Talk About Missing the Point

Case study: What happens when you allow a philosophy professor from an art institute write about domestic and international drug policy. From Counterpunch:

[...]Baltimore- and Newark, Detroit, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Washington D.C., and so many other impoverished urban centers- is the front line of a very real, very bloody Drug War, with cocaine and heroin taking center stage.

[...]

[...]For almost two decades, however, and continuing through today, the Taliban has been at the root of very real blood spilt on American streets.

There is no mystery or confusion surrounding the Taliban's link to our urban drug war, and the American lives it costs. The Taliban encourages heroin production, offers the industry government protection, and arranges the export of this elicit substance. The Taliban is in cahoots with global drug traders, sending the stuff on its way to Baltimore's dealers and addicts. In short, the Taliban is clearly a drug regime, responsible for sowing social mayhem worldwide.

[...]

On American shores, the murders of the drug trade are only its most obvious mark of destruction. In truth, the social devastation it has inflicted runs deep: lives ruined by heroin addiction, both physically and psychologically; families ripped apart by resident addicts; entire neighborhoods rendered unlivable by drug violence.

Read the whole piece -- correct me if I'm wrong -- but this is clearly way off mark in every way possible. First, the Taliban has not been responsible for a narcostate for decades. It's common knowledge that poppy production was controlled quite effectively when they were in charge of the shit-hole dust bowl known as Afghanistan. Her misstated facts aside; I take real offense with the suggestion that heroin and cocaine are the trouble makers for our urban centers -- or that farmers in Afghanistan or Columbia are to blame for the downward spiral that American cities like Baltimore are experiencing. It's not just the drugs, it's the illicit nature of the drugs. Let's put the blame where the blame is deserved. Why is this such a hard point to understand?

What about the lives ruined by criminalizing an entire section of our society? What about the families split up by prison stays and drug trade murders? What about the legitimate jobs that might give some in our inner-cities a chance that are unattainable because of criminal records?

My larger point --and boy do I bore everyone to sleep with it -- is that this is a problem of our own making. We might be victims, but only victims of a failed policy of prohibition. It's not that we are a 'nation of addicts' as this d-bag claims, or that we need to seal our borders to stop the flow of drugs from coming in...No, its the destructive policy of pushing an entire commercial network underground and out of legitimacy. Sure problems come from drug abuse, no one ever claims otherwise. But to claim that violence is a superficial injury from the Drug War, or just shrugging off the millions of people that we send to prison as nothing is foolish and missing the broader point in regards to the failure of the War on Drugs.

A much better Drug War op-ed from the Seattle Times, here.