Cocaine Blues

ABC news has a great piece about the popularity of cocaine on the party scene.

Here are some quotes-
Thirty-six years after President Nixon declared a “war on drugs,” cocaine remains thoroughly in demand and it’s as cheap and trendy as ever.

I will keep repeating this. Making something illegal does not eliminate demand, it just changes the suppliers. Despite spending billions on enforcement and incarceration the price of cocaine has not even gone down.

With limited manpower and money matched up against no shortage of supply or demand, enforcing the “war against drugs” in any other way is, as the LAPD narcotics detective told ABC News, “as effective as throwing a bucket of water into the Atlantic Ocean.”

This quote seems to blame the limited man power and money. It never stops to question the policy. Limited manpower and money? The budget for the DEA, FBI, Coast Guard, Local Enforcement and the billions we spend in Columbia to fight cocaine is not enough?

The DEA has alone has 11,000 employees and a $2,000,000,000 annual budget.

Man power and money is not the problem. Prohibition is the problem.

“Our goal is not to get drug usage down to zero percent but to get it down as low as possible and by taking a public health approach to the problem we feel that can be done,” said Lemaitre, who added that a strong network of drug treatment programs allied to educating the young as to the dangers of drugs was the way to achieve this.

Why does public health require no knock home invasion searches? How is the public health improved when we incarcerate thousands of cocaine users?

They rhetoric may shift but it is the same failed Prohibition. Education, public health, and treatment are all nice buzzwords but the War on Drugs is still about incarceration.

The police do not kick your door down and say “This is the police we are here to educate and treat you!!”
I can win the war on drugs tommorow. Let Pfizer or Phillip Morris or Miller Brewing sell cocaine.
The Columbian drug lords, the gangs, the local dealers are all out of business.

Until then it’s more of the same failure. More prisons, more enforcement, more overdoses.

Labels: War On Drugs