I read this post on the excellent blog "ginandtacos" yesterday & it was one of those things that just clicked. One of those moments when disparate things you instinctively know snap into focus & become a whole picture.
The War on Drugs is, at its core, a blunt form of class warfare
Go read the post, it is not overlong & Ed deserves the traffic.
I have never liked the whole "war on drugs" concept. It has always been a war on people & like many other "wars" we've waged, a thinly veiled war on certain people. It is an unending war that will never be won & will only have casualties. It is an expensive fetish that we can no longer afford.
It seems to me that this something worthy of discussion here. I'll add another blockquote to make this more of a diary, but please, go read the full post.
Around 1980 Americans began to accept in large numbers the idea that wealth should be concentrated entirely in the hands of a small group of people – sure, we tried that in the 19th Century and the results were subpar, but this time there were fancy Austrian economics to reassure us that the rising tide would lift all boats. Abandoning the social safety net, public schools, and the like was a recipe for increased wealth inequality and, as the past 30 years have shown, it worked like a charm. So now our society is less like those we used to consider peers (the U.K., Germany, Canada, etc.) and more like the ones we usually condescend (Brazil, India, and other 2nd World countries with great but poorly distributed wealth).
In a society like this, there is a small elite with phenomenal wealth; let's say it's the top 10%. Below that is a large mass of people living somewhere between affluence and poverty; let's say that's 70%. These people have some economically valuable skills, even if, in the case of unskilled service industry work, that skill is merely the ability to show up to work regularly and follow instructions. Many of the people in this 70% enjoy comfortable lives, but they have income and not wealth. At the bottom end they live paycheck to paycheck; at the top, they make good money but they carry far more debt. In other words, if they lost their job things could fall apart rapidly (stop me if any of this sounds familiar). Then we have the bottom, the remaining 20%. They have no economically valuable skills that the top 10% can exploit. The rest of society sees this group as a burden. Since no one wants to pay to support them or improve their circumstances in any way, you just have to find a way to get rid of them somehow.