There is a lot of talk in the media right now about the war on drugs, a war that was originally declared by Nixon just over forty years ago. The authors of these articles claim that it has been a huge failure, but I couldn’t disagree more. Whether it has been a failure or a success depends on your vantage point: if you are the mother of a boy killed in gang violence, or whose daughter is an addict, you will see it as a gross failure. But if you are an investor in the private prison system, or the owner of a global enterprise that relies on the injection of laundered money to act as “financial steroids”, you will see it as a huge success.
The people who spearheaded the war on drugs knew exactly what they were setting up, and have been hugely rewarded by its success. Like all wars, it’s about money and power, not cleaning up the streets of dealers or drug addicts.
Margo Talbot
Self Empowered Healing
War on Drugs
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Finally someone who will tell it like it is. This view is as rare as those who know some of our present financial troubles, aided by deregulation, link back to the printing of money for the Vietnam war.
We seem to repeat the memes fed to us while the facts stare us in the face and go unnoticed. As Art Spiegalman writes in his graphic novel Maus, about the Holocaust, it was taboo to even speak of the rumours coming back from the camps.
Thanks Margo for your courage
I wish you were my neighbour; we could have fascinating dinner conversations over bottles of fine red wine… I too find that nobody wants to look at the 5000 pound gorilla on the living room floor, but I learned the hard way that denial of the truth only allows it to come back and bite us a hundredfold.