The War on Drugs is one of our most viciously inept pieces of policy. As all capitalists know where there is a demand then it will be supplied.
At home our prisons are bursting at the seams accounting for 25% of the worlds prisoners.
Another contributing factor to United States' spike in the number of prisoners is the War on Drugs, formally initiated by Richard Nixon with the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970 and avidly pursued by Ronald Reagan.[55] By 2010, drug offenders in federal prison had increased to 500,000 per year, up from 41,000 in 1985. Drug related charges accounted for more than half the rise in state prisoners. The result, 31 million people have been arrested on drug related charges, approximately 1 in 10 Americans
Then we have violence created by
this half baked idiotic policy:
Lupita was 20 when five men drove into the small community near Dos Bocas, outside the port of Veracruz. "When they got out of the van all we could see were the machine guns in their hands. They wanted to know where the pretty one was, the girl with freckles. We all knew who that was. They took her and she was still holding her doll under her arm when they lifted her into the van like a bag of apples. This was more than 12 years ago. We never heard from her again."
I am glad that I am far from being alone in thinking
that this 40 year old policy is defunct
Global Commission on Drug Policy
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The global war on drugs has failed, with
devastating consequences for individuals
and societies around the world. Fifty years
after the initiation of the UN Single
Convention on Narcotic Drugs, and
40 years after President Nixon launched
the US government’s war on drugs,
fundamental reforms in national and global
drug control policies are urgently needed.
Vast expenditures on criminalization and
repressive measures directed at producers,
traffickers and consumers of illegal drugs
have clearly failed to effectively curtail
supply or consumption. Apparent victories
in eliminating one source or trafficking
organization are negated almost instantly
by the emergence of other sources and
traffickers. Repressive efforts directed at
consumers impede public health measures
to reduce HIV/AIDS, overdose fatalities
and other harmful consequences of
drug use. Government expenditures on
futile supply reduction strategies and
incarceration displace more cost-effective
and evidence-based investments in
demand and harm reduction.
No matter whom we seem to elect this mindless War goes on and on, the devastation ignored, and the lives wrecked of no significance to dogma.
Perhaps we profit from the chaos engendered in some perverse way? Destabilizing the region has been a part of our foreign policy for centuries, and it continues with this so called War
In Latin America the war on drugs presents a different order of threat than that posed in the US and Europe. The threat is an existential one because prohibition has the effect of driving profits and power into the hands of murderous cartels. They corrupt, challenge and often destroy the institutions of the state – the police, the judiciary and the body politic. Colombia very nearly succumbed to the cartels during a decade when drug-related violence tore the heart out of the institutions of the state and left many civilians dead. Politicians, public prosecutors and members of the judiciary were ruthlessly targeted. Many of the politicians who escaped death only did so because they were in the pay of the cartels. Welcome to the war on drugs.
Mindlessly banging your head against a wall will only result in a damaged head, the wall will be just fine.
End this idiocy now.
Oh I forgot; let's build a fence! Sigh.