Consider the following headlines that appeared in various newspapers, and especially notice the dates of the articles:
“Disgrace and Crime Sold Openly in Opium Market”: New York American, February 22, 1927
“Two Daughters Accuse Guitar Instructor of Giving Marijuana to Their Mother”: San Francisco Chronicle, March 26, 1940
“Black Men Versus the Drug Problem”: Metropole, November 9, 1969
“Nixon’s War on Drug Addicts”: Guardian, June 17, 1971
“Drug Lab Defendants Sentenced to Prison”: Waco Herald-Tribune, October 15, 1988
“Cocaine Haul: $100 Million”: Greenwood Index-Journal, July 27, 1989
In other words, the much-vaunted war on drugs has been going on for a very long time. It is still going on. It will go on forever. Children today will be living under the drug war when they become adults and probably until the day they die.
Today, DEA agents, federal prosecutors, and federal judges continue to do the same things that federal officials have been doing our entire lives. They arrest people who possess or distribute drugs. They prosecute them. They jail them.
And the process just keeps repeating itself, year after year, decade after decade forever.
Do all these federal officials really believe that their efforts will somehow bring victory in the war on drugs? I can’t believe they do. Nobody can be that obtuse. Every single DEA agent, U.S. Attorney and Assistant U.S. Attorney, and federal judge in the land has to know that what they are doing is just mindlessly repeating what their counterparts were doing 40 years in their effort to win the war on drugs.
It’s just a continuous stream of arrests, prosecutions, and prison sentences, with no end in sight. Forty years from now, when today’s crop of DEA agents, prosecutors, and federal judges are retired or dead, there will be the new crop of DEA agents, prosecutors, and federal judges doing the exact same thing.
And for what? What do they accomplish? Nothing. They bust one drug dealer and ten more pop up to take his place. That’s the way black markets work.
Moreover, if this were a cost-free exercise, that would be one thing. But it’s not. Along with all the taxpayer money that goes into this mindless federal program are violence, drug gangs, drug cartels, official corruption, turf wars, murders, and, of course, the destruction of the civil liberties and privacy of the American people.
As we have been saying for some 35 years here at FFF, there is only one solution to all this mindless drug-war mayhem: drug legalization. With drug legalization, the violence, the drug gangs, the drug cartels, the destruction of civil liberties and privacy, and other negative consequences of the drug war would disappear overnight.
I recently watched a 1991 movie on Amazon Prime called “The Return of Eliot Ness,” staring Robert Stack as Ness. The beginning of the movie depicted the massive violence that came with alcohol Prohibition. It was similar to the massive violence we see in the war on drugs. Emblematic of Prohibition was the war between Ness and alcohol gangster Al Capone. But the movie was built around a period of time after Prohibition had ended. Thus, there were no more alcohol gangsters or alcohol-Prohibition-related crime for Ness to combat.
Why can’t federal drug agents, prosecutors, and federal judges see this? Why can’t they see that they are just wasting their lives and their talents in devoting themselves to this drug-war inanity?
My hunch is that they can see it. They are smart people. My hunch is that they simply do it for the money. They have nice government jobs that pay well. Like lots of other people, they have mortgages to pay and children in school. They don’t want to give up their jobs, even if they know that their jobs are valueless in terms of meaning in life.
Moreover, it’s not like they have the power to end the war on drugs. Only Congress can do that. Thus, the question naturally arises: Why don’t the members of Congress end the war on drugs? Here is where I think the obtuseness really comes into play. My hunch is that the average member of Congress has no idea of how long the war on drugs has been going on and is convinced that victory is just around the corner.
Finally, there is the role that the deep state might be playing in all this. For decades, evidence has periodically surfaced that the CIA is involved in the drug trade. If that’s in fact the case, then there is no reasonable possibility at all that Congress or, for that matter, any other federal official, is going to interfere with how the deep state is making its money. The deep state’s involvement in the drug trade would guarantee that the drug war will continue into perpetuity.
Reprinted with permission from The Future of Freedom Foundation.
