For those who've said that the War On Drugs isn't working :
It most certainly works for the parties concerned: legislators, the prison industry, how bout a suboxone doc charging $60,000 cash only Per month with a minimum 12-month commitment from a patient?
Oh trust me the WOD is workin out just fine for these ppl.
Not to mention the countless law enforcement departments that are funded by us (taxpayers) to surveil, investigate and hunt us down.
That's cops employed by states (in various countries), federal police, as well as other federally funded outfits like customs, as well as various coastguards and "border force" - a big militarised kind of fascist police organisation, modelled on the US DHS.
The intelligence organisations are also involved, with the CIA being long implicated in a fair bit of drug traffic themselves.
People make money off of mass incarceration of non-violent drug offenders - those who are shareholders of the companies that run these private prisons (
of course they run at a profit).
Then there is assett forfiture.
Because drugs are illegal, they are expensive.
Most illegal drugs are incredibly cheap to produce, but the price is inflated by prohibition. Like alcohol prohibition in the US, the money greatly incentivised the trade.
Still today, the govt
want people to make/distribute/smuggle large amounts of drugs, because they can cash in.
If drugs were legal and regulated, the danger and rebelliousness of drug use would fade away.
That's not what the state wants - they want people to gamble with their freedom, because regardless of what happens, the state wins.
They make huge amounts of money by confiscating assets and drug related income.
Some of these departments are entirely funded from forfeited drug money and assets.
There is
no desire on behalf of the US government to stop the drug trade; that would be a disaster for them. It's too profitable.
This is one of the many reasons i believe that capitalism is organised crime.
That's just the financial side of things.
Socially, "the war on drugs" was focused on criminalising people. To begin with, in the days of Harry Anslinger, the targets included Mexican people (associated with '
marijuana' - the use of the 'foreign' sounding spanish name helped demonise 'loco weed') but also African American people who - in various subcultures, partook in various intoxicants that weren't the standard drugs of the anglo establishment.
Jazz music was linked to drugs (weed, cocaine, heroin) and a series of moral panics about black men raping white women because drugs made them do it. Typical paternalism + racism. "Black men raping
our women!" (ie that's something only
white men can do - donald fucking trump still uses this line, when he said that shit about mexican rapists, etc)
In the 19650s, 60s and 70s drug prohibition has been used a lot politically. The anti-war movment (especially in the US) was linked and associated with subcultures that used drugs like cannabis - and it was largely association with recreational and subcultural use of psychedelics that led to LSD and psilocybin being banned.
It was a good way of arresting and suppressing activists...
I could go on and on, but you get the point, i'm sure. Many of prohibition's "failings" are clearly not accidental.
