Cenk Uygur at HuffPo: Imagine If We Never Ended The War On Alcohol

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cenk-uygur/imagine-if-we-never-ended_b_663268.html

Cenk Uygur
Host of The Young Turks

Posted: July 29, 2010 04:34 AM

Imagine if We Never Ended the War on Alcohol

- snip -

These days it doesn't seem politically possible to ever change course. If you start a war, the only acceptable answer is to escalate it. We can never surrender, even if we should. So, our War on Drugs must go on forever, no matter how futile, no matter how terrible the results and no matter how counterproductive. It would be weak to ever admit we made a mistake.

Over the last two years we spent $1.6 billion on the Merida Project, where we asked the Mexican government to escalate their War on Drugs. The result? Over the last three years, nearly 25,000 Mexicans have been killed in the drug wars. This is madness. The amount of drugs entering our country is not appreciably different. We lost, drugs won.

But the crime and the horrific drug violence are not related to drug users; they're related to drug dealers. It's the prohibition itself that is causing this crime wave. Just like it did during alcohol prohibition, when Al Capone and all the mobsters reigned supreme here. When are we ever going to learn our lesson? We keep spending insane amounts of money on wars that cannot be won.

Like the War on Terror. Who declares war on a tactic? How do you win that war? Until all of the "terrorists" are dead? Which ones? Until everyone promises not to use that tactic anymore? The reality is it's an excuse to spend huge amounts of money on an endless project that will profit the defense industry for decades to come.

But there was one war we decided to give up on -- the War on Alcohol...

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The "war on drugs" is not only a colossally failed, colossally corrupt program that creates mayhem and murder wherever it goes, the Bushwhacks and war profiteers have managed to segue the "war on drugs" into the "war on terror" which is nothing less than a war on the poor in Latin America, and threatens to literally become a full scale war in Latin America. Oil War II.

The U.S. is larding Colombia with $7 BILLION in military aid to kill its own people and cause trouble for, and even invade, Venezuela. The U.S. military now has at least SEVEN military bases in Colombia, use of all civilian infrastructure in Colombia, and total diplomatic immunity for all U.S. soldiers and U.S. military 'contractors,' no matter what they do Colombia. The situation is hauntingly similar to the sneaky U.S. military buildup in Vietnam in the early 1960s. This has all occurred without any discussion here in the U.S.--using the "war on drugs" as the COVER.

Thousands of trade unionists, human rights workers, teachers, community activists, journalists, peasant farmers and others have been murdered in Colombia, about half by the Colombian military, the other half by its closely tied rightwing paramilitary death squads (according to Amnesty International and other human rights reports). Some 5 MILLION peasant farmers have been driven from their lands by state terror--the worst human displacement crisis on earth, outside of Sudan. A half a million of them have fled into neighboring Venezuela and Ecuador, creating a major human welfare crisis and expense for those governments, and creating chaos in their border areas (the most likely place for a U.S./Colombia "Gulf of Tonkin"-type incident to justify attacking Venezuela). Venezuela was recently proven to have the largest oil reserves on earth (twice Saudi Arabia's). Ecuador also has lots and lots of oil. They are both members of OPEC. They both have leftist governments that believe in using oil profits to benefit the poor. They both border Colombia, the Pentagon's launching pad for "full spectrum" military activity in the "souther cone" to deal with "drug trafficking," "terrorism" and "countries hostile to the U.S." (according to a USAF document uncovered by Eva Golinger).

U.S. military buildup also in the Caribbean, off Venezuela's oil coast. U.S. supported rightwing coup in Honduras (the U.S. launching pad for aggression against Honduras' neighbors during the Reagan reign of horror in Central America). U.S. military operations in Costa Rica, of all places. (Honduras and Costa Rica sandwich Nicaragua, probably the next target for a U.S. supported rightwing coup--leftist government representing the poor majority, ally of Venezuela, Ecuador and the many other leftist governments in the region).

What is all this U.S. militarism FOR? To stop drug trafficking? Yeah, right.

So, it is worse than a waste of vast amounts of money. It is worse than the ruination of many peoples' lives who are imprisoned and their only "crime" is drug possession or small time dealing. It is worse than the "prison-industrial complex"--the horrendous privatization of our prison system; worse than the removal of large numbers of potential voters from black urban areas, and their incarceration in white rural areas as non-voters but yet "warm bodies" counted as "residents" in these Puke areas, to pad their numbers for federal money and representation in Congress, and deplete those numbers in poor urban areas. It is worse than the decimation of the inner cities. It is worse than the nazification of our police forces, with many police officers viewing everybody as perps or potential perps. It is worse than our loss of human feeling for prisoners; our forgetting them; our failure to see them as human beings; worse than the routine rape and other brutality that is permitted in our prisons; worse than the overcrowding; worse than corporate Frankenfood that prisoners must eat. It is worse than the loss of our right to be free of government snooping and interference in our private lives. It is far, far worse than all the mayhem caused by the first Prohibition. And, in addition to all this--in addition to all this--it is showing every sign, in Latin America, of being escalated into outright war against democratic countries with lots of oil who have dared to assert their right to run their own affairs, and who--not incidentally--have elections that are far, FAR more transparent their our own.

END IT NOW!

With the VA decision last week to stop kicking veterans out of the VA for using a more effective pain medicine (cannabis) than the ones they are forced to use otherwise, we are beginning to see some serious breeches in the federal dam against science, common sense and compassion.

Here's hoping that, soon, all our smiles will be legal.

than those in prohibition.

Decent model but there is significant scale up to account for.

One thing that is hard to stop is a broad based popular resistance to the nonsense, so it is past time for a Zero Tolerance policy on the absurd and failed War on Drugs.

We might be making progress though.

It's a must read.

Off to watch the video now.

Thanks for posting.

Or guerrilla, maybe. Pick the analogy you think works best.

...the whole idea of a war on terror is absurd.

Nobody goes face down on the skull bong and decides to drive his truck through a pharmacy window.

But yes, I also agree that alcohol is more dangerous.