The War on Drugs: 'A Trillion Dollar Failure'

[eridani]

http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/30972-the-war-on-drugs-a-trillion-dollar-failure

It almost seems like the War on Terror and the War on Drugs are all part of one big, fruitless conflict.

These ISIS beheadings that we're seeing, that's a direct copy of what the cartels were doing in 2007 and 2008, when they were chopping off people's heads and sending out video clips as tools of intimidation or recruitment. The cartels had become so hip to modern communications that they realized that they were not only fighting a shooting war but that they needed to fight a media and propaganda war as well. And that's new in the history of organized crime.

I couldn't understand it until I found out that the Zetas had imported Special Forces veterans from the Guatemalan army, which had fought the "dirty war" in the Nineties against communist insurgents — and one of their things was to cut off heads. So you can literally see the influence come in.

What makes the cartels so effective?

They aren't in the dope business. They're in the territory business, they're in the protection business, they're in the intimidation business. The product doesn't really matter as long as it's illegal in the United States.

One of the most powerful points the book makes is that the War on Drugs might be the defining event of the past few decades, not just for Mexico but also the United States.

I can draw you a direct line between events in Ferguson and Baltimore and Cleveland to the War on Drugs. The hostility between inner-city communities and American police forces begins with the War on Drugs and continues to the point where you get militarized police armed like soldiers, acting like soldiers. So the fruits that we're reaping now are seeds that were planted back in 1971, when Nixon declared war on drugs.

One reason that we were so quickly able to move into the hypersurveillance state in the War on Terror was because we've been practicing it for decades. All those systems are in place. Now the technology has gotten much better, of course.

[PoliticAverse]

1. So which Presidential candidates are willing to admit that? n/t

[6chars]

3. we are approaching 24 years in which the President is someone who may have

smoked marijuana. they know what it is and what it isn't. all of them have been content to let people's lives be absolutely ruined for doing the same thing. the cost of the war on drugs isn't just $1 trillion. It's millions of users jailed, made felons, families torn apart.

[Live and Learn]

2. Yep! nt

[B Calm]

4. Great Post, K&R

[Scuba]

5. K&R

[djean111]

6. Oh, the people who got the trillion dollars think it is a huge success!

Money for prisons! Money for everybody connected with the "war"! Just think what we could do with that money. Infrastructure, expand social security, expand Medicare and Medicaid, etc.

[Human101948]

7. If we brought our medical care costs in line with other developed countries...

there would be no need for any additional funds or taxes. We could in fact pay off the scary, scary deficit with the savings.

21 graphs that show America’s health-care prices are ludicrous

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/03/26/21-graphs-that-show-americas-health-care-prices-are-ludicrous/

[djean111]

8. I think the TPP and TTIP have provisions that will lengthen the release time for generics,

and I think I saw something that said Pharma will be giving the countries involved the list of formularies they must use, and no negotiating lower prices. Something along those lines. So my prediction is our hideous costs will not go down, other countries' costs will go up. The TPP/TTIP is all about protecting global corporate investment, not trade between countries.

[Octafish]

9. 'A War on the Blacks.' - president Richard Nixon

The War on Drugs and the New Jim Crow

By Michelle Alexander

EXCERPT...

The uncomfortable truth, however, is that crime rates do not explain the sudden and dramatic mass incarceration of African Americans during the past 30 years. Crime rates have fluctuated over the last few decades—they are currently at historical lows—but imprisonment rates have consistently soared. Quintupled, in fact. And the vast majority of that increase is due to the War on Drugs. Drug offenses alone account for about two-thirds of the increase in the federal inmate population and more than half of the increase in the state prison population.

The drug war has been brutal—complete with SWAT teams, tanks, bazookas, grenade launchers, and sweeps of entire neighborhoods—but those who live in white communities have little clue to the devastation wrought. This war has been waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color, even though studies consistently show that people of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates. In fact, some studies indicate that white youth are significantly more likely to engage in illegal drug dealing than black youth. Any notion that drug use among African Americans is more severe or dangerous is belied by the data. White youth, for example, have about three times the number of drug-related visits to the emergency room as their African American counterparts.

That is not what you would guess, though, when entering our nation’s prisons and jails, overflowing as they are with black and brown drug offenders. In some states, African Americans comprise 80 to 90 percent of all drug offenders sent to prison.

This is the point at which I am typically interrupted and reminded that black men have higher rates of violent crime. That’s why the drug war is waged in poor communities of color and not middle class suburbs. Drug warriors are trying to get rid of those drug kingpins and violent offenders who make ghetto communities a living hell. It has nothing to do with race; it’s all about violent crime.

Again, not so. President Ronald Reagan officially declared the current drug war in 1982, when drug crime was declining, not rising. From the outset, the war had little to do with drug crime and nearly everything to do with racial politics. The drug war was part of a grand and highly successful Republican Party strategy of using racially coded political appeals on issues of crime and welfare to attract poor and working class white voters who were resentful of, and threatened by desegregation, busing, and affirmative action. In the words of H.R. Haldeman, President Richard Nixon’s White House Chief of Staff: “(T)he whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.”

A few years after the drug war was announced, crack cocaine hit the streets of inner-city communities. The Reagan administration seized on this development with glee, hiring staff who were to be responsible for publicizing inner-city crack babies, crack mothers, crack whores, and drug-related violence. The goal was to make inner-city crack abuse and violence a media sensation, bolstering public support for the drug war which, it was hoped, would lead Congress to devote millions of dollars in additional funding to it.
The plan worked like a charm. For more than a decade, black drug dealers and users would be regulars in newspaper stories and would saturate the evening TV news. Congress and state legislatures nationwide would devote billions of dollars to the drug war and pass harsh mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes—sentences longer than murderers receive in many countries.

CONTINUED...

http://reimaginerpe.org/20years/alexander

[eridani]

11. Make this an OP?

I know this was widely reviewed when it came out, but the message bears LOTS of repeating.

[Octafish]

17. Thanks! Will do.

Your OP is why I think DU matters, eridani. Truth is what makes Democracy possible.

[Mr Dixon]

16. IMO

Agreed the war on drugs has worked like a charm, trillion maybe an understatement. This is a job creator, and bed filler the prison industrial complex is raking in the dollars. Brown families have increased the profit margins what’s not to like?

[Octafish]

18. Tyranny is good business...

...for the Ownership caste. The rest of us are SOL.

[raouldukelives]

10. K&R

So amazing to me, still, to think about how Mexican drug cartels had special deposit boxes for HSBC.

Meanwhile we have kids serving years for joints.

Years.

Corporatists achieve what shareholders finance.

"Money trumps peace"

[Fumesucker]

12. What I always find fascinating about these sorts of posts on this issue is the rec list

Not who is on the rec list but rather who is not...

After a while you start to see a pattern, this is not a popular issue with certain segments of the DU community.

[BrotherIvan]

13. Any discussion of policy does not attract a certain set

on DU. The fault lines are rather obvious.

[Mr Dixon]

19. Agreed

I'm think we need to keep pushing these topics regardless of how little attention they get.

[sorefeet]

14. The drug war supports millions of people

cops, lawyers, prison personal, CCA, CEO'S, investors. Millions of people. When you have sold out your country and sent all the jobs overseas, ya got to make a phony economy from something to make it look like you are doing your elected job, so you warehouse human beings. Lets not forget the prison lobby jobs, to bribe our politicians to make fucked up laws to support the human ware house industry. What a bunch of chicken shit slime the ruling class are.

[NaturalHigh]

15. We've only spent a trillion dollars on that clusterfuck?

I would have thought it was at least five times that.