Take a deep breath, and then check out this recent article in the Washington Post, from Misha Glenny (August 19, 2007), entitled The Lost War: We’ve Spent 36 Years and [hundreds of] Billions of Dollars Fighting It, but the Drug Trade Keeps Growing.

An excerpt:

Thirty-six years and hundreds of billions of dollars after President Richard M. Nixon launched the war on drugs, consumers worldwide are taking more narcotics and criminals are making fatter profits than ever before.

The syndicates that control narcotics production and distribution reap the profits from an annual turnover of $400 billion to $500 billion.

And terrorist organizations such as the Taliban are using this money to expand their operations and buy ever more sophisticated weapons, threatening Western security.

Similar patterns, as everyone knows, were used by the prototype of the Taliban, the American-sponsored mujahideen “Freedom Fighters”, as Ronald Reagan called them, in the Afghan War against the Russian invaders, where a million or more Afghans died.

Drug-trafficking was also used with American leadership awareness to finance the Contras in their American-backed civil war in Nicaragua.

Indeed, the list, in varying degrees, allegedly goes on and on with the list of proxy wars.

It turns out that the most addictive and deadly habit to come out of the War On Drugs is the use of drugs to fund rapacious murderers, thugs, State terrorism, counter-terrorism, straightforward terrorism, and blame it on, or in support of, the War On Terror.

The sick paradox is overwhelming. But taking a step back, try to see the web from a wider angle.

One begins to picture a relationship of one (the War On Terror) feeding off the other (The War On Drugs) and vice-versa, like an ever-moving, shifting, somehow-invisible, war and death spreading machine (and I don’t even like science fiction!).

And utterly inherent in the War On Drugs and the War On Terror relationship is the relentless world-wide small arms trade (and not so small arms trade).

The trade in illegal narcotics begets violence, poverty and tragedy. And wherever I went around the world, gangsters, cops, victims, academics and politicians delivered the same message: The war on drugs is the underlying cause of the misery.

Everywhere, that is, except Washington, where a powerful bipartisan consensus has turned the issue into a political third rail.

The problem starts with prohibition, the basis of the war on drugs.

To read the entire article, press here:

Just before I finish, one thing might deserve mentioning:

The idea of the War On Drugs being a failure depends on what the objectives actually are.

In short, only if the objective of the War On Drugs is 1) increased incarceration (specifically of minorities) and 2) support of the hundreds of billions of dollars generated by the selling of illegal substances that actually props up the economy with paper money (for example Miami in the ’80s) and 3) the endless support of proxy wars, could the policy be considered a success.

Just maybe those three things largely are the objectives (with 2) actually a by-product.

Or as Steven B. Duke, the Law of Science and Technology Professor at Yale Law School puts it:

If [the Drug War’s] purpose is to make criminals out of one in three African-American males, it has succeeded.

If its purpose is to create one of the highest crime rates in the world—and thus to provide permanent fodder for demagogues who decry crime and promise to do something about it—it is achieving that end.

If its purpose is de facto repeal of the Bill of Rights, victory is well in sight.

If its purpose is to transfer individual freedom to the central government, it is carrying that off as well as any of our real wars did.

If its purpose is to destroy our inner cities by making them war zones, triumph is near.

In considerable ways, this turns out to be so.

Success is found in what is called the “Drug-Industrial-Complex,�? where drug war “costs�? turn out to be “gains�? for construction firms, private prisons, often built in rural areas, and so on.

Meanwhile, with the gentrification of, say, certain areas of New York, a not insignificant amount of displaced people—women and children—have migrated to these rural areas, living in hovels. Why? To be closer to the prisons housing their partners, the fathers of their children.

The term “Drug-Industrial-Complex�?, of course, is taken from the “Military-Industrial-Complex�?, which President Eisenhower urgently and perhaps hopelessly warned the American public against in his legendary farewell speech of 1960.

The external, social—even foreign—effects of the War On Drugs are so extreme, so insidious, that after years of being in agreement, even William F Buckley can no longer stomach its growth:

Buckley, speaking to the New York Bar Association:

[T]he drug war is many times more painful, in all its manifestations, than would be the licensing of drugs combined with intensive education of non-users and intensive education designed to warn those who experiment with drugs.

We have seen a substantial reduction in the use of tobacco over the last thirty years, and this is not because tobacco became illegal but because a sentient community began, in substantial numbers, to apprehend the high cost of tobacco to human health…

And added to the above is the point of civil justice. Those who suffer from the abuse of drugs have themselves to blame for it.

This does not mean that society is absolved from active concern for their plight.

It does mean that their plight is subordinate to the plight of those citizens who do not experiment with drugs but whose life, liberty, and property are substantially affected by the illegalization of the drugs sought after by the minority.

I have not spoken of the cost to our society of the astonishing legal weapons available now to policemen and prosecutors; of the penalty of forfeiture of one’s home and property for violation of laws which, though designed to advance the war against drugs, could legally be used—I am told by learned counsel—as penalties for the neglect of one’s pets.

I leave it at this, that it is outrageous to live in a society whose laws tolerate sending young people to life in prison because they grew, or distributed, a dozen ounces of marijuana.

I would hope that the good offices of your vital profession would mobilize at least to protest such excesses of wartime zeal, the legal equivalent of a My Lai massacre.

And perhaps proceed to recommend the legalization of the sale of most drugs, except to minors.

But to think the War On Drugs, for certain policy makers, is simply a failure may in fact miss the point. Just like with the absolute destruction of Iraq, allowing for American control of oil in the area, the objectives of the War On Drugs may be different than what we all think.

From Noam Chomsky:

[The War On Drugs] is highly effective domestically in controlling and eliminating superfluous people and enriching powerful sectors, [and] it’s highly effective overseas in counterinsurgency.

Of course it has no effect on drug use, so liberal critics can wail about how it’s money wasted, though any ten-year old could figure out that if a huge costly program continues year after year without success in its proclaimed goals, then the actual goals must be different—and they’re easy to figure out.

But since that doesn’t conform to the Party Line, it’s unthinkable.

It is hard (on the heart) to think that.

But it’s also, year after year, study after study, proxy war after proxy war, punishingly hard to believe something so catastrophic to civilians and peace as the War On Drugs via incarceration could be continued—indeed commanded—by sane people without other motives.

Or maybe it’s just evolution: the genetic predisposition of certain forms of human life, unconsciously manipulated by an ever-increasing world-population squeeze and environmental degradation killing thousands of species a year.

And I told you I don’t even like science fiction—but don’t you get the feeling we’re somehow living in the middle of a curious experiment? And if Buckley and Chomsky being in agreement (and Milton Friedman, too, incidentally) isn’t science fiction, then I’m E.T.

By the way, call home.

Whatever your take on the situation, fight paranoia, fight hatred, embrace love, courage and action. Love your sisters and brothers, that all beings may be a little happier…

Pete xox

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 21st, 2007 at 10:07 pm and is filed under Activism, Economics, History, Human Rights, War on Drugs, posted. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.