Rising Hegemon
Their report argues that anti-drug policy has failed by fuelling organised crime, costing taxpayers millions of dollars and causing thousands of deaths.
But it gives us awesome crime movies and television shows!
It calls for drug policies based on methods empirically proven to reduce crime and promote economic and social development.
The commission is especially critical of the US, saying it must abandon anti-crime approaches to drug policy and adopt strategies rooted in healthcare and human rights.
Healthcare and human rights, you know where this is going.
"Drug addiction is a disease that can be successfully prevented and treated," said a spokesman for the Office of National Drug Control Policy.
"Making drugs more available - as this report suggests - will make it harder to keep our communities healthy and safe."
"Spokesman"?, just admit it's an old "macro" on a word processor you've had around since WordPerfect 2.0.
Time to devote what little discretionary remains on more prisons -- please engage the "USA, USA, USA" macro.
[cross-posted at Firedoglake]
3 comments:
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One would think that our little thirteen-year experiment with the 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act would have forced even the most ideological drug warriors to acknowledge the truth of the UN study.
But, these days, the drug war guarantees the supply of lots of money for paramilitary police forces--and their equipment manufacturers--and laundering drug money is what is keeping who knows how many banks afloat after launching lots of crash-and-burn "innovative" investments.
And, as Al McCoy shows rather definitively in Policing America's Empire, outlawing various vices is a great way to control and induce a very conservative conformity in politicians and public alike.
The great secret of the blacklist of the `50s was that it was eagerly adopted by studio heads as a means (as with morals clauses in contracts) of controlling the rather independent-minded talent. Those who understood the motives behind that phenomenon were not surprised by the speed with which business took Reagan's urgings for business to begin workplace drug-testing to heart. Reagan, after all, while working for the Actors' Guild, was spying on his peers and doing the dirty work of the studio heads by vetting his peers for them.
Having taken more power from individuals and given it to business, it became easier for business to deny labor its share of productivity gains, and to expand its power to an even greater degree--businesses now even feel free to fire or refuse to hire people with less than perfect credit ratings or have even a brief lapse in employment.
The drug war in this country will never end because business doesn't want it to ever end.
butbutbut that would be a jobs killer.
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