Drug War a Success
This is to disagree with David Bearman’s assertion that the War on Drugs is a “failure.” [End War on Marijuana, 8/30/11]. In doing so, he accepts that the stated goals of the war on drugs —reducing addiction, etc.— are the real goals.
They never were, as the Nixon tapes revealed unambiguously. The federal Controlled Substances Acts was designed to justify ever-bigger police budgets and staffing levels, to encircle and infiltrate the ghettos, and to make sure that the rebellions of the 1960s were permanently snuffed out. The War on Drugs is not a failure for the prison-industrial complex, the armaments makers, the pharmaceutical industry, etc.
Bearman’s plea that Obama become “a man of his word” is similarly misleading —as if the president’s decisions have been a function of character rather than subservience to Wall Street. I hope he’s a better diagnostician when it comes to medicine.
