I appear to have been vague in pinpointing my specific targets when focusing on the cogs that make the drug war machine run. It’s understood that innocent people can be caught up in criminal acts without their knowledge or moral awareness. The Nuremberg trials dealt with this gray area.

The cogs I refer to are certain bizarre personality types who, like scum, rise to the top and manage to turn the possibility of a peaceful solution into nightmare alley. In that sense, what happened at Enron isn’t much different from what's happened within drug enforcement since the opium wars of the late 19th century.

This is not to say that the drug war biz is not, like most international corporations, a floating and undirected island of self interest. This is but one aspect of the drug war problem, and the problem should be pursued relentlessly. In that vein, as back-up, Emile Durkheim, the father of sociology, did excellent studies on the politics and dynamics of bureaucracies that still apply a century later. As with most bodies of knowledge, any single bit of obscure knowledge revealed in Durkheim’s work could be what eventually pulls the plug on the drug war.

But focusing the light on bureaucratic survival is only one of the options in a counter-war against a very complicated combination of social forces and personalities. As in any war or counter-war, ignoring the legitimate options toward victory, no matter how small, would make men such as George Washington and Che Guevara cringe and laugh.

Giordano

Good points. The soccer moms definitely need reassurance that the threat of the evil drug menace isn’t all that it’s portrayed to be; hippies, Che and all that. So do all the shit kickers in the heartland. This achievement would eliminate the influence of authoritarians in the drug war—people with knee-jerk responses to imagined threats. But that leads us back to eliminating the bureaucracies that deliberately feed the drug war frenzy with misinformation.

And it’s true, whatever the adolescent menace du jour happens to be, pool halls, video games, or Paris Hilton; American society is set up to make money off it. In a capitalist society, how does anyone stop that?

All the people arrested on drug offenses could magically come together to fight their drug cases in court, slowing the legal system even further than current drug trials (to the delight of corporate offenders with pending legal cases, and the disdain of civil rights plaintiffs), and still, money would have to go to a legal defense team. Drug war victims could neglect to pay their fines, or refuse to do their community service, while figuring out ways to sue the crap out of the system. The system would still find a way to either retaliate or just absorb the punches.

Big corporations such as Safeway patronize anti-drug NGOs with donations of, say, $250,000—corporate translation: here’s a quarter, kid, now go away and don’t bother me. For a pittance of money in the eyes of the Safeway corporation, it gets to look like a good friend of the neighborhood.

Stopping the flow of money would be great. I really hope someone can do it.

In the meantime, grass roots opposition to the drug warrior menace grows every day, helped along with each exposure of every idiotic, immoral and hypocritical thing the drug warriors do and say. And to uncover these gems of bureaucratic psychoses I think requires hacking the system from a concerned citizen’s standpoint of inquiry, fact finding, analysis and appropriate action.

Giordano

I just wanted to add another theoretical approach (since you mentioned sociology) called Public Choice. This discipline is essentially the study of human behavior in politics using the methodology of economics to make explanations and predictions. It could also be called "political science using economic models of humans as rational beings who try to optimize their own benefits".

Or in other words: you analyze the economic incentives present in a political or government/public system and use those pay-offs to explain and predict behavior. In my view, as a Ms.C. of Economics, is that the models have quite good predictive powers.

Like so many other disciplines it bears much resemblance to common sense, but using the theoretical framework might push our agenda more effectively into the economist and political science arena.

A close partner of public choice theory is the socalled "Game Theory" (which is also used in evolutionary theory to explain and predict evolution and behavior). Look up the "Prisoners' Dilemma" if you want a very simple taste of what game theory is about *(there are probably more appropriate games to analyze in the Drug War).

sicntired I live in Vancouver B.C. where pot is almost legal and the courts are now siding with the people over the tyranny of the police.We still have people in prison(Second only to the US in % per pop)and Marc Emery is awaiting extradition to the US for doing what he paid taxes to the Canadian government to do for years.The DEA has just sponsored another raid on a marijuana advocate and his drug war museum.There are no winners in this war.There are small victories that will hopefully one day lead to the abolition of current drug laws.The pain and untold suffering that is being fostered in the name of drug war politics will never be prosecuted and there will be no winners.