The war on drugs
- Thread starter 804brown
- Start date
wkmac
Well-Known Member
Ever notice that when the US Gov't declares "war" on some contrived problem (and I used "contrived" deliberately) that the "problem" always gets worse? We announce the war and the creation of a gov't solution which creates a bureaucracy. The problem escalates and in response the gov't initiative escalates in size and scale. In return the problem grows greater and with it the gov't initiative to defeat it. The process all but takes on market growth characteristics and as it scales up in size in a sense becomes "too big to fail". But ever notice that in all these wars, we never win?
If for example we ended the drug war today, what would be the cost to the arms industry who provides arms not only to the "good guys" but to the bad guys as well? What would the cost be to the privatized prison industrial economy or to the legal industrial industry? Who would pay those lawyers, judges, probation officers, prison guards, private food services contracts and other market forces that have grown out of the war on drugs? How about all the police forces that have grown and geared up for this war? How about the drug testing infrastructure that has been built up just so the majority of people who don't use drugs and likely never too can take a test to prove they don't thus shifting economic resources that could be used to build companies, add real market infrastructure and hire people are now shifted to make people rich by using fear as the market driver? When corp. America initiates a random drug test to an employee, who actually bares that cost at the end of the day? Other than to create a pure illusion, how am I really safer or benefited to know that the Home Depot employee who helped me load 2x4's is drug free and that the testing costs are embedded in the price of those 2x4's?
On the flipside, would all these market forces above really want everyone to not use drugs ever again? What would happen if nobody used drugs at all? And besides, as they clamp down on "illegal" drugs, look at all the "legal" drugs that come into the marketplace to fill the gap. Is the war on drugs really about eliminating the competition for the benefit of crony, finance capitalism and to act as a police force to protect markets and from trade infringements?
So I ask, what would happen were we to actually end the war of drugs?
On the same subject, in 1985' NBC aired a program that within it had a 5 minute segment that told more truth but as a fictional storyline. Couple of years later we learned from the BCCI scandal how the Medellin Cartel for example was financed. Few years later, the late Gary Webb blew open the floodgates with his exposing of the CIA drug running in his Dark Alliance series in the San Jose Mercury. Here is the 5 minute scene NBC aired in 1985'.
Miami Vice Prodigal son Wall Street - YouTube
If for example we ended the drug war today, what would be the cost to the arms industry who provides arms not only to the "good guys" but to the bad guys as well? What would the cost be to the privatized prison industrial economy or to the legal industrial industry? Who would pay those lawyers, judges, probation officers, prison guards, private food services contracts and other market forces that have grown out of the war on drugs? How about all the police forces that have grown and geared up for this war? How about the drug testing infrastructure that has been built up just so the majority of people who don't use drugs and likely never too can take a test to prove they don't thus shifting economic resources that could be used to build companies, add real market infrastructure and hire people are now shifted to make people rich by using fear as the market driver? When corp. America initiates a random drug test to an employee, who actually bares that cost at the end of the day? Other than to create a pure illusion, how am I really safer or benefited to know that the Home Depot employee who helped me load 2x4's is drug free and that the testing costs are embedded in the price of those 2x4's?
On the flipside, would all these market forces above really want everyone to not use drugs ever again? What would happen if nobody used drugs at all? And besides, as they clamp down on "illegal" drugs, look at all the "legal" drugs that come into the marketplace to fill the gap. Is the war on drugs really about eliminating the competition for the benefit of crony, finance capitalism and to act as a police force to protect markets and from trade infringements?
So I ask, what would happen were we to actually end the war of drugs?
On the same subject, in 1985' NBC aired a program that within it had a 5 minute segment that told more truth but as a fictional storyline. Couple of years later we learned from the BCCI scandal how the Medellin Cartel for example was financed. Few years later, the late Gary Webb blew open the floodgates with his exposing of the CIA drug running in his Dark Alliance series in the San Jose Mercury. Here is the 5 minute scene NBC aired in 1985'.
Miami Vice Prodigal son Wall Street - YouTube
wkmac
Well-Known Member
And the quiet side of the drug war or rather the judicial/prison industrial sector. In order to sustain and grow profits, would a larger or smaller prison population be important to that goal?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVbMDmNa3y0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVbMDmNa3y0
i dont really like vice its quite commercialized, but anyways i first heard about portugal decriminalizing all drugs in michael moores latest movie.
Portugal’s Example: What Happened After It Decriminalized All Drugs, From Weed to Heroin | VICE News
The rate of new HIV infections in Portugal has fallen precipitously since 2001, the year its law took effect, declining from 1,016 cases to only 56 in 2012. Overdose deaths decreased from 80 the year that decriminalization was enacted to only 16 in 2012. In the US, by comparison, more than 14,000 people died in 2014 from prescription opioid overdoses alone. Portugal's current drug-induced death rate, three per million residents, is more than five times lower than the European Union's average of 17.3, according to EU figures.
drug use has fallen over the past 15 years and now ebbs and flows within overall trends in Europe. Portuguese officials estimate that by the late 1990s roughly one percent of Portugal's population, around 100,000 people, were heroin users. Today, "we estimate that we have 50,000, most of them under substitution treatment,"
Portugal’s Example: What Happened After It Decriminalized All Drugs, From Weed to Heroin | VICE News
The rate of new HIV infections in Portugal has fallen precipitously since 2001, the year its law took effect, declining from 1,016 cases to only 56 in 2012. Overdose deaths decreased from 80 the year that decriminalization was enacted to only 16 in 2012. In the US, by comparison, more than 14,000 people died in 2014 from prescription opioid overdoses alone. Portugal's current drug-induced death rate, three per million residents, is more than five times lower than the European Union's average of 17.3, according to EU figures.
drug use has fallen over the past 15 years and now ebbs and flows within overall trends in Europe. Portuguese officials estimate that by the late 1990s roughly one percent of Portugal's population, around 100,000 people, were heroin users. Today, "we estimate that we have 50,000, most of them under substitution treatment,"
Babagounj
Strength through joy
Suspected Illegal Alien Marijuana Farmers Held Workers Hostage
Three brothers were taken to hospitals this week after they and a fourth brother say they barely escaped death at the hands of abductors, possibly connected to Mexican cartels, who beat and forced them to work on a marijuana farm in Northern California from February to July.
A search warrant executed near Bald Mountain Rd. the next day uncovered 23 thousand marijuana plants valued as high as $60 million dollars. As the search warrant was carried out, a Hispanic male was seen fleeing the scene. Investigators found a backpack along the same trail the male fled on, and found a handgun inside. No arrests were made during the search of that location.
In the weeks that followed, several other search warrants were executed in Stanislaus County. Arrest warrants were issued for suspects. The District Attorney’s office is considering further charges against additional known suspects.
Arellano, 43, and Medarda Urbieta, 44, were taken into custody on September 14 in Modesto and charged with human trafficking, kidnapping, battery with serious bodily injury, terrorist threats and drug related charges, according to NBC2 local news. The women appeared in court in San Andreas, California, but did not enter pleas.
Calaveras County Sheriff’s Captain Jim Macedo said the women are believed to be in the United States illegally, according to the report.
Three brothers were taken to hospitals this week after they and a fourth brother say they barely escaped death at the hands of abductors, possibly connected to Mexican cartels, who beat and forced them to work on a marijuana farm in Northern California from February to July.
A search warrant executed near Bald Mountain Rd. the next day uncovered 23 thousand marijuana plants valued as high as $60 million dollars. As the search warrant was carried out, a Hispanic male was seen fleeing the scene. Investigators found a backpack along the same trail the male fled on, and found a handgun inside. No arrests were made during the search of that location.
In the weeks that followed, several other search warrants were executed in Stanislaus County. Arrest warrants were issued for suspects. The District Attorney’s office is considering further charges against additional known suspects.
Arellano, 43, and Medarda Urbieta, 44, were taken into custody on September 14 in Modesto and charged with human trafficking, kidnapping, battery with serious bodily injury, terrorist threats and drug related charges, according to NBC2 local news. The women appeared in court in San Andreas, California, but did not enter pleas.
Calaveras County Sheriff’s Captain Jim Macedo said the women are believed to be in the United States illegally, according to the report.
burrheadd
KING Of GIFS
Time to build that wall!
greece should build a wall from the banksters.
Intercepted Podcast: Veni, Vidi, Tweeti
AM:And in 1970 and ’71, there were rumors that started coming back from Vietnam, particularly in 1971, that heroin was spreading rapidly in the ranks of the U.S. forces fighting in South Vietnam. And in later research done by the White House, determined that in 1971, 34 percent, one-third of all the American combat troops fighting in South Vietnam, were heavy heroin users. There were more addicts in the ranks of the U.S. Army in South Vietnam than there were in the United States.
Vietnam Veteran: That was the whole thing about. To keep myself going through the day, to combat, I would get high. I would be under the influence of some type of drugs. And I would — I would feel fear. But after coming down from the drugs, I would stop feeling fear, and that’s when I would go back to get high again.
AM: And so what I did was I set out to investigate. Where was the opium coming from? Where was the heroin coming from? Who was trafficking it? How is it getting to the troops in their barracks and bunkers across the length and breadth of South Vietnam? Nobody was asking this question. Everyone was reporting on the high level of abuse, but nobody was figuring out where and who.
So, I started interviewing. I went to Paris. I interviewed the head of the French equivalent of the CIA in Indochina. And he explained to me how during the French Indochina war from 1946 to 1954, they were short of money for covert operations. So, the hill tribes in Laos produced the opium, the aircraft picked it up, they turned it over to the netherworld — the gangsters that controlled Saigon and secured it for the French and that paid for their covert operations. And I said, “What about now?” And he said, “Well I don’t think the pattern’s changed. I think it’s still there. You should go and look.”
So I did. I went to Saigon. I got some top sources in the Vietnamese military. I went into Laos. I hiked into the mountains. I was ambushed by CIA mercenaries and what I discovered was that the CIA’s contract airline, Air America, was flying into the villages of the Hmong people in Northern Laos — whose main cash crop was opium — and they were picking up the opium and flying it out of the hills. And there were heroin labs. One of the heroin labs, the biggest heroin lab in the world, was run by the commander-in-chief of the Royal Laotian Army, a man whose military budget came entirely from the United States. And they were transforming in those labs the opium into heroin. It was being smuggled into South Vietnam by three cliques controlled by the president, the vice president, and the premier of South Vietnam, and their military allies and distributed to U.S. forces in South Vietnam.
And the CIA wasn’t directly involved, but they turned a blind eye to the role of their allies’ involvement in the traffic. What I discovered was the complexities, the complicity, of the CIA in this traffic. And that was a pattern that was repeated in Central America, when the Contras became involved the traffic. The CIA looked the other way as their aircraft and their allies were smuggling cocaine from Colombia through Central America to the United States. Same thing in the one 1980s, during the secret war in Afghanistan, the mujahideen turned to opium. Afghanistan went from supplying zero percent of U.S. heroin supply — soared to 65 percent of the illicit heroin supply for the United States came out of Afghanistan. The CIA sent arms across the border through caravans to the mujahideen fighters and those same caravans came out carrying opium. So a clear pattern.
The other thing was when I began to do that investigation and write up the book, I faced enormous pressures. My phone was tapped by the FBI. The IRS — I had an audit as a poverty-stricken graduate student. The Department of Education investigated my graduate fellowship. Friends of mine who had been serving in military intelligence were recruited to spy on me. In other words, what I found was the CIA penetrated every aspect of my life. They, the head of CIA covert operations, a very famous operative name Cord Meyer Jr., visited the offices of Harper and Row, my publisher, and tried to persuade the publisher to suppress the book — hold the contract, just don’t release the book — claiming that it was a threat to national security.
So what I discovered was not only CIA complicity — complex, compromise relationships with covert allies far away in remote places like Southeast Asia — but also the incredible depth of the penetration of the CIA within US society under the conditions of the Cold War. Every aspect of my life was manipulated by the CIA.
AM:And in 1970 and ’71, there were rumors that started coming back from Vietnam, particularly in 1971, that heroin was spreading rapidly in the ranks of the U.S. forces fighting in South Vietnam. And in later research done by the White House, determined that in 1971, 34 percent, one-third of all the American combat troops fighting in South Vietnam, were heavy heroin users. There were more addicts in the ranks of the U.S. Army in South Vietnam than there were in the United States.
Vietnam Veteran: That was the whole thing about. To keep myself going through the day, to combat, I would get high. I would be under the influence of some type of drugs. And I would — I would feel fear. But after coming down from the drugs, I would stop feeling fear, and that’s when I would go back to get high again.
AM: And so what I did was I set out to investigate. Where was the opium coming from? Where was the heroin coming from? Who was trafficking it? How is it getting to the troops in their barracks and bunkers across the length and breadth of South Vietnam? Nobody was asking this question. Everyone was reporting on the high level of abuse, but nobody was figuring out where and who.
So, I started interviewing. I went to Paris. I interviewed the head of the French equivalent of the CIA in Indochina. And he explained to me how during the French Indochina war from 1946 to 1954, they were short of money for covert operations. So, the hill tribes in Laos produced the opium, the aircraft picked it up, they turned it over to the netherworld — the gangsters that controlled Saigon and secured it for the French and that paid for their covert operations. And I said, “What about now?” And he said, “Well I don’t think the pattern’s changed. I think it’s still there. You should go and look.”
So I did. I went to Saigon. I got some top sources in the Vietnamese military. I went into Laos. I hiked into the mountains. I was ambushed by CIA mercenaries and what I discovered was that the CIA’s contract airline, Air America, was flying into the villages of the Hmong people in Northern Laos — whose main cash crop was opium — and they were picking up the opium and flying it out of the hills. And there were heroin labs. One of the heroin labs, the biggest heroin lab in the world, was run by the commander-in-chief of the Royal Laotian Army, a man whose military budget came entirely from the United States. And they were transforming in those labs the opium into heroin. It was being smuggled into South Vietnam by three cliques controlled by the president, the vice president, and the premier of South Vietnam, and their military allies and distributed to U.S. forces in South Vietnam.
And the CIA wasn’t directly involved, but they turned a blind eye to the role of their allies’ involvement in the traffic. What I discovered was the complexities, the complicity, of the CIA in this traffic. And that was a pattern that was repeated in Central America, when the Contras became involved the traffic. The CIA looked the other way as their aircraft and their allies were smuggling cocaine from Colombia through Central America to the United States. Same thing in the one 1980s, during the secret war in Afghanistan, the mujahideen turned to opium. Afghanistan went from supplying zero percent of U.S. heroin supply — soared to 65 percent of the illicit heroin supply for the United States came out of Afghanistan. The CIA sent arms across the border through caravans to the mujahideen fighters and those same caravans came out carrying opium. So a clear pattern.
The other thing was when I began to do that investigation and write up the book, I faced enormous pressures. My phone was tapped by the FBI. The IRS — I had an audit as a poverty-stricken graduate student. The Department of Education investigated my graduate fellowship. Friends of mine who had been serving in military intelligence were recruited to spy on me. In other words, what I found was the CIA penetrated every aspect of my life. They, the head of CIA covert operations, a very famous operative name Cord Meyer Jr., visited the offices of Harper and Row, my publisher, and tried to persuade the publisher to suppress the book — hold the contract, just don’t release the book — claiming that it was a threat to national security.
So what I discovered was not only CIA complicity — complex, compromise relationships with covert allies far away in remote places like Southeast Asia — but also the incredible depth of the penetration of the CIA within US society under the conditions of the Cold War. Every aspect of my life was manipulated by the CIA.
wkmac
Well-Known Member
newfie
Well-Known Member
absolutely
wkmac
Well-Known Member
It's an art form he's committed to mastering and on that he has my full support.
a drug lord in this article says: Violent drug gangs do not fear the war on drugs; to the contrary, as Hari notes, they crave it. It is the criminalization of drugs that makes their trade so profitable. Hari quotes a long-time drug enforcement official in the U.S. as relating: “On one undercover tape-recorded conversation, a top cartel chief, Jorge Roman, expressed his gratitude for the drug war, calling it ‘a sham put on the American tax-payer’ that was ‘actually good for business.’”
Brazil’s Latest Outbreak of Drug Gang Violence Highlights the Real Culprit: the War on Drugs
On July 1, 2001, Portugal enacted a law to decriminalize all drugs. Under that law, nobody who is found possessing or using narcotics is arrested in Portugal, nor are they turned into a criminal. Indeed, neither drug use nor possession is considered a crime at all. Instead, those found doing it are sent to speak with a panel of drug counsellors and therapists, where they are offered treatment options.
Seven years after the law was enacted, in 2008, we traveled to Lisbon to study the effects of that law for one of the first comprehensive reports on this policy, the findings of which were published in a report for the Cato Institute. The results were clear and stunning: This radical change in drug laws was a fundamental and undeniable success.
...With all the money that had been wasted in Portugal to prosecute and imprison drug users now freed up for treatment programs, and the government viewed with trust rather than fear, previously hopeless addicts transformed into success stories of stability and health, and the government’s anti-drug messages were heeded. The predicted rise in drug usage rates never happened; in some key demographic categories, usage actually declined. As the 2009 study concluded: “The data show that, judged by virtually every metric, the Portuguese decriminalization framework has been a resounding success.”
Over the weekend, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, writing from Lisbon, re-visited this data, now even more ample and conclusive than it was back in 2009. His conclusions were even more stark than the Cato report of eight years ago: namely, Portugal has definitively won the argument on how ineffective, irrational, and counterproductive drug prohibition is.
Portugal’s drug mortality rate is the lowest in Western Europe — one-tenth the rate of Britain or Denmark — and about one-fiftieth the latest number for the U.S.
“It’s incomparably cheaper to treat people than to jail them.”...
Brazil’s Latest Outbreak of Drug Gang Violence Highlights the Real Culprit: the War on Drugs
On July 1, 2001, Portugal enacted a law to decriminalize all drugs. Under that law, nobody who is found possessing or using narcotics is arrested in Portugal, nor are they turned into a criminal. Indeed, neither drug use nor possession is considered a crime at all. Instead, those found doing it are sent to speak with a panel of drug counsellors and therapists, where they are offered treatment options.
Seven years after the law was enacted, in 2008, we traveled to Lisbon to study the effects of that law for one of the first comprehensive reports on this policy, the findings of which were published in a report for the Cato Institute. The results were clear and stunning: This radical change in drug laws was a fundamental and undeniable success.
...With all the money that had been wasted in Portugal to prosecute and imprison drug users now freed up for treatment programs, and the government viewed with trust rather than fear, previously hopeless addicts transformed into success stories of stability and health, and the government’s anti-drug messages were heeded. The predicted rise in drug usage rates never happened; in some key demographic categories, usage actually declined. As the 2009 study concluded: “The data show that, judged by virtually every metric, the Portuguese decriminalization framework has been a resounding success.”
Over the weekend, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, writing from Lisbon, re-visited this data, now even more ample and conclusive than it was back in 2009. His conclusions were even more stark than the Cato report of eight years ago: namely, Portugal has definitively won the argument on how ineffective, irrational, and counterproductive drug prohibition is.
Portugal’s drug mortality rate is the lowest in Western Europe — one-tenth the rate of Britain or Denmark — and about one-fiftieth the latest number for the U.S.
“It’s incomparably cheaper to treat people than to jail them.”...
apple is over rated. ditto for steve.
Glenn GreenwaldVerified account @ggreenwald 9h9 hours ago
Glenn Greenwald Retweeted CBS News
The reaction to Elon Musk & weed is so childish. It's also a good time to recall that Steve Jobs (along with other key Silicon Valley visionaries) credits LSD with some of his most critical insights, without which he believes Apple would not have happened https://www.salon.com/2011/10/08/steve_jobs_and_drug_policy/ …
Glenn Greenwald added,
CBS NewsVerified account @CBSNews
Elon Musk appeared to smoke weed during a live podcast interview, and Tesla shares dropped sharply: Tesla's Elon Musk appears to smoke weed in Joe Rogan live interview
443 replies 2,404 retweets 6,962 likes
Glenn GreenwaldVerified account @ggreenwald 9h9 hours ago
Glenn Greenwald Retweeted CBS News
The reaction to Elon Musk & weed is so childish. It's also a good time to recall that Steve Jobs (along with other key Silicon Valley visionaries) credits LSD with some of his most critical insights, without which he believes Apple would not have happened https://www.salon.com/2011/10/08/steve_jobs_and_drug_policy/ …
Glenn Greenwald added,
CBS NewsVerified account @CBSNews
Elon Musk appeared to smoke weed during a live podcast interview, and Tesla shares dropped sharply: Tesla's Elon Musk appears to smoke weed in Joe Rogan live interview
443 replies 2,404 retweets 6,962 likes
DriveInDriveOut
Inordinately Right
I've got nothing against cannabis, but when the guy running a company acts batapple is over rated. ditto for steve.
The reaction to Elon Musk & weed is so childish. It's also a good time to recall that Steve Jobs (along with other key Silicon Valley visionaries) credits LSD with some of his most critical insights, without which he believes Apple would not have happened
CBS NewsVerified account @CBSNews
Elon Musk appeared to smoke weed during a live podcast interview, and Tesla shares dropped sharply: Tesla's Elon Musk appears to smoke weed in Joe Rogan live interview
crazy, then you find out he's on drugs..... Well most people wouldn't want too much of their money in his hands.im more concerned with the crazy part.I've got nothing against cannabis, but when the guy running a company acts bat
View attachment 211341
It will be fine
Well-Known Member
No one would care if he was just drinking whiskey. People are stupid if they think there’s a real difference. Tech is full of code monkeys that toke up.
Similar threads
