It's funny how we keep using the propaganda phrases the govt has fed us, like "War on Drugs". There has never been a war on drugs. The USG was instrumental in creating and proliferating the drug trade from the 1980s up to our exit from Afghanistan, and is likely still doing so.
A government is perfectly capable of doing proliferation and interdiction at the same time. On interdiction and enforcement the USG has spent over a trillion dollars and incarcerated millions since war was declared in the '70s. That ain't nothing.
That makes it sound like there was some sort of plan or strategy to try to end abuse of illegal drugs. There wasn't. First they propped up cartels in order to sell drugs. Then when our people got addicted to them, they passed draconian laws to punish the drug addicts (and marginalized communities that have no way to live except drugs). And finally they invaded and destabilized a country, enabling the mass production of cheap opium/heroin, which was sold to our citizens. The trillions of dollars and millions put in jail was to incarcerate our own citizens that we got hooked on drugs in the first place. The war wasn't on drugs, it was on communism and poor minorities.
TIL that Afghanistan resumed exporting Opium and derived goid from 2000/1 to 2022, which coincides with the US invasion of Afghanistan.
The US wanted them to import synthetic OxyContin, which is stronger and therefore more dangerous than Heroin (which can be produced from Poppy (Sr's name)).
Also, Opioids actually prolong pain by affecting the nervous system.
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The film "American Made" is about US government involvement in trafficking in the 1980s.
"Mandatory minimum sentences! Build more prisons! Lock up the users!"
Meanwhile they - the Republican federal government of the 1980s that recklessly deficit spent to a record degree - were involved in trafficking, were driving up the price with artificial scarcity, were dumping toxic exfoliant on campesinos in their country, where structuro-lateral adjustment by US banks that had very strongly recommended that other countries forego developing an internal economy in favor of specializing in certain exports only had failed. For example, "You (your country must only) grow wheat. Do not make washing machines for yourselves." And then the market for illicit exports that compete with the price of wheat.
Republicans have built these prisons and filled them with drug users and sellers.
Democrats have advocated for harm reduction, criminal justice reform, medicalization, and legalization.
Nixon, a Republican in the 1970s, decided that he was qualified to disagree with the interim Shaeffer report; which - like the LaGuardia report - found that cannabis should be a public health issue instead of a criminal issue. Nixon disregarded the major government-commissioned report on drugs at the time and villified drugs, druggies, anti-war idiot left on his lawn, and fucking hippies.
Should they hippocritically have access to cannabis that they have so criminalized and so victimized?
There are tens of millions of cannabis users in the US. There are thus millions of person years of wrongful incarceration.
The Right has vilified and wrongfully incarcerated unequally according to medical status, without proving intent, and with cruel and foolish disregard for the evaluations of the La Guardia commission and Shaffer report.
How can we refuse to pay for another bs junta claiming to be protecting us from severe peril while knocking out their competition, protecting their liability as sellers, and sabotaging quality control they enjoy for their essential inputs?
Somewhere there's a chart of (1) the addiction rate; and (2) and the federal and state funding schedules for criminalization of drugs.
Killing traffickers without due process presumably forces drug prices up, causes violence, and terrifies the competition.
Should the US government kill drug traffickers without due process? The former president of the Philippines should not have been killing people for drugs without due process.
If you murder (foreign traffickers, goy women and children, towlies, etc.) without positive identification or due process or presenting credentials, you cannot be the "good guy" to Americans who know the law and stick to their values.
