances that have propensity to be abused or are abusedthen why don't then ban alcohol, tranquilizers, and such which are abused, and doctors prescribe them anyway. most drugs have the propesity for abuse, but by banning drugs then end up hurting people that would be benefitted by them.


too bad.

















Edited by: peanut butter

[Softrat]

I think there are two main reasons why drugs are illegal.


1. In today's world it is primarily because people, including people in government, simply belive the propaganda that was started and passed down from many decades ago. It is kind of a self-perpetuating phenonmenon.


2. The original main reason for prohibition, and all the propaganda used to support it, was that it was an easy way to put in prison people that were deaply hated for their ideas, or deaply hated for other reason, sometimes racial. You must understand hippies and beatniks and their type were extremely hated by main stream America becasue of their ideas. But the constitution protects people from being imprisoned simply cause of their ideas. But the constitution says nothing about drugs as such. It just so happens the drugs that were made illegal were those that were popular with these people, but not at all popular with mainstream America.

[oldman]

dude I could write a dissertation on this. When I got sober (the last time) in october I did nothing but read drug forums and read several books on rehabilitation (and how the gov. has made it bullshit) and how this whole thing got started. The best book is one called "Drug Crazy" by Mike Gray. It will change your view on politics and who really runs the country forever. I won't spoil it for anyone.

[greg888]

I have to agree quite a bit with Softrat on this one. I think the people in
the government today simply believe the bullshit made up by past
generations. Those that do realize how inaffective and downright counter
productive the war on drugs is keep their mouth's shut if they want to
remain in office.

I also agree with Softrat's second point about racism being a main reason
why the war on drugs was started. Some of the initial reasons given to
make cocaine illegal was that they were afraid of black people getting
hopped up on coke and rapeing white women. They also believed that
Asian's would lure white women into opium dens where they would have
their way with them and keep them their. They believed that Mexicans
had an unfair advantage in the fields because they smoked marijuana,
and they were afraid of their white youth being corrupted by them. Which
two drugs didt white people stereotypically use again? Oh yeah
it was alcohal and tobacco. Another huge factor in making marijuana
illegal was lobbying from the logging industry and a few other industries I
cant remember right now because of how effective hemp is in making
certain goods.

The war on drugs started out because of racism. It continues today
because of ignorance and a warped sense of morality.&nb sp;

[jdude]

My take...



Legalizing drugs would move billions of dollars from one set of hands
to another. This has the very real potential of completely destabilizing
the economy.



Ask yourself... what do you think violent carer criminals would do for
income if their main source of profit was removed? Do you think they
would open taco stands? What would happen to economies that are
dependent on the collaboration between the justice/penal system and
cooperate america? Prisons employ millions, and are embedded deeply
into American socio political, and economic system. Changing this would
create all kinds of outcomes that could seriously cripple a society
that is hell bent on maximum growth.



The drug war has it's roots in many places. It's continuation is IMO
largely to insure the stability of a system that is derived by very touchy
market systems. I doubt that may government officials are
willing to risk the possible consequences of legalization for the
cognitive liberty of a small minority of a largely non-voting population.

[old hippie 56]

why drugs are illegal, simply put, it is a major source of income for all levels of law enforcement, I am talking about forfeits and fines. Plus it gives our military a excuse to run anti-dope exercises in south america. Gotta teach them colombias how to blow up processing plants and teach the locals to grows beans instead of coca plants. Not counting all the switch and bait schemes in the good ole USA.

[unico_walker]

I find the hardest thing to deal with is the deep seated emotional
reaction from the majority of "regular" citizens in the country. They
have no personal stake in drug prohibition, yet they will be damned if
people will be allowed to use drugs legally. It is a emotional response
that doesn't respond to reason, or logic. Until we can address this the
fight is pointless.

[Buyakasha]

Well... our downward spiraling country has been raging this "war on drugs" for several decades now, all with no or negative results. The following is what I think.


As posted, laws were very much racially and culturally motivated when originally enacted. It is quite comical thatalcohol, the white european drugof choice as well as one of the most destructive mind altering substances known, remains so highly regarded and socially accepted. You would think our country has only been ran by white european decendents... oh wait, it has. How nice for them. I bet they would also love to be able to pass bills to give themselves huge raises... Forsome of the people, by some of the people.


I was recently told by an FBI agent when I asked why we are continuing an obviously failing policy, "If we stopped now it would be like we were just giving up, like we were quitting." When I replied with, "how many innocent law enforcement officers and American citizens have to die, and how many years do we continue wasting billions of dollars with no results before you guys decide it's time to quit?" He decided not to continue our conversation. Of course the answer isnever, if it was up to him. He and alot of his buddies wouldprobablybe looking for a new line of work.


Unfortunately, thousands of innocent lives have been lost directly and indirectly due to drug prohibitions, just to stop people from participatingin a victimless, and for the most part,harmless activity. This resultalone should have redirected legislation years ago... but no. As mentioned in previous posts, cotton, pharmyceutical, alcohol, tobacco, etc. lobbies,I'm sure, have paid nicely to assure thingsremained the same. We all know what our country and it's leaders revolve around.....$$$$$$$$$$$$.


Also, we now have a veryintrenched sub culture, very similar to theMafia during andafter 1920's prohibition, that thrives onmayhem andviolence and is financed by theillegal drug trade.These criminals are now unfortunately linkedtodrugs and further give lawmakers and their ignorant supporters(( not all consevatives areignorant, but most ignorants are conservatives))additional fodder to keep the status quo.


The US spends billions of dollars a year to support this failing war, money which would serve a much better purpose by being directed toward education, rehabilitation, and the myriad of other under funded programs that help our citizens better their lives!


Our societyis becoming more fragmented and corrupt day by day.Just look atmetropolitan areas,like Los Angeles, that are on thefront edge of societal evolution. No one knows their neighbors (and no one cares) and you just might get carjackedwhileidling in yourBeverly Hills driveway. If something is not done to curtail this decline, expect similar disentigration of the quality of life coming to a home town near you. As a matter of fact I'm sure most of you have already noticed it leaking in. Remember when graffiti was something you only saw on tv.


I think this decline might be inevitable, but I believedrug prohibitions have acted as an excelerant, taking money away from places and programs that could slow or halt our society's digression as well asgiving the"fuck you and your mother" sub culture and generation a nichein which to thrive.


Stop fucking big brothering us to death, let us live our lives, and give our money back to our communities. So what if I smoke a joint every once in a while.


Peace

[Diphenhydramine]

In the US, I know the main reason behind the banning of weed was
because of expansion. We wanted to control Mexican land.
What did the stereotypical mexican peasant grow/use? Weed.
So, if we could kick them out for possesion, we could control areas
like Texas, because while we won these areas in war, we still had to
kick out all the original inhabitants.



In fact, the original banning law was modelled off of a law for machine
guns; early legislation was moral enough to realize an outright ban on
weed was unconstitutional, so they established a "stamp tax." on
weed. How did it work?



You could only possess weed if you had the proper documentation.
In order to obtain the documentation, you had to approach the
government with your weed, in order for it to be taxed. However,
if you approached the government with your weed to obtain
documentation, that meant you didn't have documentation, and so they
could throw you in jail. Just for trying to agree with the system.



Brilliant and asshole in theory.



But yeah, I think the war on drugs is a combination of ignorance,
corruption, and control. Man I remember as a freshmen in
highschool, I had to write a 20 page essay on any topic. My topic
was why drugs should be legalized. I wish I still had it.
Teacher gave me an F. And I am a pretty decent writer. It
was not a bad essay. So theoretically, the war on drugs helped me
fail in school!

[Woodman]

Originally Posted by jdude

Legalizing drugs would move
billions of dollars from one set of hands to another.
This has the very real potential of completely
destabilizing the economy.

Man, that's it in nutshell.

It doesn't get much easier to undersatand than that.

[glogga]

The Vice Lords of the Replacement Economies
Tue, 28 Jun 2005 23:41:26 -0700

By Charles Shaw
How the Drug War and the Prison-Industrial Complex connect in a vicious cycle of violence, vice, and profit

Editor’s note: Charles Shaw, editor-in-chief of the Chicago-based Newtopia Magazine, enters the Illinois state penitentiary Friday to begin serving a one year sentence for possession of less than ¼ ounce of marijuana and 1.4 grams of MDMA (or about a dozen pills). Shaw, a popular writer and activist, will be writing a prison diary for GNN chronicling his time as a prisoner of America’s ongoing drug war. GNN wishes him the best. Stay strong.

“In war, truth is the first casualty.” – Aeschylus

In the United States government’s “War on Drugs,” the rules are simple enough to grasp. Since drugs are bad for you, foster crime, and destroy people’s lives, they are illegal, and those that are involved with them are criminals who belong in jail. In this paradigm, drug dealers are violent and dangerous, and despite the emergence of a recovery culture, addicts are still considered morally bankrupt “others.” Removing these elements from the streets is generally considered a good thing, and whatever it takes to accomplish this, even if it means bending the Constitution, should be encouraged and permitted in the interest of our general safety and well being.

Every day Americans have these views reinforced by elected officials, the corporate media, and a pervading culture of addiction that is hardly limited to these denizens of society, but rather infiltrates millions of American lives. Everywhere you turn, people are warning you of the dangers of some drugs, while pushing others relentlessly. Everywhere you go, someone has a story of how addiction or violence ruined someone close to them.

And most people end up thinking, “Isn’t it wonderful of our government to try and protect us.”

But within this simple world is another more complex world. It is a world where everyone is addicted in one way or another and the profits from their addictions fuel the economy. A world where lethal drugs like alcohol, tobacco, Vioxx, and Oxycontin are legal and readily available, while relatively harmless drugs like marijuana, psilocybin, and MDMA are designated dangerous and highly addictive, without any tangible health benefits, and marginalized into a dangerous illicit market. It is a world where, in some neighborhoods, the police protect and serve while in others they are the threat and the enemy. It is a world where the rich go unpunished, and the poor go to prison.

And what may be even more shocking is that it has become progressively more serious to have been caught with drugs than to kill someone. In his 1999 Progressive Populist essay, “The Prison-Industrial Complex,” UNLV Criminal Justice professor Richard Shelden cites that between 1980 and 1992 the average maximum sentence in federal courts declined for violent crimes (from 125 months to 88 months) and almost doubled for drug offenses (from 47 months to 82 months).

This is the hidden world that no one has to see or think about except those on the inside. Thus most popular opinion about the Drug War is compacted down into a few, easy to swallow, demagoguish stereotypes. These are the hardest views to change, so naturally, changing opinion about the Drug War is a tough racket. But there is one thing that is undeniable: In both of these worlds, a small number of people make a hell of a lot of money.

Few see this war for what it really is, a class war, or more simply, a war on the poor.

Race and Class in Drug Crime

When we speak of American culture we must commingle race and class, because racism is the way American classism is manifested. And so, what is actually a race and class based disparity that exposes a corrupt system, lies obscured by corporate media reporting which focuses on the violence and sensationalism of the Drug War; COPS, a “huge” international bust, a drive-by shooting which killed an innocent child, a new “designer drug” ravaging the nation, the meth-addict pervert kidnapping a cute blonde woman, and the obligatory celebrity fallen from grace. What is almost never reported are the egregious inequities in the system.

In June of 2000, Human Rights Watch published a study of racial disparities in the “War on Drugs” in which they stated chillingly:

“The racially disproportionate nature of the “War on Drugs” is not just devastating to Black Americans. It contradicts faith in the principles of justice and equal protection of the laws that should be the bedrock of any constitutional democracy; it exposes and deepens the racial fault lines that continue to weaken the country and belies its promise as a land of equal opportunity; and it undermines faith among all races in the fairness and efficacy of the criminal justice system.”

Part of effectively prosecuting the “War on Terror” is the active demonization of Muslims. By the same token, the U.S. government demonizes Blacks, other minorities, drug users, and poor people, and uses the drug trade as a pretext to justify a domestic war against them. Our wars in the Middle East are purported to serve one purpose, battling terrorism, while in fact serving something altogether different: future energy commerce and geostrategic control. In the “War on Drugs”, we claim to be fighting crime and drug use, but while the budget for the “War on Drugs” increases every year and the number of prisons and prisoners increase every year, the amount of drugs consumed and the number of drug users also increases every year. According to Common Sense for Drug Policy, a drug reform think-tank, overall crime has gone down by more than 40%, or just under 200,000 less crimes a year in the 12 years since the Bush 41 Administration, but drug arrests have more than doubled in the same period.

Shelden asserts, “we have witnessed in the 20th century the emergence of a “criminal justice industrial complex.” The police, the courts and the prison system have become huge, self-serving and self-perpetuating bureaucracies, which along with corporations, have a vested interest in keeping crime at a certain level. They need victims and they need criminals, even if they have to invent them, as they have throughout the ‘war on drugs’ and ‘war on gangs.’”

In 2002 there were 1,538,813 total drug arrests, according to the FBI Uniform Crime Reports, an astounding number, particularly when you think about all those that didn’t get caught. A full 80% of these were for mere possession of a controlled substance, and 50%, of those, 613,986 people, were for nothing more than possession of marijuana.

This Rise of the Drug War and Prison-Industrial Complex

Over the last twenty-five years the “War on Drugs” and the prison industry has been steadily built up into a Leviathan which has steamrolled across our culture with such force that it is hard to envision what might ever stop it. Today, as Shelden writes, “the size of this system is so huge that it is almost impossible to estimate the amount of money spent and the profits made.”

While tacitly skirting the metaphysics of how one wins a war waged against a plant, it is prudent to understand that the international illicit drug market generates anywhere from $500 billion to $1 Trillion in annual trade. The United Nations Drug Control Program gave a figure of $400-$500 Billion for 2004, which is considered to be a conservative estimate.

How much money is this? Canadian professor Michel Chussudovsky wrote in Global Outlook that by 1994 narcotics profits were “on the order and magnitude of the global trade in oil.” He goes on to state, “the multi-billion dollar revenue of narcotics are deposited in the Western banking system. Drug money is laundered in the numerous offshore banking havens in Switzerland, Luxembourg, the British Channel Islands, the Cayman Islands, and some 50 locations around the globe.”

Sociology professor James Petras goes further: “Over a decade [1991-2001] between $2.5 and $5 trillion criminal proceeds have been laundered by U.S. banks and circulated in the U.S. financial circuits.” In Dirty Money Foundation of U.S. Growth and Empire – Size and Scope of Money Laundering by U.S. Banks, Petras outlines the path money takes from the narcosyndicates through the private banking system into the publicly traded stock exchanges of the NYSE and NASDAQ.

Consider that the last market crash of mid-2002 perfectly coincided with the 2000 decision by the Taliban to halt poppy production in Afghanistan, the world’s largest supplier of opium which provides roughly one third to one half of the annual trade in narcotics. Keeping in mind the cultivation and harvest cycle which is about 9 months to a year, the UN Drug Control Program reports that 2001 saw a 94% decrease in Afghani poppy cultivation from 3300 metric tons down to only 185 (the remaining 185 metric tons was from poppies cultivated by the Northern Alliance in territory they controlled), a loss of somewhere between $100 and $300 Billion. However, by 2002, after the U.S. invasion in late 2001, poppy cultivation rocketed back up to 3400 metric tons, returning a badly needed estimated $300 billion in cash to the financial markets. Coincidentally, over the next two years the economy has somewhat stabilized and markets have gone back up in value. It certainly isn’t the sole cause of the last recession, but the evidence clearly points to it being a major force within it.

Back home in the States, it isn’t just drug profits propelling this system, there is also a whole vast enforcement and incarceration industry spending billions.

According to the Office for National Drug Control Policy, the Federal Government spends $30 Billion a year waging the “War on Drugs”, and over $4 billion incarcerating drug offenders.

Nationwide, the Urban Institute reports that more than 40% of the 1,000 state prisons now in operation opened within the last 25 years, coinciding with the full scale launch of the “War on Drugs.” Author Christian Parenti wrote in his 1999 book, Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis, “Nationally, the tab for building penitentiaries has averaged about $7 billion annually over the last decade; in 1996 alone contractors broke ground on twenty-six federal and ninety-six state prisons. Estimates for the yearly expenses of incarceration run between $20 and $35 billion annually, and one report has more than 523,000 full-time employees working in American corrections—more than in any”.

But maybe the most frightening fact is that, according to the U.S. Dept. of Justice, a nation with only 4.6% of the total world population has a full one-third of the world’s prisoners, an estimated six million people, three million currently incarcerated in federal and state penitentiaries and county jails, and another roughly 3 million under “correctional supervision” on house arrest, probation, or parole. Half of these arrived in the last 10 years, and many now work as unpaid laborers for the government’s 100 prison factories under a program called UNICOR, and those of private corporations like Wackenhut, whose publicly traded stock is valued based upon how much “inventory” they posses. Their “inventory” is prisoners.

The phenomenal growth in the prison population is directly attributed to the War on Drugs. Shelden states, “a recent estimate is that convictions for drugs accounted for almost one-half of the increase in state prison inmates during the 1980s and early 1990s, as prison sentences on drug charges increased by more than 1,000 percent!...Prison populations have been increasing from between 5 percent and 7 percent each year. Figuring an average annual increase of 6 percent, by 2020 there will be around 6.5 million in prison!

This Can’t Be A Coincidence

Common Sense for Drug Policy reports that nationwide one in every 20 black men over the age of 18 is in prison, and in five states the ratio is 13 to 1. This is compared to 1 in 180 White men. But Blacks aren’t doing more drugs.

Douglas Husak, author of Legalize This!: The Case for Decriminalizing Drugs, says that White drug users outnumber Blacks by a five-to-one margin. But according to the US Department of Justice, Blacks comprise 56.7% of all drug offenders admitted to state prisons while Whites comprise only 23.3%. The bulk of the drugs consumed in this country are not sold on the street by minority-run gangs, they are sold by affluent Whites to other affluent Whites, who avoid the dangers involved in street dealing by getting their supply from higher up the food-chain, off the street, in private. Street dealing creates visible perpetrators, and since White people aren’t targeted in the same way by the police, because they aren’t visible to the police, one can only conclude that the enforcement community is primarily concerned with arresting the most visible, not necessarily the most influential, drug dealers. This theory is reinforced by the knowledge that bodies in cells equals dollars to the prison industry. Can you imagine the same police presence in the suburbs, trying to ferret out drug use in White subdivisions?

Add to that that there are completely different sentencing guidelines (see “Miscarriage of Justice”) for possession of powdered cocaine versus possession of rock cocaine even though they are the same exact substance. Crack is generally cooked and dealt on the street by minority gangs, whereas powder generates from further up the chain.

Based upon these numbers, the U.S. Dept. of Justice goes on to estimate that 30% of Black Americans will see time in prison during their life, compared with only 5% of White Americans, even though as of the 2000 Census, Whites made up 69% of the total national population while Blacks only accounted for 12%.

These racial distinctions often obscure the fact that almost everyone who ends up in prison on a drug charge is poor.

Even though there is virtually no way to divorce race from the “War on Drugs”, it would be all too easy, and all too lazy, to blame it simply on racism. The main component is and has always been economic, and the real story behind the “War on Drugs” is one of radical economic transformation like that which the United States underwent in the 1980s and 90’s. Many of those left behind in this transformation, unable or unwilling to find work in the new “service economy,” have turned to drugs, and the fight against them, for economic sustenance, and so a natural vice economy has grown up to replace some of the lost income from exported jobs, while others barely eke out a living earning minimum wage.

The low-income violent ghettos that exist in most cities were not always there, but today they are the most stark and direct symbol of this economic transformation. As law professor Richard Sander notes, blacks in early 20th century cities did not live in as segregated areas as they do today. His research shows that ghettoes today are mostly concentrated in those cities with large numbers of blacks who came north via the Great Migration.

The modern state of the Black ghettoes came from the combination of the industrial jobs that drew millions of Black Americans north being exported to other countries, and drugs being imported, most notably during the 1980s crack cocaine epidemic. But it is important to note that the crack epidemic was merely the continuation, the escalation, of a pre-existing narcotics problem in the ghettos.

Twenty years earlier heroin flooded the same streets, right at the same time the U.S. government was waging a war in Southeast Asia around the golden triangle, the world’s other major supplier of opium, and riots were breaking out in the major American cities in a widescale Black uprising. Yet, again we are supposed to view this as coincidence.

The hopelessness pervading the inner cities perpetuates to this day. Kelsa Rieger, a community organizer in Chicago who works closely with gang youth laments, “When there are no jobs, the schools are in deplorable condition, college is out of the equation for most, and racism permeates every aspect of society, in order for many people to survive, they get involved in drugs and gangs. Our society worships money and the access it grants, and gang members and drug dealers who have respect on the streets and money to spend become the idols that these young people aspire to be.” Most of the youth Rieger tries to help are caught up into the system at a very young age, and once they have a conviction record, regular employment (even if there were jobs available) becomes a near impossibility.

Unlike the 1960’s when Black communities began to come together, by the 1980s American cities were in the grips of violent Black on Black turf wars between street gangs. Crack cemented an historically tragic policy of “divide and conquer” that has kept these communities fractured. It also gave the police entrée to sweep into those neighborhoods with a disturbing, occupation-like finality and begin a steady process of eroding long and hard fought Constitutional civil rights.

Racism and entertainment propelled an overwhelmingly sensationalist corporate media which cravenly followed the trail of violence while rarely investigating why these conditions arose, or where the drugs were coming from. Public opinion was reinforced with daily tales of gang wars, ‘crack babies’ abandoned to dumpsters, suburban teenage overdoses, and victims of AIDS. In response, White people stampeded to the polls to vote for elected officials who would continue to implement harsher drug laws and expand police forces.

Underlying the clarion call for increased crime fighting, forever embedded in the national consciousness, was the raised fist of 60’s Black militancy. Ironically, that fear was never taken to its logical conclusion: no one seemed to point out to Whitey that the Black community couldn’t possibly unite for Revolution against them while they were steadily murdering each other.

Concordant with the “War on Drugs was a steroidal expansion in size and power of our federal policing agencies, the DEA, FBI, and ATF, and the widescale militarization of municipal and state police departments across the country using Federal money, a policy embraced by both major political parties as “crime” became a critical election-year issue. Through multi-billion dollar appropriations of taxpayer money, our government effectively did an end run around the Posse Comitatus Act and turned our domestic law enforcement agencies into mini-armies tasked with the control of its own citizens and the policing of morals. It is a job with no ostensible end.

Moreover, the Patriot Act privacy violations are really nothing more then the extension of changes to the criminal code that were made in the 90’s, like the power of the government to seize property and assets without a trial and use the money to fund the Drug War, or the intensification of surveillance practices and technology.

These were easy enough policies to implement while obscuring the truth and politics behind them. To the American public, the “War on Drugs” was about Law and Order, plain and simple. The effects of the crime wave were so bad that their causes were somehow rendered moot, and never really brought up again, which leads us to where we are now.

The Coming Paradigm Shift

Drug dealing is the very paradigm of the capitalist free market, unregulated and completely driven by supply and demand, but drugs and prisons are sorry replacements for productive work, thus, creating new opportunities seems the most logical order of business, and a legal and regulated drug economy could not only provide cities and states with badly needed revenue, it could also easily fund a series of infrastructure improvement projects that could potentially employ millions, provide badly needed health care for the 40+ million uninsured in this country, a comprehensive prevention and treatment program, and train and educate many others for a variety of other skills in the workplace. $500 Billion goes a long, long way, but bear in mind it is also what the US government spends annually on “defense”.

To achieve this, our culture would need to be prepared for a profound shift in attitude towards the role of drugs in our society, but it’s nothing we aren’t familiar with. People drank before, during, and after the Volstead Act, and when it was repealed, there was a stampede by government and business to regulate the legal liquor market, and fortunes were made. The “War on Drugs” has taught us that people use drugs in an identical manner, and no matter what the US government tries, they keep on using them. All prohibition has done in both cases was escalate violence, create a massive criminal economy, and a permanent underclass of drug users. Remove prohibition, and the power is returned to the government, and hence the people, to make good with it.

Since 9/11, the “War on Drugs” seems almost forgotten, the hidden world no one sees. But it continues, escalating year after year as high profiteering, an economic engine driven by the limitless harvest of drug users, the unemployed, and the disenfranchised. We often hear that the “War on Drugs” has “failed”, but it hasn’t failed at all. It was never winnable in the first place, and winning was never the goal. It’s time we concede defeat in the “War on Drugs”, which in itself is a glorious victory for compassion and common sense.

[Buyakasha]

I think one of the key phrases in that last passage was regarding sustances and "supply and demand"! Basic economic law... if something is demanded, it will be supplied.


That crack ho would be a crack ho whether it was legal or not.


"A war not meant to be won...", hmmmm.

[Dan Kush]

I think that this is as cogent and concise a summation of why the war on drugs is being fought as I've ever seen.
From www.norwichbulletin.com 4 June 2005<?:namespace prefix = o ns = "urnchemas-microsoft-comfficeffice" />

<B style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal">'War on drugs' not meant to be won[/B]

With remarks to a civic group in Enfield recently, Superior Court Judge Howard Scheinblum engaged in what is seldom forgiven in Connecticut's public life: candor.
The judge asserted what can neither be denied nor acknowledged -- that public policy on drugs doesn't work. Speaking from his 15 years of experience on the bench, Scheinblum estimated 90 percent of criminal cases in Connecticut are connected in some way to the pursuit of illegal drugs, and he asserted that society would be far better off to let users of such drugs obtain them by prescription and to be charged for them according to their ability to pay.
That is, the judge said, drugs are not the problem, not the cause of thievery, robbery, and violence; drug <I style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">prohibition [/I]is.
If now-illegal drugs were available to addicts by prescription, many addicts would waste their lives away, but at least they wouldn't be robbing and killing others for money for drugs, and drug dealers would not be killing others over drug sales territory. Most violent crime would disappear.
Sensible as this might seem -- after all, despite drug criminalization, illegal drugs are more prevalent than ever; the legal drugs, alcohol and tobacco, claim so many more lives than illegal drugs; and who really cares how people waste their lives as long as they don't hurt others?-- the judge said any departure from futile drug policy would be blocked by "vested interests." For if drug prohibition crime ended, the judge said, Connecticut wouldn't need as many police, courts, prisons, drug programs and so forth.
Judge Scheinblum's analysis only seems cynical, but it has been borne out by the political action of Connecticut's prison guards union against the transfer of inmates to prisons out of state where costs of imprisonment are lower. The families of prisoners have protested as well, but the union didn't care about prisoner welfare; it cared about losing business.
The judge's analysis also has been borne out by state government's refusal to audit drug-criminalization policy. The policy's failure is obvious, but politicians are paralyzed by fear of the policy's financial beneficiaries and the fear of asking the public to challenge old but faulty assumptions.
As with many other policies in Connecticut that are never evaluated for results, the "war on drugs" is not meant to be won; it is meant to be <I style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">waged[/I]. Even its racially disproportionate casualties are not enough to prompt politicians to engage in candor like Judge Scheinblum's. Indeed, Connecticut's politicians are happy to put half the state's young men of color in prison if the other half can be hired to guard them.

[Nicaine]

Yep, the prison system is big business in the USA. Pretty soon all we'll have left here are soldiers and prisoners. And imprisoned soldiers. And prisoners drafted to be soldiers. Some fun, eh?

P.S. the "War on Terrorism" isn't meant to be won either. Keeps the Military/Industrial Complex alive, vibrant and rolling. Maybe they can use the prisoners from the War on Drugs to fight the War on Terrorism. Oops... don't want to give anyone any bright ideas... Edited by: Nicaine