hoskinsoncharles | From time to time, I enjoy investing an afternoon considering politics
and the state of affairs here in the United States. Our country is the
first hyperpower forcing all other nations to consider us in whatever
policy happens to be the day's grock. This reality is divorced from
ethical or moral metrics and the war on drugs is no different.
For whatever reason (religious, practical, dystopian, etc), policymakers
in the United States have continuously decided to label a behavior or
substance as dangerous to the social fabric™ of our society.
Prohibition is the standard example and its spectacular failure is
somehow forgotten. We saw and acknowledge the rise of the modern mafia.
We saw the decentralized nature of resistance through bootleggers (some say one who's kid become president)
and the FBI form to stop the bootleggers empowering J. Edgar Hoover to
terrorize two generations of Americans via illegal spying and blackmail (including Martin Luther King). Yet why have no lessons been learned?
The war of drugs is a leviathan that has imprisoned millions of Americans (vastly disportionate for minorities),
formed massive bureaucracies such as the DEA and their state
equivalents, and like Hoover's FBI slowly transformed society to both
militarize the police and make their actions somehow ok.
Where in this process have we asked what the goal exactly is? Why are
we as a country destroying families, imprisoning millions and treating
addicts as hardened criminals? Why have we created an industry that robs
us of our constitutional rights and turns our police force into
something resembling the Stasi?
I honestly don't have a good answer. There is perhaps an historical
context that could be explored and used to synthetically explain why we
are somehow comfortable as a nation using a plato like ideal social fabric™ to justify incarcerating millions for non-violent crimes. Yet this leaves a putrid taste in my mouth.
