New Front in the Drug War

H

huisache

2,500+ Posts
As part of the ever promising, always victorious War On Drugs, our brilliant government, run by the cream of the crop and the best and the brightest from the Ivy League Meritocracy, has now set up three forward operating bases in Honduras in a new and gonna be highly successful move to smack the drug lords around.

The theory is that our drug war in Mexico has been so successful that the evil druggies are now transshipping through Honduras, that bright sparkling center of culture, civilization and material progress to the south of our valiant Mexican allies. So, we are "learning lessons from our military successes in Iraq" (I am not making this up) to set up small forward posts to combat the evildoers.

Of course, if we make things uncomfortable enough for the drug lords in Honduras, I am certain they will not think of moving their bases to Guatemala or Nicaragua or Belize. They aren't that smart or ruthless. Are they?

In the meantime, we militarize yet another country that can't afford a military and doesn't have any enemies to speak of and we train their cops and give them all kinds of neat stuff at our expense to make them more efficient police states.

Someday the only country to our south that is not a militarized police state with abject poverty and a brutal authoritarian government will be Costa Rica, which abolished its army in 1948 and wastes its money on universal literacy, a national health service and social security and which has the highest standard of living in the region with the lowest crime rate.

There is a lesson there, folks, but don't expect the Ivy League geniuses in our government to figure it out. They are too busy being the smartest guys on the planet and engaging their penchant for playing tough guy as they take our herd in a dead run for another dive over another cliff.

Is it true that Honduras is Spanish for Viet Nam?
 
The war on drugs is a taxpayer-subsidized profit center for private business interests, and those interests have lobbyists.

This war will never be won and it will never end, just like the war on terror.
 
I've been to Honduras a number of times and have been in remote areas of the country. The US has basically pushed trafficking through central America instead of the Caribbean due to reactive enforcements rather than a comprehensive strategy. Honduras, most likely, is just more friendly to outsiders than the other surrounding countries.

The country is not a hot bed for drug production so the trafficking is isolated in bands through the middle of the country or moved around the coast in crude submersible vehicles. I'd say per capita, the populace is more "happy" than ours despite the significant poverty that exist. I hope our insatiable drug habit doesn't ruin it for a beautiful country.
 
So we wasted all this money, what would the drug situation look like if we didn't spend this money?

Besides the war on drugs, what would you suggest?
 
The Link

attached is William Huddle's famous picture of the surrender at San Jacinto. The two major figures, one the president of Mexico and the other the future president of Texas, were both regular consumers of opiates. Their best work came in later years. Assuming Santa Anna ever did any truly good work. He certainly continued to function at a high level.

My parents were nicotine addicts and died from it. A lifelong friend has been a heroin/methadone addict for thirty years and has lost his teeth.

Heroin and coke are bad for you, no doubt about it. That's why I don't use them and never have. Others use them and get hooked. Too bad for them. If they want to go to rehab, more power to them. I would oppose forcing them into it because I don't think it works well that way and it creates more work for idle bureaucrats, who should be forced to work for a living like the rest of us.

The notion that the government should be regulating people's lives to make them live them more intelligently is an addiction that has cursed the nation for some time now. It has not worked well in the past and never will. Which is why the War on Drugs has not and will not work short of an all out war--as in killing lots of people. Like they did in China after Mao and the other concerned citizens took over there.

If you want to live in a police state, move to Cuba or Singapore. If you want to live in a stupid regulatory state, keep up the current expensive failure we have here now. If you want a more intelligent brand of regulatory state, do it like we do alcohol after our failed attempt at improving the lives of alcoholics in the last century. Accept that some people are lost and try to minimize the loss. Addicts should be able to go to Walgreens and get good quality cocaine and heroin cheap. It wipes out the market for blackmarket product, guarantees less overdoses because they know the quality and quantity of the product and gives blackmarket dealers no incentive to try to hook new customers.
 
So, basically allowing the drug lords free reign into bringing drugs to the border of this country, just stopping them or preventing them from crossing the border? Using this method to cut the supply.

Then to cut the demand you want to rely on Education and Treatment.

Does that summarize your plan of action?

They tried that in the 1960's and 1970's, not very good results.

My opinion is there has to be action taken against the creation of the product, against the supply chain of the product and against the demand of the product.

I believe the the issue is more of a how far do we go, I don't believe we have gone far enough, but that is just me. I also believe that this is one expense that should be made by the country. I also believe that drugs like cocaine and heroin are extremely dangerous to society and could eat this country from within if let go unchecked.
 
The drug lords would get free reign to compete with HEB and Walgreens. The pharmacy product would be of a known quality and strength and so you would not risk dying when you shot up. As the demand was met by legal sources, the amount of money to be made would shrink if not evaporate entirely.

This market approach to drug problems was first promoted by William F. Buckley Jr when he ran for mayor of New York City several decades ago. Milton Friedman made the same argument.

IF you attack it at the source the source moves. If you try to interdict it, the method of transport moves.

The War on Drugs was lost decades ago and all you do by continuing is make the drug people move their bases occasionally, corrupting yet another area and killing large numbers of innocent people. This has happened over and over and will continue to do so for as long as we treat it as a police or military problem.

We now have a huge industry devoted to prisons, DEA agents, cops, deputies, courts, etc and all are being paid with our money to fight a war that cannot be won.

Let us try something else.
 
Excellent posts, hiusache and buckhorn.

Why do we have these apparently arbitrary distinctions where nicotine and alcohol are on the legal side of the ledger — and generally viewed as OK, or at least tolerable, by society — while coke, heroin, etc are illegal and portrayed as more harmful or threatening? The “hard drugs.”

Is it just money/industry and their political clout?
 
Wow, this a 1st in quite some time on the WM. A thoughtful discussion/argument w/o the usual bantering back and forth of partisan politics.
biggrin.gif


And to huisache, as ELP used to sing "welcome back my friends (to the WM), to the show that never ends..."

Thanks for the introspective discussion.
 
Legalize everything. You can get it anyway. So legalize the damn stuff, regulate it, tax it, and the drug war ends.

Seriously, do Budweiser and Miller go around offing eachother and chopping off heads and hands and machine gun people?

This is really really simple. Really.
 
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