Keeping Drugs Illegal: The Drug War Folly

by Nik Green

Look at the death tolls amongst Americans with legal drugs:

Tobacco: >400,000 a year
Alcohol: >150,000 a year
Prescription drugs (side effects, bad reactions etc): 110,000 a year.
Prescription drug abuse: 15,000 a year.

Illegal drugs (heroin, cocaine, crack, meth etc) around 5000 a year.
Marijuana: unknown, zero attributed.

Legal drugs' death tolls outnumber illegal ones by a factor of some 130:1

Keeping drugs illegal is one of the mainstays of the economy. The trade in illegal drugs is greater than that of motor vehicles and textiles combined, and this huge flow of capital ($1.5 trillion annually) is laundered through banks and financial institutions, primarily American companies; it does not sit under the mattresses of Colombian gangsters, gaining mildew and no interest.

If the profit motives were suddenly removed by mass global decriminalization, and drugs were made available to users via clinics and pharmacies, legally, regulated, taxed (and regarded as a medical issue) then suddenly 15% of the flow of dirty capital through big financial institutions would dry up. A UN study of this some years back indicated that to legalize drugs would cause anything from a huge recession to the complete collapse of the world banking system, (although the system in time would recover its equilibrium after the shake-up). One bank (BCCI) was caught redhanded in one of those unbelievably rare instances of enforcement of the law at the top levels in society.

Imagine all that police time and effort going to catch real criminals, such as thieves, burglars, rapists, murderers and Enron executives. Imagine the gangbangers suddenly having to find honest work! Imagine the streets and inner cities getting a whole lot safer as the financial raison d'etre for the streetgangs was removed. Imagine the improvement in relations between police and inner-city communities, minorities and drug-users. Imagine the increased safety on the job for law-enforcement personnel.

Imagine the howling and bleating of those privately run correctional institutions like Wackenhut and CCA whose business relies on the incarceration of millions of petty drug offenders, at $40,000 per bed per annum! That is $$billions upon $$billions of $$throughput. Their corporate lobbyists would be bouncing round Congress like pacmen on crystal meth.

Imagine the loud noises from multinational corporations, which use the captive labor pool of hundreds of thousands of mostly petty drug "offenders" provided by prisons at virtually zero wages cost, to do work that would normally be done by Americans, (or should that be Chinese and Mexicans?) in factories and workshops etc etc. Suddenly many of those prisoners, who have no business being in jail, would become unavailable for this equivalent of slave labor.

Imagine the shift in burden from being a tax liability, with $$billions being spent on this insane war-on-drugs which will never be won, to being a potential source of revenue, where the proceeds would go into educational and treatment programs!

America is hooked on traditional approaches, even if proven time after time to be uneffective, counter-productive or both, and any sensible/balanced approach to the drug situation will be seen by much of the public, who have been "educated" (brainwashed) in reefer-madness-ology regarding drugs, as "going soft on crime". Muttering about legalization/decriminalization is seen as a death sentence for any politician.

No matter what, as long as the powers-that-be in the world of big business and Wall St continues to reap huge profits from the illegal drug trade and its spin-offs, then nothing will change.

Then there is the other (exhaustively documented) issue of U.S. agencies (C.I.A. et al) deliberately importing and distributing cocaine, thereby creating a large user base which in turn furnishes huge returns to the banks through which the proceeds go. And another current issue.....during the Taliban's rule in Afghanistan, opium production fell to nearly zero...now the Northern Alliance and its allies have "taken over" and a record harvest of opium is forecast as
farmers go back to growing poppies. Expect huge amounts of cheap heroin to be flooding into the USA in due course....to get that drug-money rolling again and prop up those Wall St. profits.

As I said before, there is as much chance of legalizing drugs as the Pope converting to Hinduism. And anyone who buys into the official whitewash and BS that the "war-on-drugs" is to protect our children, then they are naive in the extreme. It's a war for and on behalf of narco-profiteers, bankers and gangsters using working class, uneducated and addiction-susceptible people, white, black, yellow and brown, as guinea-pigs.

**** **** ****

So many people get into the drug scene because it is the "cool" thing to do, because it places them within a culture; they respond to peer pressure to "be cool and hip", outside of the mainstream and outside of the law. There is a parallel with cigarettes; almost every kid you know probably had his/her first one "behind the gym at school etc" because it was (a) against the school rules, or (b) there was peer pressure to start, in the full knowledge that continued tobacco use will get them hooked, or kill them in any number of gnarly fashions. Same thing with alcohol. A big part of many peoples' teen years is this need to rebel; if the hipness label was stripped away from intoxicants by the universal acknowledgement, both in law and education that drugs are a medical issue, and kids could be convinced as a result that drugs/alcohol use is 'lame', or for 'losers', then that's a start in a more productive direction. If people want to use drugs, or want to experiment with altering their consciousness, then no amount of draconian laws will stop them. People have been taking recreational drugs for thousands of years, and they ain't going to stop now because a roomful of suits have arbitrarily decided that they must. The problems all started when laws were made to supposedly frighten people out of indulging, but in reality were designed to protect the interests of certain powerful corporations. DuPont (re. marijuana) is a classic case.

I doubt that because drugs are illegal, people don't drive around smashed out of their skulls. The roads right now are jammed packed with people drunk senseless, or doped on a smorgasbord of over-the-counter drugs like nyquil or robitussin etc (i.e. anything which says on the label that "this may cause drowsiness: if affected do not drive or operate machinery"). Tens of millions of people are on prescription barbiturates which can render a driver in a highly incapable state, specially when combined with a very small amount of alcohol. And yes, there are people driving around whilst high on cocaine, ecstacy and methamphetamines, the laws have no effect on stopping intoxicated people from driving, because people (a) have to get about, and (b) people will continue to use drugs!

If someone's going to get hooked, then they are going to get hooked: it's to do with the character of the person and not the nature of the drug itself. Some will go for whisky, some for cigs, some for speed and a tiny percentage will go for heroin. If drugs are decriminalized, do you honestly think that suddenly, a whole lotta people will get up and suddenly say...."coooool maaaaan, lets go get smashed now because Uncle Sam says I can"??? Gimme a break.

It is universally known that cigarettes will probably kill you, and heroin will turn you into a junkie. Since we live in a society where we are constantly reminded that "You Must Take Responsibility For Your Own Actions", then why does the Government feel the need to "nanny" people regarding the arbitrary choice of what substances we ingest, from hashish to heroin, to the point of spending $billions to do every imaginable dirty deed, from arming terrorists overseas, wrecking the environment with chemical defoliants, shooting civilian planes out of the sky and innocents on the ground, trashing the Constitution, raiding peoples' homes, turning entire neighborhoods into no-go areas and locking people up by the millions in the process?

Then there is that grossest of double standards regarding the relative status of tobacco, the biggest killer of them all. Tobacco behemoth R.J. Reynolds (and others) manufacture and market a product that kills nearly a half million Americans each year, (in terms of fatalities, that's a World Trade Center scale disaster every 2.5 DAYS) and everybody sits back and says...oh, thats OK, they are a big corporation, so it must be just fine. And whats more they and others contribute megabucks to the Republican-Democrat 'axis of medieval-outlook'. Strange and baffling; how sick we are.

And, no by the way, I don't believe that tobacco should be illegal. If so, the industry would be overtaken by a different set of gangsters who have even less ethical standards than the current batch of scumbags (if that was possible), and would put tobacco addicts in contact with dealers who most likely would trade in other illegal drugs, in the same way many folk who are looking for some pot may well be offered harder drugs, by constantly having to use those who operate on the black market.

If only America and the rest of the world would simultaneously turn to a sensible approach, such as that operating in the Netherlands. It's not perfect but it is an order of magnitude better than the harebrained, corrupt and destructive system in place in the U.S. The problem is all to do with too many people in positions of power in the areas of financial services, law-enforcement, military, and organized crime suddenly finding themselves taking a big financial hit.

To be continued!