Slate's Jack Shafer on Rolling Stone drug war article
LinkIf I were maximum dictator, I would force every newspaper editor, every magazine editor, and every television producer in the land to read Ben Wallace-Wells' 15,000-word article in the new (Dec. 13) issue of Rolling Stone, titled "How America Lost the War on Drugs."
Wallace-Wells captures the complete costs of the drug war better than any journalist I've read in a long time. He documents how the federal government has dropped about $500 billion combating illicit drugs over the past 35 years. Nearly 500,000 people sit in jail or prison for drug crimes, "a twelvefold increase since 1980," Wallace-Wells writes. For all the money the government has spent and all the people it's jailed, it's still failed to make a long-term impact on the availability of drugs. The militarized drug-control techniques favored by the Bush administration, he reports, have increased violence and political corruption abroad, violated human rights, and destabilized several Latin American nations.
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Thanks for the post.
If he were maximum dictator, wouldn't it be better to just end the drug war?
"If he were maximum dictator, wouldn't it be better to just end the drug war?"
I know! Totally sucky use of maximum dictatorship. There's gotta be at least three things that would take priority over making a small sub-set of the media read an article, including, as you mention, actually ending the war on drugs.
I do think it's past time to give up controlling drugs through war. It's time to work on making it less necessary for our society to seek escape.
The Rolling Stone link above is broken. This one works.
Saw this a few days ago. For someone with as much ADD as me, I can't believe I read the whole thing. Very good article.
The slate article points out how the criminalization of drugs only leads to more violent sellers.
Along those same lines, making alcohol/marijuana not available to teens may drive them to find highs in other places. A son of a friend recently went to the ER after drinking a bunch of Robutussin DM in search of a high... maybe if he had milder drugs available, he wouldn't try risky highs.
If the government can't keep drugs out of their maximum security prisons, why do they think they can keep drugs out of the rest of the country?
Thanks for providing the correct link, johnrynne. I fixed it in the blog entry.
Teens, hell, My two year old will spin in circles until she can't stand up anymore and laugh hysterically. I wrote my Representative to try and get it criminalized, but no response yet. As most people are aware, spinning in circles until you can't stand leads to harder stuff.
An article about an article about an article. I'm dizzy (although that might be from the drugs).
"An article about an article about an article. I'm dizzy (although that might be from the drugs)."
or the spinning (which, as I understand it, will soon be illegal)
I'll point out that that today is the anniversary of the repeal of Prohibition (of alcohol) in the USA.
http://www.repealday.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repeal_of_prohibition
Cheers! ...and, um, Legalize It!!!111
-- JahKnow
Look, if you think the WoD is about making it hard to get drugs, of course it's a failure. We had a perfect example of how prohibition would fail with alcohol, and only the insane do the same thing twice and expect different results.
But if you think of it as a way of locking up minorities, it's a screaming success. Note that the drug war started at the twilight of the civil rights era, when politicians could no longer blatantly spout racism. Instead they use code words about being 'tough on crime.' Note that minorities are disproportionately represented in drug arrests.
We should also note that Rolling Stone are a bunch of hypocrites who for a time were enthusiastically supporting the drug war and they even had compulsory drug testing of their employees. Don't let them off the hook. They need to do an article like this every month for penance until sanity is restored to our country's drug laws.
Why don't they legalize pot? Well, because as long as there is a commonly used illegal drug, they can use that as an excuse to make you submit to all kinds of humiliating things, like pissing in a cup at work.
Here's how the debate goes:
"We have the right to know these these things about our employees."
"No, you don't. You don't, for example, have the right to know what sites I visit on the web at home."
"Yes, but smoking pot is illegal!"
Ding! Ding! Ding! Discussion over!
Now everyone is a junior G-man in the War on Drugs, and if you object to your rights being trampled, why, you're a dirty druggee with something to hide!
It's well-known that the whole Drug-Free Workplace movement was started by Republicans as an adjunct to the War on Drugs; a way of widening the net, like when Homeland Security tries to use EMT personnel.
This is news?
The article in RS is quite brilliant. I never realized that the guy in the trenches at DEA finally get it. Certainly the top has not gotten it. The fact that they control what your doctor can prescribe to you is a crime itself. DEA needs to go away and be replaced with DTA, Drug Treatment Agency. But once a government bureaucracy is in place, killing it is near impossible. But then we did kill off the postal service as a cabinet department to something that had to pay their own way. Maybe if the DEA was forced to pay its own way.....
IMHO the message to young people should be "What a sucker you're being played for" by the dealers. That would resonate more than appeals on health grounds. Nobody likes to be suckered (except diehard Bushies)
The "war on drugs" is positively medieval and Bush, well I don't even want to get started on the shithead piece of crap.
the war on drugs is a psycological marketing tool created by and for the world money that profits from world drug trade. a good example would be the head of the CIA in the late 70's. You know the guy, he was good friends with that Noriega fella, down there in panama, and he had a few guys over there in afganistan when those damned ruskies were causing so much rukus. gosh, for the life of me, i just cannot remember that guys name. wonder what ever happened to that fellow?
I have always thought it strange that, since the occupancy of Afghanistan by the military forces, opium production has increased by an incredible percentage.
I haven't read the article but I'll he doesn't write a word about why we ar3 fighting the drug war. That's the only question that matters that no one ever asks, or hardly ever asks.
It's all pretty fucked up, really. God, so many lives destroyed. The war on drugs is really a war of hatred against freedom loving people. The pencil dicks who set up this bullshit basically are threatened by people seeking to opt out with something other than alcohol.
The only western approved pleasure drug is alcohol, and that's really tragic since people on it really do act like the people in reefer madness. It should still be legal (as all drugs should be) but it's a perfect drug for the west becasue it reinforces our judeo christian caveman think that stipulates that punishment must follow pleasure. We drink, we repent. There is no repentence with pot.
Of course there's way more to it. The war on drugs helps to reinforce the stark class divisions which exist in american society. Invariably addicts are fairly poor people with wrecked lives. You get to make a statement about how wrecked your life is by having a drug hobby. It is one of the more potent currencies of shame. Once drugs became legal its value as a currency of shame would quickly depreciate and the addicts would start disappearing. The problem, however, is that class lines would become more indistinct. This would be insufferable for those maintain class status on the basis of moral superiority.
What you have just read explains the war on drugs probably better than anything you have ever read or will read again.
George Bush to working mother: "You work three jobs? Do you ever sleep? Hee hee hee. Uniquely American, isn't it?"
[I can show you the clip if you think I'm paraphrasing.]
Caffeine's even better than alcohol. How would our two-income families work their four jobs without constant infusions of the java juice?
How would we keep going on our litle hamster wheels, making big bucks for our corporate masters (whose profits keep breaking new records), while we can't even afford health insurance?
It's a good article, but the subject is simply too large to be taken on fully in an article, and there are large gaps in the narrative.
First, the WoD started with good old Harry Ainslinger, and the 'Reefer Madness' crowd; of course, we all know now that the rationale was really racially and profit driven.
Also, like the 'War on Terra,' the 'War on Drugs' itself is a contradiction in terms--we would be equally (in)effective starting a 'War on the Common Cold.'
As Sonny notes above, there is no mention of the cocaine trafficking element of the Iran-Contra scandal, where US govt officials were trafficking cocaine for arms, and which said cocaine ended up on the streets of US cities.
The military aspect is mentioned, and it should come as no surprise that ulterior motives came into play as to the armament and deployment of US troops throughout Central and South America; whatever good they have done has been more than offset by the (real) perception that these forces are very similar to the forces used by MNCs and right-wing dictatorships to prop up their business initiatives.
Also missing is the current explosion of poppy harvesting and heroin production in Afghanistan, which is either a direct failure of the current WoD, or else a secret directive that is allowing somebody to reap these massive profits.
Finally, the explosion of 'legal' drug marketing by Big Pharma was largely given a pass, via an anecdote that suggests they were a problem in the past, but somehow today are not. Check the stats, and you'll see that prescription use of painkillers, antidepressants and sleep aids (not to mention 'restless leg syndrome') are all on the upswing. And, if you pay attention to the legal disclaimers, these drugs have many more potential side effects than good old cannabis sativa.
The bottom line is that the 'War on Drugs' is an abject failure in its stated purpose, but again, like the 'War on Terror' it has deeper, hidden purposes that have little to do with People, and everything to do with Power, and the cartels are small beer compared to the Politicians that are benefitting from both sides of this phony 'war.'
@#25 (DWittSF):
Afghanistan poppy growing is a tough one, since it's a poor country and it can be tough to find alternatives to growing poppy. But that problem ain't gonna be solved militarily. It needs to be solved economically.
Per Central and South America: the cocaine cartels are truly a destabilizing force in many countries, and are often, as in Columbia, de facto competitors to the democratically elected governments. Terrorists and violent revolutionaries in those countries also grow and traffic in cocaine.... So American military assistance in those areas is maybe not unreasonable. It's in everyone's best interests to have stable, democratically elected governments in those nations.
The problem is that the feds have lumped marijuana in with the hard drugs. We can grow our own, we don't need to buy it from the drug cartels! Also, it's nothing like as addictive or destructive as cocaine or heroin. And why oh why can't it be used medicinally? Heroin (morphine) is!
I don't know about current corporate or governmental profitting from the drug trade, although nothing at this point would surprise me. I just need to see some evidence.
I'm more concerned with the disastrous effects of the War on Drugs here at home, which obviously concerns you too.
I think Sonny in post #20 makes a great point. Due to a certain ex CIA head (and subsequent ex US President), to borrow Sonny's deliberate ambiguity, America's "war on drugs" was a war fought against itself. While supplying arms to Noriega by way of US military airplanes, the CIA was happy to turn a blind eye as Noriega used the return flights to bring drugs into America. It was all part of the deal. Explicit details can be found in the book In the Time of Tyrants: Panama 1968-69
Huh, the drug war, going on since the '80s, is all Bush's fault. Nice of them to stick their political viewpoint into the mix. Get the facts right though, it's not George, it's having a federal government with a mission - control of the little people. It doesn't matter who's in the White House.
thanx lovezapp
If i could please make the point that i am placing no particular blame on any "person".and, yes DWITTSF it is too broad a subject to encompass in a single article. it is also a subject that cannot be approched with any more emotion then the profiteers approach with. to distill my point: world economics is a simply a game played with the ideal of money. it's just business...
also SHOOSH I belive you have made a very very important, yet inadvertent point "IT DOES NOT MATTER WHO IS IN THE "WHITEHOUSE""
Um, I dunno, I kinda think it does matter who's in the White House. We're not a one-party system quite yet.
Someone wrote recently, I can't remember who, that America has been doing an experiment these last six or seven years to see if it makes any difference who we stick in the Oval Office.
Turns out it matters a whole lot. One man in the right position can bugger up so much it's incredible.
Who among us has any faith left in the current political gang to make things better vis-a-vis the War on Drugs or anything else? Not many, I'd guess. Certainly not me. However, I would never underestimate how much worse things could get if we keep electing the kind of people we have been, or even worse.
Shoot, I almost forgot: Impeach Bush!