Just say Know! Essay Example for Free

Just say Know! Essay Intelligent consideration of the war on drugs may lead one to believe that it is inexplicable, irrational and unsustainable. It is none of these. It is a rational subterfuge perpetrated for a particular purpose, namely, the profits resulting from the importation and distribution of huge quantities of heroin and cocaine, and those who are behind the war on drugs are the same as those who are responsible for the widespread use of these addictive and life-destroying drugs. Unless they are stopped the war on drugs and all its attendant horrors will continue to ruin America. Just one CIA drug ring, that of Rafael Caro Quintero and Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo based in Guadalajara, Mexico was smuggling four tons A MONTH into the U. S. during the same period! Other operations including Manuel Noriega (Panama), John Hull (Costa Rica), Felix Rodriguez (El Salvador), Juan Ramon Matta Ballesteros (Honduras) and elements of the Guatemalan and Honduran military were dealing close to two hundred tons a year or close to 70% of total U. S. consumption at the same time! All of them have been connected to CIA by documentation and testimony which already exists! This coke was smoked, snorted and injected by people of every race and in every state; in the cities and on the farms. — http://www. radio4all. org/crackcia/sjmn. html The CIA smuggling cocaine? U. S. covert action organizations responsible for flooding the U. S. with addictive drugs? Farfetched? Far from it — the evidence is now overwhelming. Put simply, in order to keep making enormous profits, those responsible for the distribution of addictive drugs in the U. S. (and it is not only the CIA) must keep the use of these drugs illegal. Were drug use legalized their profits would disappear overnight. So how to keep drugs illegal? Simply buy up enough legislators to block any steps toward revealing the facts of the matter or toward reversal of the present state of prohibition. The profits of the drug lords, and the corruption of the legislators, makes this possible. So drug use is demonized, those who use drugs are turned into criminals, and to make it appear that the authorities are sincere in their attempts to combat the drug problem hundreds of thousands of drug users are arrested and thrown into jail for up to forty years. Those responsible for this, and for the addiction of millions of Americans and others for the sake of profit, can only be described as evil. Not only are users of the life-destroying drugs heroin and cocaine caught up in this pogrom but also users of non-addictive life-enhancing drugs such as LSD, THC (marijuana), psilocybin (mushrooms) and MDMA (ecstasy). The users of such substances are often some of the kindest and most non-violent people youll ever meet (Ive met plenty of them), but for the sake of perpetuating the profits of the drug lords (both American and foreign) many of them have had their lives ruined and most of the rest live in fear of persecution. Its about time that Americans woke up to the fact that it is the prohibition of drugs which is making possible these profits, is corrupting their government and which is likely (if not corrected) to be the ruin of their country. The information regarding who is profiting from the illegal status of drug usage is available now, and no-one will be able to say, as the good Germans of the Nazi era said, we didnt know. Just say Know! On 1997-05-22 the late Terence McKenna said, on the Art Bell radio talk show, in response to a callers question as to why psychoactive drugs are illegal: Let me say this I mean, Im a bit of a pessimist on this subject. Because I take psychedelics so seriously, I cant imagine them ever being really legal unless theres a total social transformation because my analysis of it is, the reason everybody from a Marxist state to a Christian oligarchy to a high-tech industrial democracy can get together and agree that psychedelics are a terrible terrible thing is because the social effects of psychedelics being taken by large numbers of people is a kind of deconditioning from the cultural myths, whatever they are. Its no knock on any given society, its just that if people start taking psychedelics, they start questioning what theyve been told about reality. And culture is in the business of keeping you inside a set of predetermined answers to those questions. Although McKenna had some interesting to say about drug usage (and called for the legalization of all drugs), here he missed the main point entirely. It is true that psychedelics are de-conditioning agents, and that they lead to questioning of mainstream premises defining reality (and perhaps even contribute to the dreaded questioning of authority — though no drugs are needed for this), but this is not the fundamental reason that the Drug War continues. The fundamental reason is money. As stated above, it is the enormity of the profits from the international illicit drug trade that requires drugs to remain prohibited. Nothing much can be done to end the Drug War until this fact is recognized (recognition will come more quickly to those who read James Mills book, The Underground Empire). To assert, as McKenna did, that prohibition continues because legislators are afraid of youth questioning authority, suggests that the solution is to reassure and re-educate those legislators so that they see the light. Such a re-education is certainly desirable, but it will do very little to bring an end to the Drug War as long as the fundamental economic basis for prohibition is not recognized and acknowledged. In the meantime the insanity continues †¢ The late Peter McWilliams wrote: Prisons are filled to capacity and beyond. In most areas an early-release program has been instituted which, of course, fails to differentiate between prisoners whose crimes had innocent victims [e. g. theft, assault and rape] and prisoners whose crimes did not [e. g. marijuana smokers]. This puts truly dangerous criminals out on the street sooner, giving them extra months, and in some cases years, to rape, rob and plunder. Due to overcrowding caused by the War on Drugs, prisons (not enjoyable places under the best of conditions) have become intolerable. Some of them violate the constitutional guarantee against cruel and unusual punishment. With the overcrowding, any hope of rehabilitation, job placement, counseling, therapy, or achieving any other high-minded goals is completely derailed. — Aint Nobodys Business If You Do, p. 242. And the carnage continues †¢ P. B. Floyd: Weighing The Harms In 1980, Californias prisons held 23,511 inmates or 1 in 1006 residents. By 1994, about 125,000 were incarcerated, or 1 in 256. By the year 2000, the California Department of Corrections projects that 1 in 146 people in California will be in prison. Drug offenses were responsible for 25 percent of the US prison population in 1995, up from only 8 percent in 1980. About 220,000 drug prisoners were held in state prisons in 1995, up 1070 percent from 1980. Over 70 percent of the arrests have been for possession of drugs, not sale or manufacture. Over 200,000 prisoners of the Drug War in the State of California alone — victims of a vicious and depraved pogrom occurring right under the noses of the citizens, most of whom are willing to look the other way, like the good Germans of the 1930s. As regards state persecution of minorities there is no difference between sending a person to prison for smoking pot and sending a person to a labor camp for being a member of a group which lights candles in memory of deceased relatives on Friday evenings. In both cases the imprisonment is done by Nazis or those with the mentality of Nazis. And if you think this comparison of drug warriors to Nazis is far-fetched, just take a look at the book mentioned above, R. L. Millers Drug Warriors and Their Prey: From Police Power to Police State. If you read this book you wont be able to say to your children, I didnt know what was happening. Jonathan Blumen: What I Learned From Auschwitz The article by P. B. Floyd discusses the following harms resulting from the war on drugs: o Incarceration Boom and Lives wasted in prison o Addicts cant get effective treatment o Increased AIDS Cases o Civil Liberties Lost o Increased street and organized crime o Waste of billions o Third world dictators supported Yet this War has been going on for twenty years and is still being promoted by the U. S. and other cryptofascist governments despite the massive evidence of its harm. What is really going on that this can happen? †¢ U. S. Prison Population Sets New Record in 1996 [Page removed from Yahoo and also from the Wayback Machine. ] The U. S. prison population increased by about 55,900 inmates last year, reaching a record 1,182,000 at the end of 1996 and posing new problems with overcrowding, the Justice Department reported Sunday. The report attributed the increase in the state prison population over the decade to more black drug offenders and more white violent offenders behind bars. Other factors included a sharp increase in the number of people imprisoned for drug offenses. — Reuters, 1997-06-23 †¢ U. S. Prison Population Slowed in 96 [Page removed by the L. A. Times] Counting both prison and jail inmates, more than 1. 6 million adults were behind bars as of last June 30, an incarceration rate of 615 inmates for every 100,000 U. S. residents. That rate of imprisonment put the nation second only to Russia, which had a rate of 690 inmates per 100,000 residents in 1995, the last available figure. The two countries imprison a far higher proportion of their citizens than any other country in the world. — Los Angeles Times, 1997-06-23 †¢ STATE PRISONS EXPECTED TO GROW 37% BY 2003 Californias already crowded prisons are projected to add 57,733 inmates by 2003, a 37 percent increase, state officials said Wednesday. The Department of Corrections said the states adult prisons now house 155,687 prisoners, compared with 66,965 in 1987. Officials predict that the population will reach 202,855 in 2002 and 213,420 the next year. — Orange County Register, 1997-12-11, page 4.