The more you can increase fear of drugs and crime, welfare mothers, immigrants and aliens, the more you control all the people.
Our current prison state has the dual effect of getting rid of a superfluous population of basically unskilled workers (with a close race-class correlation), and also demonizing them... The drug war is basically for this - It has nothing to do with drugs, but it has plenty to do with criminalizing an unwanted population and scaring everybody else.
Suppose that the US really is trying to get rid of drugs in Colombia. Does Colombia then have the right to fumigate tobacco farms in Kentucky? They are producing a lethal substance far more dangerous than cocaine. More Colombians die from tobacco-related illnesses than Americans die from cocaine. Of course, Colombia has no right to do that.
Now take a look at the way the Drug War is conducted over the past 40 years. It goes back farther, but start from 40 years ago: There's very little spent on prevention and treatment. There's a lot on policing, a ton of stuff on border control and a lot on out-of-country operations. And the effect on the availability of drugs is almost undetectable; drug prices don't change on measures of availability. So there are two possibilities: Either those conducting the Drug War are lunatics, or they have another purpose.
Where are the drug cartels getting their weapons? They are being provided by the United States. Cut off that flow of arms.
One substitute for the disappearing Evil Empire (The Soviet Union) has been the threat of drug traffickers from Latin America. In early September 1989, a major government-media blitz was launched by the President. That month the AP wires carried more stories about drugs than about Latin America, Asia, the Middle East and Africa combined. If you looked at television, every news program had a big section on how drugs were destroying our society, becoming the greatest threat to our existence, etc.
The worst drug of all by far is tobacco; the death toll from tobacco is just overwhelming.
In fact, when drugs are legalized, use sometimes goes down, it's been claimed. Part of the reason is that teenage kids use illicit drugs because they are illicit. They are thumbing their noses at society. If they were legal, they might not.
Today, aid to Colombia is given under the pretext of a drug war. That's pretty hard to take seriously. Ten years ago, Amnesty International flatly called it a myth.
There's one white powder which is by far the most lethal known, it's called sugar. . . . The Caribbean back in the 18th century was a soft drug producer: sugar, rum, tobacco, chocolate. And in order to do it, they had to enslave Africans.
The actual consequences of Plan Colombia are to devastate peasant communities, which have been driven to drug production. These peasants have no particular desire to grow coca, but their other means of livelihood have been wiped out.
U.S. domestic drug policy does not carry out its stated goals, and policymakers are well aware of that. If it isn't about reducing substance abuse, what is it about? It is reasonably clear, both from current actions and the historical record, that substances tend to be criminalized when they are associated with the so-called dangerous classes, that the criminalization of certain substances is a technique of social control.
It's not in doubt that tobacco is far more lethal than hard drugs.
The drug problem is in the United States, not in Mexico. It's a demand problem and that is to be dealt with here, and it is not being dealt with. It's been shown over and over that prevention and treatment are far more cost effective than police action, out-of-country action, border control, and so on.
The Andes region is not stable. So we can expect to see more US intervention. It could be under any kind of pretext. We can no longer use the Russians as an excuse, as we did in Central America in the 1980's, so drugs will have to do.
When leaders carry out policies for decades that have no consequences for the stated goal and are very costly, you have to ask whether they are telling you the truth or whether the policies are for a different goal, because they are not reducing drug use.
Follow AzQuotes on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Every day we present the best quotes! Improve yourself, find your inspiration, share with friends
or simply: