Congress wastes billions of your dollars


The War on Drugs has failed
I admire Ronald Reagan for some things. Without him standing his ground, I doubt that the Cold War would ever had ended. But the War on Drugs has to be one of the greatest government failures of all time. It looks like economics is finally rearing it's head faster than the FedGovs can spend.

The immensely costly "war on drugs" in Latin America is slowly collapsing like a Zeppelin with a puncture. The long-forecast failure for strategies which involve police and military in forcibly suppressing narcotics - first decreed by President Richard Nixon decades ago - is now pitifully evident in Bolivia, one of the poorest countries of the Western hemisphere.

The estimated $25bn (£13bn) that Washington has spent trying to control narcotics over the past 15 years in Latin America seems to have been wasted.

In 2005, according to UN guesses - and, amid merciless political spinning of what few facts there are- Colombia, Peru and Bolivia, the main producers of cocaine, had the capacity to produce 910 metric tons a year. As more productive strains of coca bushes appear, production has been increasing. Unsurprisingly, the price of cocaine on US streets has tumbled, according to the White House drug tzar John Walters, to $135 (£70) a gram, a fraction of the $600 a gram it was fetching in 1981. The purity of cocaine has gone from 60 per cent in mid-2003 to more than 70 per cent last October. Like the conflict in Iraq, the US's other great war is now being visibly lost.

<snip>

The truth is also emerging about the Colombian army, beloved of the US government but widely hated by many Colombians for its closeness to the death squads. Senator Patrick Leahy ordered a temporary freeze on tens of millions of dollars of US military aid after the Colombian army commander, General Mario Montoya, was found to be deeply involved with the death squads.

Leahy condemned the waste of US money in Colombia: "When Plan Colombia began, we were told it would cut by half the amount of cocaine in five years. Six years and $5bn later, it has not had any measurable effect on the amount of cocaine entering our country."

Big business is also caught up in drug dealing. In March, Chiquita Brands International, a US banana multinational, was fined $25m by the US Justice Department for having funded the AUC, the principal Colombian death squad which is closely linked to international drug-smuggling. The collapse of the "war on drugs" in Latin America is of a piece with Tony Blair's failure to control drugs in the UK by police action and imprisonment. Britain's drug use rates are among the highest in Europe and there are 327,000 problem drug users. The failure to stem the supply of heroin is illustrated by the fall in price of a gram, from £70 in 2000 to £54 in 2005. The annual number of drug offenders jailed more than doubled between 1994 and 2005 and the average length of their sentences went up. The courts handed out nearly three times as much prison time in 2004 as they did 10 years earlier.

Okay, here are some facts. When the United States exported the War On Drugs, all we did was spend billions to go after cheap agriculture. At least in the Middle East we had the excuse of containing the Soviet Union. But Central and South America, that was our own "morality." A morality that has killed thousands, corrupted governments, wrecked lives, and destabilized half a hemisphere, And for what?

If anything, cocaine is even more available than it was before.

The only thing that makes cocaine expensive is the American effort to ban it. Here is a product that is easy to produce, costing only time and a few cents per pound. The expense brings in the criminal element who couldn't compete if it was actual cost. Purity problems and portion control would disappear if it could be sold in stores.

How do I know?

Because Prohibition brought the exact same problems with alcohol, and when Prohibition was lifted, those problems fixed themselves.

That is billions of your tax dollars spent to destroy lives, burn property, and destabilize nations. All to "stamp out" a problem that would mostly fix itself if left to the free market.

Not to mention the tax revenue that LEGAL drugs would bring.

Hat tip Sunni Maravillosa, who has her own great take on the same article.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Mon - May 28, 2007 at 05:20 AM  Tag


 ◊  ◊   ◊  ◊ 

Random selections from NeoWayland's library


Pagan Vigil "Because LIBERTY demands more than just black or white"
© 2005 - 2009 All Rights Reserved