Read You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos Online
Authors: Robert Arthur
This is the same government that was warned by an FBI field agent a year prior to 9/11 that Osama bin Laden’s followers could be training in American flight schools. The agent proposed that information be compiled on the visa applications of foreign students seeking flight school admission. This was never done because FBI headquarters regarded it as a “sizable undertaking.”
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Meanwhile, the 2002 Super Bowl ads launched a $1.5 billion anti-drugs advertising campaign. When later evaluated by the Government Accountability Office it was discovered that this “sizable undertaking” had not reduced drug use, but instead convinced kids that illegal drug-taking is normal.
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G | E | P |
Aryan Brotherhood | White | U.S. Prisons |
Bloods | Black | Los Angeles |
Crips | Black | Los Angeles |
Gangster Disciples | Black | Chicago |
Hell’s Angels | White | Canada |
Italian Mafia (Five Families, Cosa Nostra) | Italian | New York City |
Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) | Salvadoran | Los Angeles, El Salvador |
Mexican Mafia (La Eme) | Chicano | Southern California |
Nuestra Familia | Latino | Northern California |
*
Umbrella organization with many affiliated gangs (sets).
T | O | C |
Taliban (Al Qaeda’s Protectors) | Islamic | Afghanistan |
FARC | Marxist | Colombia |
AUC’s heirs | Para-Military | Colombia |
Shining Path | Maoist | Peru |
The insanity of the war on drugs is most evident when it is recognized how abysmally it has failed. All twenty-three blue-ribbon commissions that have studied the issue in the past century have condemned the drug war. A 2006 survey of over 22,000 chiefs of police and sheriffs found that eighty-two percent of them disagreed with the statement that the drug war had “been successful in reducing the use of illegal drugs.”
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The government likes to point to temporary dips in the usage of particular drugs as signs of success, but these dips are often accompanied by blips for other drugs—blips that go unmentioned. The popularity of individual drugs, and drugs as a whole, wax and wane just as with other consumer goods, regardless of government intervention.
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One of the few objective measures of prohibition’s success is the price of drugs. If the government was successful in stifling the flow of drugs, prices should go up. However, prices for cocaine and heroin fell steadily during the heated drug warring of the 1980s and 1990s. This price drop did not appear to be attributable to less consumption or less availability; for example, in 1989 cocaine was almost twice as easy to get by high school seniors as it was in 1980.
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The price of marijuana has been more erratic, but its availability and its popularity are the same as they were in the mid-1970s.
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It is also worth noting that marijuana is now the number-one cash crop in the United States, bigger than corn and wheat combined.
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The war on drugs will never succeed because of iron-clad economic laws. The stated goal of drug enforcement is to drive up illegal drugs’ retail price.
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This fails because recreational drugs have proven to be a necessity to the human species.
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Some scientists have even argued that it is instinctual to desire altered states of consciousness, for instance, little children spinning to create dizziness.
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Since getting high is impossible to stop,
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the war on drugs is self-defeating for two reasons.
One, since drugs have proven to be a necessity,
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when the government manages to raise a drug’s price it also raises the profit (incentive) for people to supply them.
Two, criminal enforcement of drug laws actually strengthens the drug market. It is well known to those who witness the drug war firsthand that “we only catch the stupid ones.”
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Law enforcement largely locks up low-level or middle-level offenders. The drug kingpins that politicians blame for little Suzie’s choices are seldom caught.
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Law enforcement “weeds out the less effective, less ingenious participants and encourages the more ruthless and the more cunning.”
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The rising efficiency of drug traffickers and dealers can be seen in more than just the price drop in the finished product; it can also be seen in its quality. Street heroin rose in purity from five percent in 1982 to twenty-seven percent in 1999. Street cocaine rose from thirty-six percent in 1982 to sixty-four percent in 1999.
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T | P | T |
100 lbs. of coca leaves | Rural South America | $50 |
1 lb. of cocaine | South America | $500 |
1 lb. of cocaine | United States | $5,000 |
16 1-ounce packets | Wholesaler | $15,000 |
1 lb. of crack rocks | Retailer | $50,000 undiluted or $100,000 diluted |
America’s drug war abroad has caused decades of slaughter in countries like Colombia and Mexico. This collateral damage has not dampened America’s enthusiasm to rid the world of chemical pleasure.
Perhaps a better understanding of its own tragedy might. The masterminds of 9/11, al Qaeda, were sheltered and abetted by the Taliban that controlled Afghanistan from 1996–2001. The Taliban was largely financed by opium and, in 1999, Afghanistan produced three times more opium than the rest of the world combined.
In Spring 2001 the United States gave the Taliban $43 million as a reward for “cracking down” on opium production (despite knowing it protected Bin Laden). It later was learned that the Taliban merely cut back because the country was producing so much opium that heroin prices were tanking.
—Jeffrey Bartholet & Steve Levine, “Holy Men of Heroin,”
Newsweek
, 6 Dec. 1999; Bill Masters, ed.,
New Prohibition
(2004), p. 33; and “Retired General Says Drug Money Fueling Taliban, al Qaeda”
Washington Times
, 1 Oct. 2005.
The futility of keeping drugs off of the streets is demonstrated by other facts. For example, America cannot even keep drugs out of its prisons. In 1997, nine percent of those in American prisons tested positive for drugs.
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This is the case even in high-security “supermax” prisons, where people such as Charles Manson have tested positive.
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The government could lock up the entire population to keep it from doing drugs and it would still fail.
It is argued that if drugs were legal their use would soar. The following is a partial list of drugs found naturally in America that are legal to possess. Despite not being drug-war targets their usage is rare. Perhaps what is needed is a government campaign against them to get the word out. Warning: Legal status varies by jurisdiction and is subject to change. Users’ experiences with these drugs can be found on the Internet at sites such as
Erowid.org
.
Amanita muscaria—
This mushroom was the Soma of ancient India and grows wild in North America. Consuming one to five dried mushrooms causes sensory distortions and occasional hallucinations. Nausea and vomiting often result as well.
Broom (Cytisus scoparius
)—When smoked, this yellow-flowered shrub produces intoxication and euphoria.
Calamus (Acorus calamus
)—Eating two inches of the root is invigorating. Ten inches creates an LSD effect.
Catnip (Nepeta cataria
)—Smoking catnip or drinking it via a tea creates a marijuana effect. An LSD effect is reported at high doses.
Coleus (Coleus blumei and Coleus pumilus
)—Chewing and eating fifty to seventy-five leaves causes colorful hallucinations.
Hops (Humulus lupulus
)—Used in alcoholic beverages, hops can also be smoked as a marijuana alternative. Because of this the government has asked growers not to sell them to the general public.
Morning Glory (Rivea corymbosa
)—Consuming twenty to fifty powdered seeds causes restlessness and increased awareness. A hundred to 150 seeds will cause visual distortions and hallucinations. Two hundred to five hundred seeds will cause intense hallucinations, nausea, vomiting, and abdominal pain. Used by the Aztecs.
Scorpion—
In Afghanistan the main part of scorpion tails are dried, crushed into powder, and smoked. They reportedly cause long-lasting intoxication and hallucinations. Effects likely vary widely between species.
—Paul Gahlinger, “Psychoactive Drugs that Are Not Illegal,”
Illegal Drugs
(2001), pp. 177–194; and David MacDonald,
Drugs in Afghanistan
(2007), pp. 244–249.
Another clue is America’s entry points. Media attention is given to the drug war’s battles at the border. This is usually focused on smuggling through international airline flights and motor vehicle traffic running from Mexico into the United States. The fact that smugglers are even bothering to use these routes at all shows how ineffectively they are policed because there are easier alternatives. The most obvious one is walking them across deserted border areas like illegal immigrants— without drugs—do every day.
A second route is through the mammoth forty-foot-long steel containers of international commerce that are flipped from ships to railroad carts and trucks. Checking just one of these containers is a huge task and Los Angeles’ port alone can bring in 130,000 of them in a month. In Los Angeles, customs inspectors struggle to check even two percent of these. The entire annual cocaine supply for the United States could fit in thirteen of the boxes. The entire annual heroin supply could fit in just one.
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Heroin importation on the East coast practically came to a halt in the summer of 1972, but it had nothing to do with law enforcement. There was a shipping strike.
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Even if drug importation miraculously ceased, Americans could simply grow their own. Coca and poppies can both be grown on American soil.
Papaver somniferus—
the poppies that provide heroin—grow through sidewalk cracks in Seattle, along interstate highways, and are planted by gardeners like Martha Stewart.
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To get opium from these plants one merely has to slit the pod with a knife. It is probably not a coincidence that poppies are frequently the top-selling dried flower.
Lastly, people can always switch to other drugs. The thorough prosecution of particular drugs in the past has simply turned people to alternatives. The prohibition on opium and cocaine drove people to use heroin. Alcohol’s prohibition was the “mainspring of the marijuana boom.” The raising of the minimum legal age for alcohol consumption to twenty-one in the late 1970s and 1980s also stoked marijuana demand.
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