Drug Wars
Posted: March 25th, 2009, 10:42 pm
Drug Wars
for release 03-26-09
Dallas, Texas
by Lightning Rod
Maybe I'm just a nostalgic old hippie. I remember when the drug trade with Mexico was a benign enterprise. We would go down to Mexico and stay in the farmer's hacienda and take our little 50 or a hundred pounds of his crop back to Texas and sell it to our friends. No problem, no drug wars, no cartels. Family business.
But that was before the drug trade became WalMartized. Corporations which we call drug cartels grew. Now they compete with automatic weapons, which we provide, for the profits, which we provide. Ain't America great? It's the Land of Opportunity. If we won't let the Mexicans pick our crops or make our widgets, we at least let them sell us our dope.
In the process of this service, masses of money are involved. Money is the wind in the sails of the illegal drug trade. There is so much money involved that thugs and gangs and governments try to secure their slice of the pie by whatever means. We are seeing the results of this sinister transaction on our Southern border.
More people have been killed in this greedy and needless guerilla war in the last year than have perished in Iraq and Afghanistan in the past six years. It's a large problem.
Secretary of State Clinton fairly well defined the problem. She acknowledged that the 'War on Drugs' has been an utter failure. And she also said that the problem was based on America's appetite for drugs. But that's as far as she went. What she didn't say was that the real wind in the sails of this ship of violence and corruption is money, not dope.
I don't know if it's the anorexic legacy of Nancy Reagan or what. But we seem not to be able to see that we have made the problem worse with our drug laws. If we legalized and controlled all drugs, the problems on the border would evaporate.
We control and tax cigarettes and booze. It's an asset to the commonweal. But we insist on making what could be another sin-tax asset into a liability. We even made a 'War' out of it. Instead of taxing the drug dealers, we are letting them tax us. We spend more than a billion dollars a year to maintain the thugs at the DEA. Corruption is endemic. We are being asked to dispatch troops to the region. It's insane.
The Poet's Eye has seen this subject from all angles. I think we should legalize and control ALL drugs. Let the buyer beware. If we simply decriminalized marijuana, that would take more than 50% of the revenue out of the pockets of the criminals on our border.
You know I smoked a lot of grass.
Oh Lord! I popped a lot of pills.
But I've never touched nothin'
That my spirit couldn't kill.
You know I've seen a lot of people walking 'round
With tombstones in their eyes.
But the pusher don't care
If you live -- or if you die.
God Damn! The pusher.
God Damn! The pusher.---Steppenwolf