We might as well get used to it. The United States doesn’t win every war. Moreover, the wars our government proclaims to be wars are basically badly thought up mistakes. I’ve always been a critical thinker and the moment our government proclaims any new type of program I look into the fine print to see what it’s really about.
Source: Ben Wallace-Wells - “How America Lost the War on Drugs”
After Thirty-Five Years and $500 Billion, Drugs Are as Cheap and Plentiful as Ever: An Anatomy of a Failure.
In this case you don’t even need to read the fine print - if you haven’t been living in a cave the past 100 years I would assume it to be rather obvious that of all the threats this country faces, drugs aren’t really one of them. Of course you always have people on society that can’t hold their own, but this is true for every drugs thats sold in this country - whether it’s legal or illegal.
I’ve posted on this topic before, but I’m revisiting the topic because an article with the same topic as this post was posted in rolling stone magazine. It covers the history of the US’ war on drugs and how bitterly it has failed, how much money was lost and how many people have been incarcerated based on rules that are way too strict.
How is that a crack user gets a mandatory jail sentence but when a CEO rips of hundreds of thousands of workers and the benefit funds get stolen this person gets away with a minor sentence in comparison. The crack user really only harms himself, and the addiction is punishment enough. The CEO goes into retirement and receives a severance package that will guarantee a golden path to old age.
Following is a quote from the article :
But what Haislip didn’t know was that the men in suits had already gone to work to rig the bill in their favor. “Quite frankly,” Allan Rexinger, one of the lobbyists present at the meeting later told reporters, “we appealed to a higher authority.” The pharmaceutical industry needed pseudoephedrine to make profitable cold medications. The result, to Haislip’s dismay, was a new law that monitored sales of ephedrine and pseudoephedrine in bulk powder but created an exemption for selling the chemicals in tablet form - a loophole that protected the pharmaceutical industry’s profits.
So what it boils down to, and this is what makes this situation so ironic to me, is the fact that powerful lobbies happen to have something against the banning of ephedrine. They can’t make the amount of profits they’re supposed to, hence they will do anything they can to block any kind of legislation that might get in the way of that. Take that corporate run society! So now it doesn’t effect environmentalism, or any other “marginal” topic - it effects legislation that many republicans would be in favor of - and it’s not going to happen because lobbyist are against it.
This article was written by Arno - Author's Website
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