What is the purpose of the War on Drugs?
Is it to reduce competition with Big Pharma and the tobacco and alcohol industries?
Perhaps it is so banksters can enrich themselves laundering drug money to decrease their dependency on taxpayer bailouts?
Or maybe it is an opportunity to provide jobs in the ever expanding police state, the military/mercenary industries and Homeland Security?
Could it be a creative way to intensify class war by creating a criminal class of the underfed and unwashed dependent on the drug trade for survival?
Is it to justify opportunities for enrichment of lawyers, judges and others employed in the justice system, the prison industrial complex and the rapidly expanding privatized prison system?
Is it to empower righteous racists who exploit migrants with fear of deportation and incarceration by equating brown skin with the drug trade and legal status?
Is it conceivable that agribusiness benefits from laws prohibiting cannabis, coca and poppies which require less water and chemicals than genetically engineered and monoculture crops subsidized by government and controlled by giant corporations?
Could it be that one of the purposes is for media to use trauma and drama related to drug busts, crimes and tragedies to terrorize citizens into sacrificing their civil rights for security?
Perhaps it is a logical extension of globablization, entitling the empire to invade and occupy countries to enforce compliance in controlling the international drug trade?
Might it be an ideal instrument for instilling values of aggression, brutality, fear, racism, bigotry, hatred, destruction and death necessary for world domination?
Could the purpose simply be to satisfy an addiction to war?
Or possibly the War on Drugs is to protect and save us from ourselves?
This article appears in Apr 29 – May 5, 2010.
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Sue–
No.
Have a nice day.
C’mon Source, no letter of the week for this??
Sue made certain to include all the essential elements of a Bastian letter in the first couple of paragraphs. Banksters, Big Pharma, police state, military industrial complex, calling out our military. She even invented a new one in an attempt to seal the deal, “prison industrial complex”. For emphasis, all the real zingers went into the top third of the letter.
One of her better efforts, it deserves a bag of coffee.
Jon–
Wrong!
“Prison industrial complex” is just another regurgitated expression–been around for more than ten years. Read up on it–very interesting.
This may be the finest, the most accurate, mailbox piece The Source has ever published. Indeed, with this and the Rise in Decline feature it may very well mark this as the best Source issue ever published (which of course isn’t sayin’ much). No wonder the trolls are pissing their ‘oops I pissed my pants’.
fergoodnesssakes, stephen, you used to be a pretty sensible guy. WTF happened?
And trolls, please, check out the masthead, my masthead, paying particular attention to the part that says ‘does not give a rat’s ass what you think’. Talk smack, sell wolf tickets, till you’re blue in the face, till the cows come home, till the hungry lizards come on white horses with a thousand ‘angels’ to carry away the ‘faithful’… as The Source is the second slowest loading web-site in Bend* I’ll not be back till the next time something in the print edition attracts my attention.
*The number one slowest loading web-site in town is the college.
Thomas
“…the finest, the most accurate, mailbox piece The Source has ever published” is nothing more than a laundry list of questions that provide no insight to the issue, sometimes border on paranoid and sometimes on the delusional, and deserve an answer.
I gave it.
Sue–a very nice person who I do not attack troll-wise or in any other fashion–provides a list of musings my college friends and I voiced forty years ago while appropriately impaired. We couldn’t be bothered with proof–the idea in itself was enough. To no one’s surprise their merit dissipated with the dawn. Now we have the internet for proof–musings and claims are ‘concrete’ because we can read them. A blog or posting or letter is not fact, but nothing more than an opinion in the ether and I treat it as such.