What Was I Smoking

Here's a little quiz. Guess the source of this quote:

"...it is our judgment that the war on drugs has failed, that it is diverting intelligent energy away from how to deal with the problem of addiction, that it is wasting our resources, and that it is encouraging civil, judicial, and penal procedures associated with police states. We all agree on movement toward legalization..."

THE NATIONAL REVIEW! For God's sake, even The National Review can surprise--but not NPR. What was I smoking when I saw that NPR was doing a series on "the war on drugs" and wondered if they might actually question the whole premise of the war on drugs. Not a chance, just as they never dare question the premise of the similar farce called "the war on terror."

You might hope that any serious coverage of "the war on drugs" would look back at the anti-Hispanic roots of anti-drug laws (particularly anti-marijuana laws). Any thinking person (and apparently there are some even at The National Review) would have to ask oneself what is the purpose of the war on drugs if it isn't just to make the police powers of the state more robust and to criminalize certain sectors of the population (ahem...Black folks!) To get a sense of this it is worth doing a Google search of "war on drugs" and "black codes" (here are the first three results--one, two, and three.)

So it was that Mondays ATC piece looks only at the failure of the "war on drugs" to stop all drugs coming in to the US and today's piece is a bit of hogwash from Juan "Plan Colombia" Forero where we get to here how Plan Colombia has helped "reduce the violence" in Colombia--wow!