John Walters was appointed to the position of "Drug Czar" with the Bush Administration months after the administration slithered into power. It took them a long time to find a candidate bad enough to be a Bush Administration Drug Czar.
We have learned - painfully - over the past 7 years that Team Bush is profoundly focused on appointing the worst, most incompetent people available for a particular job.
The core of the "Drug Czar" job is to lie about marijuana and to make sure that anti-drug budgets grow and grow. The job requires the endless repetition of repeatedly smashed myths and unadulterated propaganda - lying, in a nutshell. The entire job is about telling lies about the cannabis plant and the "war on drugs". There's not a shred of truth to be found in the stream of black water that flows from the open hole under his nose.
Right now, Walters says "We are winning the war on drugs".
John Walters, head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, said cocaine shortages had led to a jump in prices in 37 American cities.
Efforts on both sides of the Mexican border have disrupted the flow of all drugs into the US, Mr Walters said.
But he said it had not yet been proven if the results could be sustained over the long term.
Sound believable? He says it often enough.
He recycles this shit every couple of years: it's another job of the Drug Czar - this is from 2005:
US anti-drugs policy 'succeeding'
The rising street price of cocaine in the US shows that its policies in Latin America are working, a senior US drugs policy official has said.
John Walters said the price of a gram of cocaine had risen 19% in seven months, and its purity had fallen.
Critics say the price rise is just a temporary blip, and the war on drugs has made no real progress in 20 years.
Well, the CIA is still flying cocaine to somebody, somewhere:
Earlier this week a plane went down in the Yucatan Peninsula, carrying 2.3 tons of cocaine of Colombia to the U.S. And it turned out to be "one of the planes chartered to the CIA for the renditioning of kidnapped prisoners."
Kidnapping people AND trafficking cocaine: the CIA sure is a bastion of American values...
John Walters is essentially boasting that the US government is doing a good job increasing the profitability of cocaine trafficking.
How does that make you feel?
Is this "unimportant"? Don't we have more important issues at hand?
Is the war on drugs maintained - at least in part - to allow agencies like the CIA to make huge invisible profits for their invisible operations?
I am going to tack a discussion of marijuana onto this as this deals with the Drug Czar. So much of Walter's job is lying about marijuana, he merely takes a break to lie about cocaine so they appear to be "accomplishing" something.
Cocaine is a dangerous chemical drug. I know some people sometimes e-mail me and dispute this but I think it's a simple fact essentially beyond dispute. It's known to be dangerous. And it's only popular with a small segment of the population.
When's the last time you saw a cocaine legalization article or rally? (Hint: you probably haven't.) In all my readings and ramblings through the internet I have never seen any hint of a cocaine legalization movement. The closest you can get is a philosophical debate about the Iron Law of Prohibition. The conservative media ALWAYS spins that discussion as "legalizers" trying to get 5 year old children addicted to heroin.
But that is 100% lies and Grade A Bullshit. It's the hyper-emotionalized response to a simple fact-based assertion. Another GOP red herring that the lapdog media reports over and over without the first shred of a challenge.
The fact is that cannabis is safer than most of our foods, safer than alcohol, safer than tobacco, safer than most pharmaceutical medications yet it is by far the most demonized of the "drugs" out there. It's got about the same impact on health that a coffee habit does.
But if you listen to highly-paid. politically-appointed lying assholes like John Walters, you'd think cannabis was indistinguishable from terrorism.
As of mid-July, law-enforcement officials (representing 17 agencies, including the Drug Enforcement Administration and the California National Guard) had exterminated more than 68,000 pot plants growing on public lands. But don't mourn the loss of so much green, says Walters, because the grow sites the camouflaged officers are eradicating are run by "terrorists" who are armed to the teeth and wouldn't hesitate to use their firepower on anyone -- including bird-watching, day-tripping hikers -- who inadvertently stumbles upon their covert operations. "These people are armed; they're dangerous," Walters told the Redding Record Searchlight. They're "violent criminal terrorists."
Walters has dusted off a moldy oldy to tout the eradication effort. Shortly after 9/11, the ONDCP first seized upon the alleged terrorist-pot connection in anti-drug TV ads that linked hapless recreational pot-tokers to well-funded Middle East terrorists. The ads were widely criticized and quickly disappeared. This time, the role of the dreaded terrorist, previously played by the specter of Osama, has been recast with the feds' brown menace du jour, Mexicans. "America's public lands are under attack," Walters told The Washington Times. "Instead of being appreciated as national treasures, they are being exploited and destroyed by foreign drug-trafficking organizations and heavily armed Mexican marijuana cartels."
Please tell me you don't buy this crap. Mexicans have never engaged in "terrorism" in America. Never.
Walters is blaming the cannabis plant for the highly predictable effects of prohibition:
The big profits draw in people who would not otherwise break the law, spreading corruption among the police and disdain for the law among otherwise law-abiding citizens.
Those "Mexicans" growing weed illegally in American forests are there for the money, period. They are common criminals, not "terrorists". They are there because there is profit to be had THANKS to prohibition and the efforts of police to enforce prohibition. They would not be here making illegal money and threatening people if marijuana was properly relegalized. (Which means "Regulated" for those who still cringe in inappropriate horror at the mere mention of relegalization.)
What Walters is trying to do simply amplify the pre-existing bullshit. To conflate marijuana with terrorism, something they were doing before the WTC had stopped smoldering.
I know some people are so interested in "fair and balanced debate" on a subject that they would try to seriously debate the assertion that cannabis had some actual reason to be prohibited. I would expect these persons to seriously debate whether the moon is, in fact, made of green cheese. After all, we all grew up hearing this, why would it not be true? We have to extend some courtesy to those who believe that which we know to be false, right?
Please feel free to support the idea that the moon is made of cheese if you are one of the minority opinions that still think marijuana is a dangerous drug that our government is working hard to protect you and your family from. Just go for it. Then you and Fred Thompson can wax eloquently about Iraq's WMD's.
Democrats. Where are they?
The Democratic support of the war on drugs is complicity with everything done in the name of the war on drugs: all the killings of innocent people, all the people languishing in American prisons for simply touching the cannabis plant.
Either they oppose it or they support it - there's no middle ground. And the Democratic Party MUST oppose it.
Given their abysmal response to stopping the war - the very task they were elected to do, I cannot hold my breath on the Democratic Party finding the bright light of day on this issue either.
We will have to keep hammering on them and slamming them for their abject failure to accomplish something so simple.
Oh....PS
In other drug-policy-related news, it appears the nation's mayors have seen the light -- and now recognize how harsh a glare it casts on the federal drug war. During their June meeting, the U.S. Conference of Mayors unanimously passed a resolution calling the federal War on Drugs a "failure" and calling for the creation of a harm-reduction approach to drug policy -- reframing the issue as one primarily about public health, reports Join Together, the Boston University School of Public Health program designed to support community-based drug treatment and prevention programs. The resolution, sponsored by Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson, slams the ONDCP -- and specifically Walters' anti-drug media campaign, which the mayors deem "costly and ineffective." Instead, the resolution calls for greater financial support for treatment programs, which the municipal leaders say are more cost-effective and key to ensuring public safety. "This conference recognizes that addiction is a chronic medical illness that is treatable, and [that] drug treatment success rates exceed those of many cancer therapies," reads the resolution. "U.S. policy should not be measured solely on drug-use levels or number of people imprisoned, but rather [on] the amount of drug-related harm reduced."
The DEA says, predictably, that the mayor's resolution is nonsense.
The Mayor's resolution and serious drug reform spell the end of the DEA. They are a bunch of fucking liars too. As I have been laid-off from jobs 5 times in the past 15 years, I hope to see the day when DEA agents are standing in the unemployment line.