The roots of the fiasco

I'd like to start off the new year, if I may, with a radical look at the War on Drugs — a close look at its roots and at the ugly growths that have resulted in America's failing social order today.

I'd like to take as my text a statement by — of all people — TV evangelist Pat Robertson, who commented recently on his 700 Club broadcast on the Christian Broadcasting Network: "We're locking up people that take a couple of puffs of marijuana, and the next thing you know they've got 10 years.

"I'm not exactly for the use of drugs — don't get me wrong," Pat said, "but I just believe that criminalizing the possession of a few ounces of pot and that kind of thing, I mean it's costing us a fortune and it's ruining young people. Young people go into prison ... as youths and they come out as hardened criminals, and it's not a good thing." Robertson's spokespersons later tried to back away, saying that he only wanted government to "revisit the severity of the existing laws," but the episode is telling.

Our subtext is provided by the Associated Press in a piece cited by Tony Newman in Alternet last month. The AP headline: "The U.S. drug war has met none of its goals." The AP said, "After 40 years, the United States War on Drugs has cost 1 trillion dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives, and for what? Drug use is rampant and violence more brutal and widespread."

"This year," Newman adds, "Mexico President Calderon called for a debate on drug legalization to help reduce the bloody war in Mexico. Former Mexico President Vicente Fox has since gone further and called for an end to prohibition. Just last week, United Kingdom's Bob Ainsworth, the former drugs and defense minister, called for the legalization and regulation of drugs.

"All of this follows a 2009 report by three former Latin American presidents, Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil, Cesar Gaviria of Colombia and Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico, where they called the drug war a failure and emphasized the need to 'break the taboo' on an open and honest discussion on international drug policy."

"An open and honest discussion" would lead first to an examination of what the War on Drugs is all about: Why do they have a War on Drugs? What are its goals? Who are the combatants? Why has there been no measurable success at all?

First off, it's not a war on drugs per se, because all sorts of drugs are more prevalent than ever, and the pharmaceutical industry is indeed the most profitable of enterprises, but it's a war on recreational drugs and their users.

The purpose of the War on Drugs is to persecute and punish users of recreational drugs in an effort basically to try to keep people from getting high on substances ruled illegal by a political process with little regard for medical or moral niceties — nor for due process of law, for that matter.

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