The War on Drugs, just like the War on Terror, drags on
pointlessly. Wasting billions of dollars, millions of lives, and
precious time with no progress made and no goals met. And not just
because the Founding Fathers themselves grew hemp either.
Rather, declaring war on anything, especially abstracts, is a cash bonanza like few others. And with hyperreal grifters like the Bush administration, the most deadly weapon in the war chest is language itself. You start throwing around loaded terms and the next thing you know, Congress gives you military authority to do everything from spy on your own citizens to waterboard someone else's in the same torture rooms that caused you to invade in the first place.
Pardon my tone, but some things you just have to laugh at. What else can you do, really? (Ask Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert about that one.) Especially when the terrorists your draconian administration tackles after the Saudi-fueled mayhem of 9/11 end up being people like Seymour Hersh and Tommy Chong, or the National Education Association. This is the type of lunacy I tackled in a piece that went up on Alternet yesterday:
Pot Growers Are New Target in "War on Terror"
Last time we checked in on the bizarro nexus between cannabis and terrorism, it was none other than actor/director Tommy Chong who was feeling the Bush administration's post-9/11 wrath. In fact, the stoner icon, whose fabled act was concurrently resuscitated for Fox's drugged and confused comedy hit That 70s Show, was being slapped by John Ashcroft with a nine-month prison bid, a $20,000 fine and over $100,000 in seized assets for selling bongs. The terrorism connection? He was sentenced on Sept. 11, 2003. And if you think that's a specious connection, it's only gotten worse since. In fact, over the last few years, "terrorist" has become an epithet for all seasons... MORE @ ALTERNET
The latest "terrorists" this time around, according to the White House's Office of National Control Drug Policy, are Mexican cartels ferreting undocumented immigrants into Redding's national forests to grow weed. Because nothing says "I want to destroy your country, American infidels!" like raising crops for the sole purpose of getting you and your neighbors totally high.
OK, I'm joking. OK, I'm not. I thought it was hilarity until I recently read that our military campaigns in Afghanistan haven't defeated the Taliban or sniffed bin Laden's trail but have nevertheless managed to make sure the poor nation's heroin trade remained fully functional if not better than ever. Hey, wait. I get it now. They're fighting the War on Terror in Afghanistan, not the War or Drugs. OK, I feel better. OK, I don't.
I'm not here to tell you that anyone should be able to plant and cultivate crops of any type in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest whenever they feel like it. Or that Seymour Hersh can't try to hip the United States to neocon schemes for doomed occupations. Or that the National Education Association's millions of teachers can't have a lobby heckling the father of "No Child Left Behind" for some accountability. Or, at last, that Tommy Chong isn't high some of the time his son is selling bongs.
I'm just here to tell you that these people aren't terrorists. They're just targets, taken down by terminology.
Words have power. We cannot live without them, but we can also use them to imprison, oppress and even kill our fellow inhabitants of this lucky planet called Earth. In fact, we do it all the time, since before the Bible, Koran and every other narrative governments use to consolidate that power and, in the end, watch that contentious power fade into memory.
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As for the War on Drugs, Nixon hated the hippies and potsmokers, who he saw as rabblerousers getting in the way of his agenda. Nixon even said,"within the last decade, the abuse of drugs has grown from a local police problem into a serious national threat to the personal health and safety of millions of Americans...a new urgency and concerted national policy are needed at the federal level to begin to cope with this growing menace to the general welfare of the US." (Congressional Quarterly Almanac, vol.24, 1969, p57A). The Vietnam War was a disaster, many troops were using drugs and Nixon equated drug use among the troops with the failure in Vietnam. America was under seige by drugs! But all the while the CIA was flying tons of heroin out of Southeast Asia.
To bring it to the current era, now cheap heroin is flooding the streets again. Cocaine seems to be back, too. Meth is all to common as well. But marijuana does not belong in this category.
But even more importantly to me, is that marijuana is a beautiful plant. Opium poppies are also beautiful, as the coca plant is too. I just find it ridiculous to demonize a plant. It's what human's have done to control populations and manufacture highly addictive substances that is the real issue. The Opium Wars, Tobacco plantations/ corporations, pharmaceutical companies, financial instutions laundering drug money, etc.
Thirty-six years of fighting it, and the illicit drug trade is now a $500 billion industry. The drug cartels are now using submarines!
Corruption in Mexico was so bad that Calderon sacked a swag of high ranking police officials. That didn't work and he sent in the military. Monterrey, once recognised as the safest city in Latin America, is now a war zone. Over 1300 deaths this year, many 'collateral damage'.
But lo! it's Bush to the rescue. He'll give them $1.2 billion of military assistance, including weaponry and Blackhawk helicopters.
Plan Colombia has sucked up in excess of $5 billion with no discernible results. Current street product is higher quality and lower in price. In fact, a recent report suggests crop spraying affect 12% of coca crops but 88% of food crops. Easy to see why a poor but honest farmer decides to 'follow the money'.
Prohibition did not stop people drinking alcohol. The WOD fails for the same reason. What it succeeds at is bribery and corruption for a few, a hugely increased prison population that costs tax dollars, and too many wrongful deaths from SWAT raids gone wrong.
And increased crime by those who need to feed a habit. This does not make the public safer. However, it should be noted, not all drug users are addicts.
Note to Scott: It just occured to me, looking at your picture, what a Scott Thill wannabe I must be! http://www.opednews.com/author/author7412.html
Having walked and talked with the man in the prison yard, I feel entitled to call him Kalish. Having read the reports in numerous cases of the testimony he gave, I am certainly glad that I never had any association with him outside of that.
There are any number of people who have been documented as receiving convictions for participating in two of Kalishs’ trips that are remarkable because they are the two biggest loads that I personally ever even heard of. Among a lot of other lore, there was a container vessel with 1,000,000 pounds of pot, and a tug and barge run that is said to have hauled 400,000 pounds. Monster loads!
Kalish giving testimony against Manuel Noriega, the former dictator of Panama, doesn’t really much move me one way or the other, but the several hundred other people that he dropped dimes on needs to earn him a special place in hell. The testimony all happened after we shared a prison together, and, since his life term was still on appeal he didn’t really talk about his past. But he sure did start doing some talking after it looked like he was gone for good. Long story short, my favorite recollection from the literature is about Kalish giving up someone from his own family who was small, small fish, and was trying to make a living selling pot because he was otherwise wheel chair bound.
Kalish got blessings in the end, and everyone down chain from him got shit. In this old drug war of ours, it seems, quantity of testimony is more important than quality, and it clearly makes sense somewhere to let the big guys off for giving up the little guys.
How wonderful!