Consign the 'war on drugs' to history

For 40 years, the country has been officially at war against narcotics. The "war on drugs", a term conjured up by Richard Nixon in 1971 and used more frequently during the dark days of Watergate, when the president and his team were looking for any and all ways to distract an angry electorate from the administration's crookedness, has cost America hundreds of billions of dollars and generated remarkably scanty returns. It has led to unprecedented expansions in prisoner populations at a state and federal level; the building of hundreds of new prisons to house these additional inmates – at a staggering cost to state budgets; has impacted American foreign policy around the globe; and has wreaked havoc on already dilapidated communities and their residents. What it hasn't done is end the American appetite for illegal drugs or destroy the supply chains that feed this demand.

Sure, Colombia has seemingly gotten its cartels at least partially on the run, but the Mexican cartels that have succeeded them are at least as vicious and at least as able to hijack the state apparatus to their advantage. Sure, hundreds of thousands of street corner hustlers have been charged with drug crimes and gotten off the streets over the past decades; but they are replaced by new pushers as soon as they are carted off to the local jail to await trial. Sure, some drugs are used less frequently than used to be the case, but others, in particular meth, have become evermore entrenched and evermore damaging to the societal fabric.

Yet, despite the failings, the drug wars have been seen as such as Third Rail issue that, since Nixon, Democratic and Republican administrations alike have hewn closely to the same script. (True, there was a slight dip in the rhetoric during the Carter presidency, but since Reagan's election the fighting has raged unabated.) That has meant more money for interdiction of drugs and incarceration of users and sellers; more of an emphasis on law enforcement responses; more collateral penalties – restrictions on access to welfare, public housing, education loans and the like – for people convicted of drug offenses.

Barack Obama's presidency has broken this mould. Since coming into office, Obama and his team have been reorienting the country vis-à-vis drug control. They have talked less about a war on drugs and more about public health responses to addiction; less about wholesale incarceration and more about treatment – in some cases, the country's new drug policymakers support a person's record being expunged after they have completed court-mandated treatment, so that the drug conviction doesn't evolve into a lifelong handicap. They have made a point of defining the issue in holistic terms, as a problem not only for law enforcement but for systems that provide education, mental health services, job training, community development and so on. Gil Kerlikowske, head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, has repeatedly talked of the need to treat small-time users rather than criminalise them.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/may/29/usdomesticpolicy-us-politics

future generations will disregard prohibitions against politically incorrect drugs.

It would be much more effective if we could have an open and ongoing conversation at all levels about why so mamy Americans, of ALL ages, NEEEEEEEEDD so desparately to alter their consciousness. What does this mean about who we are and how we live?

"Shake N Bake" is a new, extremely easy and convenient meth recipe that uses far less equipment, time, chemicals, and effort than older "meth lab" style recipes. Nearly any fool or bumpkin can now brew up a nice little stash of meth in just a few short hours. If you can make a cake, you can probably make meth.

This is the result of law enforcement's much touted "victory" in the last few years. They liked to brag about how they had gotten so much better at busting meth labs. And they had. Past tense.

Enter "shake N bake".

Yes, the ones who didn't make it, didn't make it, but a bunch of people got over it. Why?

Because "we" are concentrating at the wrong end of the process, kids are being exposed to MORE and EARLIER, thus FAR reducing their chances of getting over it. That DEEP feedback loop just keeps on keeping on.

AND We need better responses for them than just "Accept 'Jesus' into your life". Young people are particularly vulnerable to ANY hypocrisy (I think because it is a fundamental threat to their ability to survive). It makes them angry and they can see quite clearly what hypocrisy relgion has become, especially The Prosperity Gospel. Problem is that they are not equipped, and worse yet they are not allowed, to deal with these problems, so they use the tools available to them and are mastered by those tools before they even have a chance.

Somebody was telling me the other day, at the "beauty" salon, a young person btw who was apparently starting to get it together, she said dysfunction, stress, drama, dishonesty, all of that, they've NEVER known anything else, NONE of them have, not the poor, not the middle-class, not the wealthy. All of that messed-upness is **NORMAL to them**. "It's the way things are."

And THESE are the people who will govern the Boomers' old age!!!

God help us all.

:rant:

to become junkies.