The war on drugs, now 36 years old and hundreds of billions of dollars in the hole, is a losing battle. A battle that has taken on more meaning over the last few years, as it goes hand in hand with the war on terror.
“…..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. In the past two years, the drug war has become the Taliban’s most effective recruiter in Afghanistan. Afghanistan’s Muslim extremists have reinvigorated themselves by supporting and taxing the countless peasants who are dependent one way or another on the opium trade, their only reliable source of income. The Taliban is becoming richer and stronger by the day……”
In some reports it’s estimated that law enforcement agencies seize less than 20 percent of the coke and heroin and yet they would need to nab 60 to 80 percent to make the industry unprofitable.
“Supply is so plentiful that the price of a gram of heroin is plummeting in Europe, especially in the United Kingdom. As for cocaine, according to the UNODC, the street price of a gram in the United States is now less than $70, compared with $184 in 1990. Adjusted for inflation, that’s a threefold drop.”
So then the debate turns to figuring out alternatives to the war on drugs…. to help the farmers who have no choice but to grow coca find other outlets, to survive and feed their children, or….. to simply make drugs legal under the state’s control are two of the more popular ideas…
I feel the war on drugs in the US should be within the home and it is our responsibility to guide our children…. overseas? we should be blasting the fields with every sprayer that we have… for years the US has been spraying the fields of Columbia, and yet we haven’t touched any of the poppy fields in Afghanistan?
It’s such a shitty feeling knowing the leaders of our country are a bunch of goons, and the best we can do is hope for a better situation in two years…
519 days to be exact….