Why the War on Drugs persists Essay Example for Free

Why the War on Drugs persists Essay Clearly the unstated aim of the federal government of the United States of America is the attainment of total control of the Earth, including all its material resources and peoples, by economic, political and military means. The achievement of this requires the expenditure of vast amounts of money over several decades. A major part of this money comes from covert U. S. government trafficking in illegal drugs, primarily the addictive drugs cocaine and heroin. U. S. -sponsored world-wide drug prohibition, a. k. a.the War on Drugs, is primarily a tactic to keep street prices high and profits astronomical, regardless of the huge social and personal damage done. U. S. -sponsored drug prohibition will continue until either the U. S. attains its aim of complete military and political domination of the Earth (which is still some time away, if it ever happens) or the junta which rules the U. S. and which aims at total control is removed from power. Only an alliance of anti-fascist nations, and sustained resistance by people who value their freedom, can prevent the subjugation of the Earth to those intent on controlling and exploiting it. Repeal of the laws, and of the U. S. -imposed international treaties, prohibiting possession and sale of drugs which are presently illegal would remove the enormous profits derived from wholesale illegal drug trafficking and cut off a major source of the money required by the U. S. for the achievement of its aim of total world domination. Obviously the U. S. will never repeal these laws and treaties, so it is up to the other countries of the world to do so, if they value their sovereignty, freedom and cultural tradition. Covert government by defense contractor means corrupt wars of conquest, government by dope dealer. When the worlds traditional inebriative herbs become illegal commodities, they become worth as much as precious metal, precious metal that can be farmed. Illegal drugs, solely because of the artificial value given them by Prohibition, have become the basis of military power anywhere they can be grown and delivered in quantity. To this day American defense contractors are the biggest drug-money launderers in the world. — Drug War: Covert Money, Power and Policy, p. 318. And, of course, the tactics used by one player in the game can be used by others. Not all the poppy fields are funded by the CIA. To some it will seem that with enough money one can buy control of the entire planet. This is no doubt an idea which occurred to some people long ago. But it takes time to achieve such an ambitious goal. Ethical considerations, of course, do not enter into the calculations. Any means may be used to attain the end. One useful means is the exploitation of the urge humans have to modify their consciousness by eating, drinking, smoking or snorting substances found to produce desirable effects. Humans have done it for ages. Bring in a capitalist socio-economic system and you have a sure way to make a lot of money. Especially if consumer prices can be jacked way up. And the way to do that is to make the possession and use of these substances illegal. Then suppliers become criminals and run the risk of punishment, and so must be financially compensated for the risks they take. The higher the risk, the higher the street price. So make it all very illegal and (try to) corner the market in mind-altering substances, especially the addictive ones (a captive market, so to speak) and voila! The greatest money-making scam in the entire history of the planet! Sufficiently lucrative that with the profits one can buy everyone who needs to be bought: police, judges, customs officers and politicians. Total control! The wet-dream of every fascist dictator — now within the grasp of any sufficiently large, sufficiently well-run, sufficiently immoral organization, such as a government of a country whose wealth has been acquired by war and ruthless exploitation of natural resources and which maintains a military-industrial economy larger and more threatening than that of any other. How long has there been a War on Drugs? Seems forever. (It was announced by Richard Nixon in 1971, but goes back millennia, as we saw above. ) And year after year, it just gets crazier and crazier, ruins more and more lives, and drives the U. S. further into the pit of social disaster. How is it possible that this insanity persists (even though intelligent and rational people have been pointing out for many years how crazy and evil it is)? Read this page (and page two) for an understanding of what lies behind this monstrosity. America, with less than 5 percent of the world population, has a quarter of the worlds prisoners. There are six times as many Americans behind bars as are imprisoned in the 12 countries that make up the entire European Union, even though those countries have 100 million more citizens than the United States. Our jails and prisons have become the 51st state, with a greater combined population than Alaska, North Dakota and South Dakota. — Editorial, San Jose Mercury News, 1999-12-31. In August [2000], the U. S. Department of Justice revealed that the number of men and women behind bars in the U. S. at the end of 1999 exceeded two million and the rate of incarceration had reached 690 inmates per 100,000 residents — a rate Human Rights Watch believed to be the highest in the world (with the exception of Rwanda). The unrelenting war on drugs continued to pull hundreds of thousands of drug offenders into the criminal justice system: 1,559,100 people were arrested on drug charges in 1998; approximately 450,000 drug offenders were confined in jails and prisons. According to the Department of Justice, 107,000 people were sent to state prison on drug charges in 1998, representing 30. 8 percent of all new state admissions. Drug offenders constituted 57. 8 percent of all federal inmates. — Human Rights Watch World Report 2001: United States At this time the Gulag Archipelago, the scattered islands of prisons in which hundreds of thousands of non-violent people are locked away for half their lives for their opposition to the disgraceful and immoral policies of a tyrannical and dictatorial state, is not in Russia, rather it is in the United States of America. This is a crime against humanity by which the government of the United States, which trumpets itself as a defender of liberty and democracy, makes itself into an object of contempt in the eyes of the world. The real problem with drugs in the modern world is that they are illegal. Put simply, the Drug War exists primarily to support — financially and otherwise — the maintenance of the criminal status of the possession of (certain) drugs so that those (mostly on the payroll of the U.S. federal government). Who profit big — directly or indirectly — from the supply of prohibited drugs can continue to do so, at the expense of everyone else, and especially at the expense of the hundreds of thousands of people imprisoned for victimless crimes. This is a scandal and a disgrace of the first magnitude. It will become for the United States of America a source of enduring shame and infamy just as the Third Reich became for Germany.