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Wednesday, March 19. 2008
Addicted to the Drug War
News story Monday Night: more than 500 pounds of marijuana was found in a Phoenix home, still in the bales used to transport it from Mexico. The illegal drug trade. The effect it is having on America — the negative effect — is nearly beyond comprehension.Some people will look on the seizure as a good thing, that the authorities made some great headway in this great war on drugs. A war that was declared in 1927 and has only grown in size and financial drain. Conversely, the amount of illegal drugs being imported and used in this country has grown exponentially.
Maybe the drug war isn’t working.
In 2007 the budget for the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) was over 2.3 billion dollars. That’s about half of what President Bush spends in Iraq every week. That figure doesn’t count what the states, counties and local municipalities spend in their efforts to “combat drugs.” Nor does it count the money spent to incarcerate people arrested and imprisoned for drug busts and it certainly doesn’t count the money — meager as it is — to fund drug and alcohol rehabilitation. So, as a nation, we are spending far more than that on the illegal drug problem.
And that’s the problem. As we spend and spend and spend money in this “War on Drugs,” the drug kingpins keep making more and more money. The more shipments we snag, the more shipments they manage to get through the borders and onto our streets. Of course, politicians will tell us we have to fight this War on Drugs smarter and that by doing the same thing over and over again, we will eventually get different results.
Einstein is credited with saying the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Every year our politicians pour more and more money into this drug war — essentially doing the same things — expecting a different result.In reality though the usual result is what we get: huge expenditures of tax dollars for results we can show on TV. Drug busts make the news in the localities where they occur and of course the authorities, along with the local media, sex up the stories by adding “also seized were guns.” Once in a while they show an arsenal with enough weaponry to successfully assault Rhode Island. But most of the time it’s a couple firearms and I’m left wondering, what does a shotgun, a deer rifle and a Glock have to do with anything?
Back in the ‘80’s, when Reagan really amped up this phony war by sending our tax dollars into Columbia to blow up drug labs, we saw on the national news footage of U.S. agents (troops) assaulting cocaine processing plants with the usual fiery explosions and pyres of burning blow. Much to the chagrin of all involved — including the media that so loves stories with stuff blowing up — the trade in illegal cocaine didn’t subside: it increased. Imagine that. We were sending our people into harm’s way and the result was just opposite of the stated goal!
Hey! Where have I heard that before? Oh yeah, the Bushies said the Iraqis would love us for getting rid of Saddam and our troops wouldn’t be there longer than five months. Oops. Slight miscalculation.
Once the national news machines realized they were covering a losing effort, they stopped reporting on the U.S. interdiction in other nations, with the notable exception of when our troops invaded Panama to assault Manuel Noriega.
That was planned and took place during the Bush 41 administration if you recall. The irony, no, the hypocrisy, being that less than ten years earlier George H.W. Bush was in Panama shaking hands with Noriega thanking him for his efforts on the part of assisting the U.S. in the drug war and Noriega’s assistance in Reagan’s illegal war against Nicaragua. That’s the war that produced the Iran-Contra scandal that nearly crushed the Reagan Administration.
Thankfully for them, the chickenshit Democrats didn’t push for impeachment, even though President Reagan came out and said he was responsible for what had happened, that over 200 Reagan Administration people had either been convicted or indicted for related crimes.
The phony war on drugs is just a front for other preoccupations for some administrations.
Hey! Where have we seen that again? Oh yeah … the war on terror switched from Afghanistan, where the terrorists had their base of operations, to Iraq, where our troops are bogged down in a war with no successful conclusion in sight. The “War on Terror” was just an excuse to invade Iraq.
In countries where drug use is legal, drug-related crimes are non-existent. In the U.S., where drugs are very much illegal, we have the largest penal system (per capita) in the world. And most of the criminals doing time are there for drug-related crimes. The amount of money spent to house these drug offenders is astounding. Billions spent by federal, state and county governments, not to mention courts so overloaded by the drug cases, true justice is nothing more than legend handed down in middle school civics books.
Which brings to mind the town of Tulia, Texas. Of course it’s gotta be Texas. In 1999 a “Gypsy Cop” by the name of Tom Coleman claimed to have bought over 100 packages of drugs from 46 people in the small Panhandle town of just over 5,000 people. All but six were African-Americans. Coleman had no records of his “buys,” none of those arrested were found with drugs, drug related money, drug paraphernalia or weapons. After the first few defendants were sentenced for stretches that included sentences of over 300 years, most of the others pleaded guilty for lesser sentences.Even though several defendants were able to secure acquittals after proving Officer Coleman had lied about buying drugs from them, the other convictions were not over turned.
Eventually, civil rights lawyers stepped in and eventually secured the release of all those imprisoned by Officer Coleman’s fraudulent claims. Coleman eventually was convicted of perjury for his testimony.
A rogue cop, whose history would make your head spin — there was an arrest warrant for Coleman for theft and skipping out on his debts while he was conducting his so called sting operation in Tulia — had the ability to imprison 10% of Tulia’s African-Americans essentially without any evidence or corroborating testimony. For phony drug crimes.
What was Swisher County’s (where Tulia is located) motivation for hiring Coleman for this drug sting program? Federal grant money. Show some results in the “War on Drugs” and the federal government will give community money to carry on police operations.
Even though most people in government (with the exception Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona), publicly and privately, admit the “drug war” is unwinnable, all agree it is imminently fundable. Throw money at policing the drug war and most Americans think that’s a good thing.
General Barry McCaffrey, the “Drug Czar” under President Clinton, even went on TV to tell everyone the authorities were winning the war on drugs, even though every agency and private organization that is involved with the illegal drug trade said heroin use was on the rise. Clinton’s stature declined for me after that little white lie. The real money though isn’t our tax dollars being spent. It’s the lobbyist dollars from the legal drug manufacturers who see illegal drugs as competition for their legal trade. It’s always about the money. I could write a month long series just on the CIA’s involvement in the cocaine and heroin trades just so they could fund little escapades like the illegal war in Nicaragua.
-- Here’s a little fact, the brother of Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, is the biggest opium/heroin producer in that country. Karzai is our ally by the way. Think we’ll ever go after Karzai and his brother … oh wait, we went after Manuel Noriega even though CIA Director William Casey told Noriega he could engage in the cocaine and marijuana trades as long as he let the U.S. use Panama as a base of operations for their illegal war in Nicaragua.
Legalize drugs. It’s about time.
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