I Blame

Everyone is looking for some one to blame these days. Presidents are very useful in this regard. Some blame Bush II, Some blame Obama I. I blame Nixon. I blame him for ramping up the Drug War that has cost the Federal Government at minimum $1 trillion so far. With no end in sight. If you figure the total direct cost at $70 billion a year for 30 of the past 40 years (a good rough estimate I think – which sorta inflation adjusts the numbers) the total cost is around $2 trillion, Federal, State, and local. If you include insurance losses due to thefts to support a hard drug habit at a conservative $50 billion a year, that is another $1.5 trillion. And what about the cost of the Drug War in the source countries? Hard to quantify. But in lives alone it is at least 40,000 a year. Even twenty years of that is a staggering 800,000 lives. To keep plants and plant extracts out of the hands of those who want them. And that is just the source countries. Add in a minimum of 5,000 a year in the US for 20 years and that is another 100,000. And that does not even count my brother who was killed in a Drug War crossfire in 1974.

End the sonofabitch. Before some one else loses a brother.

Cross Posted at Power and Control


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10 responses to “I Blame”

  1. Randy Avatar
    Randy

    Tyranny does have its costs, doesn’t it?

  2. Frank Avatar
    Frank

    Although I agree with you totally about ending the drug war, both from the principle of personal freedom as well as cost, the actual results of drug use are staring us in the face and they are not pretty. Just compare our society today with that of pre-World War 1 America.

    It’s true what you have said about low drug use during that time when it wasn’t illegal and there was no Drug War. And your comparison with alcohol use and crime going up during Prohibition is true also. But I’m not buying into a return to those halcyon days if we make drugs legal. Sure, it will be better than the situation now with prison and legal costs down, somewhat lower real crime like robbery and homicide, and probably an eventual decline in drug use.

    But the reasons for the rise of drug culture are outside the factors you dwell on. We will never return to a society with half the population living in family units on farms and attending church and Bible study. We will never have a society without some kind of government welfare safety net which allows time to indulge. In short we have a very fractured open society without the moral constraints of family and church, and with way too much time on our hands to indulge in vice.

  3. Frank Avatar
    Frank

    By vice, I don’t mean to imply that using drugs is necessarily evil, only that they are an “indulgence” – to the extent they become addictive and take over your life – yes then they are highly destructive. And that applies equally to alcohol.

  4. Simon Avatar
    Simon

    Frank,

    I do not believe for one minute, not one nano second, in the myth of addiction. It is a chimera. A bogey man conjured up to herd the rubes.

    From Nov. 2005

    Is Addiction Real?

  5. Simon Avatar
    Simon

    Further,

    My dad was an alcoholic until age 60 when he gave it up. Why was he an alcoholic? PTSD. His mother used to beat him without mercy when he was a kid. She once thew a meat axe at him in a fit of anger. Fortunately he ducked.

  6. Randy Avatar
    Randy

    Simon,

    This is anecdotal I know, but it does lend credence to the many posts you’ve made concerning the link between PTSD and drug use.

    Within the last 12 years or so, I’ve befriended a couple of women who were herion users at one point in their lives.

    One of them was raised in a broken home. Her parents divorced when she was in grade school. To make matters worse, after the divorce her mother moved away, about 1,000 miles, and gave up any custody rights to her and her two siblings. For the rest of her adolesence, she had very little contact with her mother.

    It’s bad enough when I try to imagine what I would have felt had my mother done the same. Try it yourself, then just imagine what it would be like to actually that happen.

    As for the second woman, her father was an M.D. who, for reasons unknown to me, was prone to angry outbursts toward her and siblings and her mother. One example of his irrational rage was the day he came home and destroyed a sapling she and her mother had grown from an acorn for a grade school science class. He committed suicide when she was about 18. She told me she felt nothing when he killed himself. No sadness, no relief, nothing.

    My father is still alive and at 82, doesn’t have too many years left. I get sad just contemplating his inevitable passing. I can’t comprehend not being saddened by the death of a parent. It says something about her home environement that she felt nothing at his death.

    Many of us can’t imagine the emotional pain that some people experience in their lives, whether as children or adults. Perhaps we ought to try, then we will better understand ourselves and those around us.

  7. Frank Avatar
    Frank

    M. Simon, I have a slightly different opinion about drugs than you. I will defer to your general understanding because it is a subject you have investigated and feel passionately about.

    But I hate the drug culture. It passed by me in the 60’s. Other than a few tokes back when, I’ve never used drugs. No reds, whites, or yellows. No shrooms. No ecstasy or LSD. No heroin or coke. No poppers or crystal meth. Nothing. Nada.
    And that goes for my partner of 31 years.
    If you insist on calling it a drug, then too many beers at the gay bars might qualify us. But I doubt it.

    I see the wreckage around me. If you want to say it comes from PTSD, that’s fine. But the ruined lives are real and it sure looks like the drugs caused it.

  8. Simon Avatar
    Simon

    Frank,

    Of course that is what it looks like. That is the lie that keeps Drug Prohibition going.

    BTW most of the damage you see is caused by prohibition. Steady supplies at legal prices makes the vast majority of that go away.

    http://powerandcontrol.blogspot.com/2011/03/if-you-dont-quit-harming-yourself-we.html

    I am a consultant psychiatrist in Widnes, northern England and prescribe hard drugs such as heroin and cocaine. Ironically I may not prescribe hasheesh, nor opium nor coca. This is like being able to prescribe cognac but not wine. Nevertheless this policy has eliminated drug deaths, there is no H.I.V. infection, and a police study of our program shows a 15-fold fall in drug-related acquisitive crime. Most interestingly, the incidence of addiction has fallen 12-fold.

    http://www.libertarian.co.uk/lapubs/polin/polin082.pdf

    The cases described in the pdf will warm your heart. Until you learn what happened to them when the program was shut down.

  9. Simon Avatar
    Simon

    Alcohol is a drug.

  10. Frank Avatar
    Frank

    A famous quote from Marx:

    Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.

    Hence my remark above about drug use now vs. the 19th century. It seems to me that Marx was dead on here. His solution however was worse than the disease. Without moral guidance from religion people seem to flounder about.

    Drugs are filling a need in the vacuum that is left. (Better that I guess than the New Soviet Man!)