Editorial:
Star
Wars
and
the
Drug
War
7/1/05
David Borden, Executive Director, [email protected]
The story is not straightforward. Senator Palpatine, secretly the evil Sith lord Darth Sidious, quietly orchestrates a series of conflicts in order to draw the Republic's central government down a road of militarization while increasing and cementing his own power -- first as Chancellor, finally Emperor, the army built to defend the Republic from enemies his henchmen had organized transformed into the instrument of a dictatorship firmly under his grip. Precious democracy failed, undermined by the fear of enemies without and the corrupting machinations of unprincipled individuals within. The dark side won, at least for a time. The dark lord's power grab in the Star Wars prequels took the form of a plot. Not being much of a conspiracy type, I don't see the evolution of the drug war in that way. I view the drug war more as resulting from a malignant confluence of ignorance, political convenience, economic interests, racial and cultural prejudices, and misguided zealotry -- along with a legitimate concern over addiction and the misuse of substances. I don't believe the drug war is a plot directed by a few key actors, though I can't prove that. My analogy lies in a different direction. What prompted me to draw a Star Wars analogy this week was the release of the annual World Drug Report of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, which this year included an estimate of the annual revenues of the global drug trade in 2003. UNODC placed that amount at $320 billion. "This is not a small enemy against which we struggle. It is a monster," UNODC head Antonio Maria Costa said of the 12-figure industry. One of Costa's associates pointed out that the drug trade's worth is greater than the GDP of 88% of the UN's member nations. But those $320 billion per year only lie in the criminal underground because governments have decided, nationally and at the international level, to use the criminal law to prohibit drugs. If drugs were legal, the money would instead reside in the legitimate economy. All the harm, all the pathology flowing from this huge, illicit drug economy -- and it is vast -- all the warping, corrupting effects that economy has on entire societies -- all this exists because governments created an army of enemies by prohibiting drugs and then declared war on them. Every week we report here on further diminutions of civil rights and liberties -- of freedom -- in the name of a drug war waged against a multi-hundred billion dollar foe that can't be beaten. Dr. Costa is not a Sith lord -- I hope -- but his call to struggle against the "monster" serves to fuel that process. Nor do I equate the travesties of the drug war even with our own world's worst atrocities -- much less with the sheer evil of blowing up an inhabited planet as transpires in the first Star Wars movie taking place decades later. But some of the things going on in the drug war in their own right are still pretty bad; those who are involved in them should consider doing some introspection and rethinking if they don't want to continue unwittingly serving the dark side as they are doing now. Fantasy aside, a lot of lives are being ruined and a lot of people are dying because of our drug policies, and our institutions of justice and governance no longer have the shiny luster we might have once believed them to have. My vote in this democracy of ours is to cease building up enemies and armies to fight them. My vote instead is for peace.
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