"How America Lost the War on Drugs"

[[R-MOD]Saobh]

Very nice article (6 pages worth) looking at the historical evolution of the "war on drugs" and its all too human failings.

1. AFTER PABLO

On the day of his death, December 2nd, 1993, the Colombian billionaire drug kingpin Pablo Escobar was on the run and living in a small, tiled-roof house in a middle-class neighborhood of Medellín, close to the soccer stadium. He died, theatrically, ­ridiculously, gunned down by a Colombian police manhunt squad while he tried to flee across the barrio's rooftops, a fat, bearded man who had kicked off his flip-flops to try to outrun the bullets. The first thing the American drug agents who arrived on the scene wanted to do was to make sure that the corpse was actually Escobar's. The second thing was to check his house.

The last time Escobar had hastily fled one of his residences - la Catedral, the luxurious private prison he built for himself to avoid extradition to the United States - he had left behind bizarre, enchanting ­detritus, the raw stuff of what would ­become his own myth: the photos of ­himself dressed up as a Capone-era gangster with a Tommy gun, the odd collection of novels ranging from Graham Greene to the Austrian modernist Stefan Zweig. Agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration, arriving after the kingpin had fled, found neat shelves lined with loose-leaf binders, carefully organized by content. They were, says John Coleman, then the DEA's assistant administrator for operations, "filled with DEA reports" - internal documents that laid out, in extraordinary detail, the agency's repeated attempts to capture Escobar.

"He had shelves and shelves and shelves of these things," Coleman tells me. "It was stunning. A lot of the informants we had, he'd figured out who they were. All the agents we had chasing him - who we trusted in the Colombian police - it was right there. He knew so much more about what we were doing than we knew about what he was doing."

Coleman and other agents began to work deductively, backward. "We had always wondered why his guys, when we caught them, would always go to trial and risk lots of jail time, even when they would have saved themselves a lot of time if they'd just plead guilty," he says. "What we realized when we saw those binders was that they were doing a job. Their job was to stay on trial and have their lawyers use discovery to get all the information on DEA operations they could. Then they'd send copies back to Medellín, and Escobar would put it all together and figure out who we had tracking him."

The loose-leaf binders crammed in Escobar's office on the ground floor gave Coleman and his agents a sense of triumph: The whole mysterious drug trade had an organization, a structure and a brain, and they'd just removed it. In the thrill of the moment, clinking champagne glasses with officials from the Colombian police and taking congratulatory calls from Washington, the agents in Medellín believed the War on Drugs could finally be won. "We had an endgame," Coleman says. "We were literally making the greatest plans."

At the headquarters of the Office of National Drug Control Policy in Washington, staffers tacked up a poster with photographs of sixteen of its most wanted men, cartel leaders from across the Andes. Solemnly, ceremoniously, a staffer took a red magic marker and drew an X over Escobar's portrait. "We felt like it was one down, fifteen to go," recalls John Carnevale, the longtime budget director of the drug-control ­office. "There was this feeling that if we got all sixteen, it's not like the whole thing would be over, but that was a big part of how we would go about winning the War on Drugs."

Man by man, sixteen red X's eventually went up over the faces of the cartel leaders: KILLED. EXTRADITED. KILLED. José Santacruz Londoño, a leading drug trafficker, was gunned down by Colombian police in a shootout. The Rodríguez Orejuela brothers, the heads of the Cali cartel, were extradited after they got greedy and tried to keep running their organization from prison. Some U.S. drug warriors believed that the busts were largely public-relations events, a showy way for the Colombian government to look tough on the drug trade, but most were less cynical. The crack epidemic was over. Drug-related murders were in decline. Winning the War on Drugs didn't seem such a quixotic and open-ended mission, like the War on Poverty, but rather something tangible, a fat guy with a big organization and binders full of internal DEA reports, sixteen faces on a poster, a piñata you could reach out and smack. Richard Cañas, a veteran DEA official who headed counternarcotics efforts on the National Security Council under both George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, can still recall the euphoria of those days. "We were moving," he says, "from success to success."

This is the story of how that momentary success turned into one of the most sustained and costly defeats the United States has ever suffered. It is the story of how the most powerful country on Earth, sensing a piñata, swung to hit it and missed.
...

Read the rest here:
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/sto...e_war_on_drugs

[Ghostrider]

"Drugs Are as Cheap and Plentiful as Ever"

Sad..and to know that there's people dumb enough to abuse them..


-Ghost

[[R-MOD]Wasteland]

So you don't drink alcohol, smoke cigarettes, drink coffee, or eat refined sugar I suppose.

[Ghostrider]

Originally Posted by [R-MOD]Wasteland

So you don't drink alcohol, smoke cigarettes, drink coffee, or eat refined sugar I suppose.

I dont know if your comment is meant to be sarcastic or not, but I'll answer your comment anyways..

I dont drink alcohol.
I dont smoke cigarettes (or any other thing for that matter)
I drink coffee from time to time (months in between if you want a guesstimate)
Regarding refined sugar (white one if Im not mistaken), only when I drink coffee...which again, is not often..

I believe you supposed correctly in the first place

-Ghost

[[R-MOD]Mongolian_dude]

Originally Posted by Ghostrider

I dont know if your comment is meant to be sarcastic or not, but I'll answer your comment anyways..

I dont drink alcohol.
I dont smoke cigarettes (or any other thing for that matter)
I drink coffee from time to time (months in between if you want a guesstimate)
Regarding refined sugar (white one if Im not mistaken), only when I drink coffee...which again, is not often..

I believe you supposed correctly in the first place

-Ghost

....Druggie

Personally, im against the abuse of drugs, not the consumption full-stop.
I think the best way forward for the UKs drug problem, is to begin with the LEGALISATION and REGULATION of the consumption of class C drugs.
With it legal, no one is 'breaking teh-rulz man!' (which is why allot of people i know did so in the 1st place) and with relatively FAT TAX, people will reduce demand to some extent.

Havent thought much about Class B and A tho.

FOR LULZ: Sacha Baron Cohen (the guy who plays Borat in those films) as one of his other characters, Ali-G:http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=HqZKW1WEVlM

...mongol...

[CDN-SMOKEJUMPER]

Ouch Ghost you need to get wasted. Just joking of course but one who does not partake in any such activities could not really understand why some of us like to get messed up once inawhile.

However, no one should abuse them no matter what it is you're doing.

Legalisation will solve a lot of problems such as street crime. Why buy from a thug when you can go to the shop? It will also make drugs very cheap thus cutting off a very lucrative money source for terrorists.

The war on drugs is a waste of time money and most importantly lives.

[Ghostrider]

Originally Posted by CDN-SMOKEJUMPER

Ouch Ghost you need to get wasted.

:P

Originally Posted by CDN-SMOKEJUMPER

[...]one who does not partake in any such activities could not really understand why some of us like to get messed up once inawhile.

Nice logic, but I dont think I need to partake in those things in order to have a good time or to deal with a problem (which is not really 'dealing with it' per say). Also, I dont think you really have to try everything to know if you will like it or not. There're other ways to know if something will be beneficial (or not) to you (like watching other people do it and say "wow..that'll hurt, dont do it").

Originally Posted by CDN-SMOKEJUMPER

Legalisation will solve a lot of problems such as street crime. Why buy from a thug when you can go to the shop? It will also make drugs very cheap thus cutting off a very lucrative money source for terrorists.

The war on drugs is a waste of time money and most importantly lives.

True as well imo..


-Ghost

[[R-DEV]Masaq]

I'm gunna go out way on a limb here and say that legalisation/decriminalisation and state control doesn't actually counteract all the harmful elements of substances - look at alcohol and look at tobacco. Sure, Tobacco revenue brings in millions of pounds in tax each year but it certainly doesn't begin to even cover the health-related costs of this (legal) substance. Ditto with alcohol - the social and health costs of alcohol abuse are massive - anyone ever struggled to get seen at their local Accident and Emergency department on a Friday or Saturday night because all the staff are patching up drunks?

It's the same with the non-legal drugs, too. I've sat in a secure inpatient psychiatric ward and listened to eight patients (all with a psychotic illness such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder) all discussing cannabis use. All of them described quite clearly how they had used large quantities of skunk since a very early age, developmentally speaking (11-14 was the range).

Now, the interesting part was that even when they were presented with pretty rigid evidence that long term heavy use of cannabis can play a role in the initial onset and continuation of psychotic symptoms (paranoia, auditory and visual hallucinations, thought disorder and a plethora of others), every single one of them point blank denied that their drug useage could have ANYTHING to do with their current situation; namely being short-stay residents on a secure Psychiatric Intensive Care Unit.

Now, when I tell you that the care for each of those patients was costing over £1000 a week, and that a patient using local inpatient services like the PICU could expect to be in hospital for anywhere between a couple of weeks and a couple of years, that puts the possible true costs of drug use into context.

I'm not saying that cannabis use will CAUSE people to become psychotically unwell. What I am saying is that there is always the strong possibility that long term drug useage will cause somebody to experience problems. Many people can and do take recreational drugs without experiencing those kinds of problems, for many will experience them - and the cost to them, their families and society as a whole are pretty large.

I'm not a fan of blanket bans, I'm not for harsher sentences - I actually do favour a degree of state control. But I'm also a realist, and when people claim that (for example) class C substances have no impact other than a gentle release from day-to-day stresses, they're wrong.

[SiN|ScarFace]

The War on Drugs is working, people are making a killing, private prisons come to mind.

[[R-MOD]Wasteland]

Masaq, I've known hundreds, possibly thousands of dope smokers. I've only known two of them to have a psychological problem requiring hospitalization. One was bi-polar, and the other had severe OCD exacerbated by chronic self medication with Adderall (an American produced cocktail of amphetamine salts). I don't think either of their conditions had anything to do with their marijuana use.

I don't doubt that marijuana can cause latent psychoses to manifest earlier than they would otherwise. I also don't doubt that chronic marijuana use can cause all kinds of stresses in a person's life which can cause serious mental problems (especially when their main coping mechanism is more marijuana).

All I'm saying is that I think that your position at a mental health institution places you in the bottle-neck of these problems, and probably skews your sense of scale.

In a nation with national health care, tobacco use represents a harm to the public good. Any libertarian advocate of legalization would of course also advocate that this harm be paid for through increased taxation. If the taxation is not covering the harm, there needs to be more taxes. This would be the case with drugs as well.

Between the years 2000 and 2004, the average estimated yield for a square km of Andean coca plants per year was approximately 0.41 tons of pure cocaine. In Calgary, 3.5 grams of (far from pure) cocaine is about $110, and this would be considered a very good price in Canada. That's an incredible amount of markup. Can you imagine the tax revenue you could derive from that, even if end prices to the consumer were slashed by 50% or more? This is why drug lords are rich. If that money was going to the health care system instead of some fat Columbian guy in an Al Capone suit, we would be able to afford treatment facilities for drug addicts.

Drug addiction itself would be less of a problem as well. Much of the problems associated with a drug-using lifestyle stems not from the drugs themselves (though there are plenty of those, as Masaq has illustrated). Much (I would say most) of the problems come from the criminality of that lifestyle, as well as the attendant costs.

Do I think that drugs are a bad idea? For me, yeah, most of them are (and have proven themselves so). But does that mean that I ever once decided not to take a drug because it was illegal? Hell no. And that's the bottom line.