Along with Garcia Luna, the drug war should be in the dock.
David Brooks: The war on drugs is empirically a total failure. The human, social, and economic costs are almost innumerable both in other countries and in the United States, but what can be verified is that after 50 years of applying this strategy, including the arrest and high-profile trials such as that of El Chapo and the former police chief, among others, along with the destruction of so many communities, the result is that there are more cheap, illicit drugs and opiate addicts on America's streets than ever before.
Who decides what illegal drugs are and how to prohibit or control them has been from the beginning more a political decision than a matter of law and order or public health.
It was in June 1971 that President Richard Nixon first declared a "war on drugs," which was, as one of his top advisers, John Ehrlichman, later admitted, a political ploy: "Nixon's (election) campaign in 1968, and then the Nixon White House, had two enemies: the anti-war left and the black population… We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be anti-war or black, but we could get the public to associate hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalize both, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, disrupt their rallies, and vilify them on the nightly news. Did we know we were lying about drugs? Of course".
America's drug epidemic has been brought heavily to light
A few months earlier, in December 1970, Elvis Presley had come to the White House to visit Nixon and offer his support in the fight against what he called "drug culture," receiving an honorary plaque from the agency that later became in the DEA. Nixon told him that "those who use drugs are in the forefront of anti-American protests," according to notes from an aide to the president present at the meeting. Elvis was already abusing opiates that contributed to his death from a heart attack seven years later.
Nixon's goal has been achieved dramatically since the 1980s, when the number of people incarcerated for non-violent drug offenses increased from 50,000 in 1980 to more than 400,000 in 1997; Today an average of 500,000 are still detained under these measures, affecting mainly racial minorities. "Nothing has contributed more to the systematic mass incarceration of people of color in the United States than the war on drugs," concluded expert Michelle Alexander.
Even before the declaration of that "war," the United States used drug laws as political weapons against certain communities, for example, anti-opium laws against Chinese immigrants in the 1870s and anti-marijuana laws against Mexicans in the early 20th century in the Southwest.
At the international level, for decades, the "war on drugs" has justified all kinds of overt (Panama) and covert interventions by Washington, as well as all kinds of imposition of policies in the Americas.
But that half-century-old consensus is unraveling. Today two countries that were the pillars of this "war" in the region under Plan Colombia and the Merida Initiative have rejected that strategy, something that is surely worrying Washington.
In the United States, opponents of this war have managed to legalize marijuana in 21 states and the federal capital, and even one, Oregon, has just approved the first measure to decriminalize all drugs; 68 percent of adults favor the legalization of marijuana.
It does not help the official version that in recent years it has been revealed that the opiate drug addiction epidemic –responsible for the majority of a new record of more than 110,000 overdose deaths in a period of one year in 2021– was nurtured not by cartels, but by American pharmaceutical companies and doctors in white coats.
*Rebellion Note: Reference to Genaro García Luna, who was Mexico's Secretary of Public Security -the highest authority in the "war on drugs"- is accused of receiving millions of dollars from the same drug cartels that he allegedly he said fight.
Those responsible for this drug policy, and its costs, are not yet before a court.
Sly & The Family Stone. I wanna take you higher. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqWQzOzK3kw
