bellum se ipsum alit is a Latin phrase that roughly translates to "the war feeds itself." It's the last thing we hear at the end of the four-part History Channel documentary entitled America's War on Drugs (more information here). Like most things on the History Channel, it suffers from tacky re-enactments, but the core message -- a message that could be whittled down to a strong two hours, IMHO -- is devastatingly simple: the utterly ruinous policies behind the "War on Drugs" have cost trillions of dollars and millions of dead or ruined lives. It has negatively impacted domestic and foreign policy for a half-century, it is the hub of what Kerouac called the slaving meat wheel of incarceration and racism and other societal and interpersonal ills, and it is long past time to try anything else.
But we won't.
We won't because the United States -- by far the largest consumers of drugs, legal or other -- cannot have an honest engagement with the driving forces of demand. In other words, what are the differences between need and want, and what it and is not legitimate need?
We won't because the driving forces behind the creation of the War on Drugs v1.0 in the Nixon Administration -- the template of policy through the current day -- were to incarcerate opposing ideology, to legalize the quashing of liberal and African-American dissent by sweeping those sometimes disparate groups into the prison-industrial complex under the smoke screen of a safer America, of law and order that serves to enrich the State at the expense of the citizens.
We won't because the United States understands basic science less and less with each passing moment. If someone equates marijuana and heroin, that someone doesn't grasp the mechanisms of action and the resulting effects of those two types of drugs, and when that someone (or those someones) are dictating the products and policies of American society on a grand and vast scale, those barriers to understanding become more and more insoluble.
We won't because existing systems of oppression are resilient. Like bacteria in the face of "anti-bacterial" soaps, new pathways to expression are formed and strengthened on the backs of the failures. When marijuana is eventually legalized in the United States, global conglomerates will descend on the market and create new customers and new harms to fight through law enforcement rather than social and health programs. Like any good documentary, America's War on Drugs gave me more information than I had before, and reinforced the fact that it will only get worse, no matter what superficial gains are achieved.
I just wish I had something to make me feel better quickly.
But we won't.
We won't because the United States -- by far the largest consumers of drugs, legal or other -- cannot have an honest engagement with the driving forces of demand. In other words, what are the differences between need and want, and what it and is not legitimate need?
We won't because the driving forces behind the creation of the War on Drugs v1.0 in the Nixon Administration -- the template of policy through the current day -- were to incarcerate opposing ideology, to legalize the quashing of liberal and African-American dissent by sweeping those sometimes disparate groups into the prison-industrial complex under the smoke screen of a safer America, of law and order that serves to enrich the State at the expense of the citizens.
We won't because the United States understands basic science less and less with each passing moment. If someone equates marijuana and heroin, that someone doesn't grasp the mechanisms of action and the resulting effects of those two types of drugs, and when that someone (or those someones) are dictating the products and policies of American society on a grand and vast scale, those barriers to understanding become more and more insoluble.
We won't because existing systems of oppression are resilient. Like bacteria in the face of "anti-bacterial" soaps, new pathways to expression are formed and strengthened on the backs of the failures. When marijuana is eventually legalized in the United States, global conglomerates will descend on the market and create new customers and new harms to fight through law enforcement rather than social and health programs. Like any good documentary, America's War on Drugs gave me more information than I had before, and reinforced the fact that it will only get worse, no matter what superficial gains are achieved.
I just wish I had something to make me feel better quickly.
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