…is the Drug War bureaucracy. Nixon declared a “War on Drugs” in 1971, proclaiming that “America’s public enemy number one is drug abuse”. Since that declaration, police have militarized to an unfathomable extent, deadly synthetic drugs that are easier to produce in an environment of Prohibition have left a a mountain of bodies, criminal gangs have ballooned, with all the violence that goes with it, and US prisons have been bursting at the seams with non-violent drug offenders. Billions of dollars have been poured into this futile crusade with nothing to show but the predictable, tragic social disintegration that comes along with the creation of a black market. The chief lesson that the Drug Warriors have failed to learn, because it would threaten their paycheck, is that their creation of the black market is the source of the chaos, not drug use. The government’s enforcement of Prohibition is the enforcement of the black market, which means that government, either intentionally or unintentionally, is protecting the drug market for the most violent of the drug cartels.
An environment of Prohibition incentivizes the creation of violent, black market criminals. An environment of Prohibition incentivizes the employment, by law enforcement, of those who are less inclined to restraint themselves in dealing out violence. The drug cartels rely on the policy of Prohibition just as the US Police State relies on it. The Drug War is the domestic Warfare State’s Golden Goose, it’s the excuse for the massive network of surveillance, war goodies handed down to local cops, no-knock raids, and trigger-happy cops. The Drug War is the reason minorities are rightfully afraid of the police. The Drug War is the outlet for the Bush/Obama power grabs that were sold to protect us from “terrorists”. From the Patriot Act all the way down the legislative line, these instruments of tyranny and oppression are now aimed at you, the citizen.
America’s public enemy number one is NOT drug abuse, it’s not terrorism or some other trumped-up social affliction. The number one enemy is the government that professes to protect us from ourselves, the government that constructs a massive bureaucracy upon our politicized fear.
The Drug War is now a jobs program for the hundreds of thousands of federal and state minions who do its bidding. That bureaucracy has no interest in seeing drug use wiped out; only an escalation of the domestic war will increase their power and their pay.
