Tuesday, May 18, 2010

The Reason We Have A "War on Drugs"


From US Drug War Has Met None of It's Goals

- $20 billion to fight the drug gangs in their home countries. In Colombia, for example, the United States spent more than $6 billion, while coca cultivation increased and trafficking moved to Mexico — and the violence along with it.

- $33 billion in marketing "Just Say No"-style messages to America's youth and other prevention programs. High school students report the same rates of illegal drug use as they did in 1970, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says drug overdoses have "risen steadily" since the early 1970s to more than 20,000 last year.

- $49 billion for law enforcement along America's borders to cut off the flow of illegal drugs. This year, 25 million Americans will snort, swallow, inject and smoke illicit drugs, about 10 million more than in 1970, with the bulk of those drugs imported from Mexico.

- $121 billion to arrest more than 37 million nonviolent drug offenders, about 10 million of them for possession of marijuana. Studies show that jail time tends to increase drug abuse.

- $450 billion to lock those people up in federal prisons alone. Last year, half of all federal prisoners in the U.S. were serving sentences for drug offenses.


4/5ths of all the money spent in 40 years in fighting this "war on drugs" has been spent to militarize and increase our police forces, and to create a literal gulag of Federal Prison detention facilities across the country.

I think the article's title has got it completely wrong...it's met all of it's goals.

7 comments:

Miles Anderson said...

They just left out the word "stated".

I think they have met the goal of keeping the prison lobbies happy.

It is "amusing" that before ~1900 a lot of the discussion around drug control was that it wasn't constitutional. Slow creep through 1914 and 1937 and then the big boom with Nixon and imprisoning ones enemies and making ones friends rich in 1970.

Now we just pay.

Hughman said...

Two words: Industrial-military complex.

Columbia's coccaine production has crashed this decade to 1991 levels. But that's because the State has won the war of attrition. And it's all moved to central America and Mexico.

Hughman said...

My last post wasn't clear: America funds the War because of the industrial-military complex. My next paragraph is simply about chaning and shifitng patterns.

John Smith said...

just another gov't institution with which to tax us, have a hand in our pocket.

Andrew Ryan said...

"Just another gov't institution with which to tax us, have a hand in our pocket."


And a pistol to our neck.

Anonymous said...

Didn't the CIA head testify in front of Congress in 1994 that they started the crack cocaine epidemic in 1985. Any money they get outside of Congress, they do not have to say where they got it and can do with it as they please. There was also a CIA plane that crashed in Latin America that contained drugs. A recent Fox News segment with Geraldo in Afghanistan showed the US Military "guarding" the opium. Follow the money-Norm

Draupadi said...

And yet I know several white people who got busted for drugs and had to do jail time.