U.S. Tells South America to Shut Up About Legalizing Drugs

(Reuters) - Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano defended Washington's drug war strategy on Monday despite calls by some Latin American leaders to consider decriminalizing narcotics.
...
"I would not agree with the premise that the drug war is a failure," Napolitano said. "It is a continuing effort to keep our peoples from becoming addicted to dangerous drugs." [Reuters]
Okay, but what do these two sentences have to do with one another? Yes, we know the drug war is "a continuing effort to keep our peoples from becoming addicted to dangerous drugs [and marijuana]," but I don't understand what that has to do with whether or not it's been a failure. This is like saying, "I would not agree with premise that asbestos is toxic. It is a material used to insulate buildings."
So in a metaphorical sense, you could say that American drug policy is made of asbestos, and Janet Napolitano has been given the fun assignment of convincing a bunch of frustrated foreign leaders that the sickness and death presently surrounding them was caused by something other than the one thing that's obviously causing it.
It's a ridiculous situation that lends itself to some really ridiculous arguments, such as Napolitano preposterously comparing Mexican Drug Kingpin Joaquin "Shorty" Guzman to Osama Bin Laden:
"It took us 10 years to find (al Qaeda chief) Osama bin Laden and we found him, and you know what happened there," Napolitano said.
Yeah, but the fact that these drug lords are as slippery as Osama f#$king Bin Laden ought not to inspire confidence. Seriously, I don't even know what her point is supposed to be, because it's gotta be pretty damn obvious to Latin American leaders that we don't have enough SEAL teams to track down and kill every wannabe drug boss all over the globe. Their services, unlike Bin Laden's, are actually popular with much of the American public.
Calls for legalization in Latin America are going to get louder the longer this idiocy continues, and it should surprise no one that the U.S. government's latest attempts to suppress it are utterly and predictably devoid of substance as always.
drug war
Overdose deaths from prescription painkillers have skyrocketed in the past decade. Every year, nearly 15,000 people die from overdoses involving these drugs—more than those who die from heroin and cocaine combined.
Prescription Painkiller Overdoses in the U.S.
http://www.cdc.gov/Features/VitalSigns/PainkillerOverdoses/
hey, great article again
hey, great article again speak easy man, this lady is such a miserable, miserable... bleeding at the pores corrupt piece of garbage. I hate to say it man but if there was a prohibition on canoli's I bet you this this lady would not be in this position, i assure you, you'd see this chick a good 4-5 months out of the year in a regular NYC train station, panhandling for the majority of the day, disappearing in the early afternoon for a couple hours then back at the panhandling spot after the wakeup canoli, of course, this time there'd be some sugar powder on her cheeks as one man says to her, who sees her everyday, and, out of pity always throws her some change, "hey, you know, there's help out there for you... I mean, aren't you sick and tired of being sick and tired?? you say that you need money for your kids... but everyday i see you in the morning, you disappear then you come back looking a little more full then you did earlier with sugary residue on your cheeks... i think you have a problem.. i think you need to let go, let god, let go let authority, let go let district attorney....." and Napolitano would deny it, it's not sugar residue from those illegal canolis it's makeup that got caked up as she rushed from the spot to check on her kids, of course. The dude would shake his head and again out of pity throw her a few cents. After the majority of the day was over shed count up all the dough she got, it's rarely enough (once in awhile, it works out to be 'enough' - usually on holidays or around the givingness of drunk folks) but she counts up in her head how many canolis she could get with this version of the daily loot.... at 20 bucks a canoli, when they used to be legal back in the 'old days' in little italy for 25 cents a piece... she can get two and a half canolis... she'll see if her 'guy' who they call 'the baker' will 'spot her' or 'loan her' on 'credit' an extra canoli... she may need to, ahem, 'clean his house' for the credit, if he's in one of THOSE moods, but whatever, it's not like she's got a choice, i mean, who'd be dumb enough to actually try to save this cash and NOT get a canoli? you know? cause then youre not gonna be able to sleep, and it'll feel...sorta like god is trying to turn you inside out in terms of pain.. that gnawing pain of not having that canoli. those hot flashes, the constipation, then nuclear toilet visits.. the hot, the cold, and the worst, those striking pins and needles in the legs when you lay down, nobody is gonna go through that. So she disppears again, gets those canolis..and since most times she asks for credit, the baker IS in that mood, she did clean his house, too bad she don't know and wont (not until she goes to a canoli substitution clinic, where they give out sugar free italian pastries which are always old and dry and just not even close to the canoli in anyway - though she dreams of one day, maybe winning the lottery and going to europe, where canolis are still prohibited, but are legal in medical settings, depending on country, with the UK, denmark, holland, germany and a couple others leading the way in canoli maintenance treatment) that the baker has hep C and HIV, cause he wasn't always a baker, before he turned his life over to the 'authority' but realized the money to be made in the canoli trade as a former canoli consumer, he was a canoli addict himself... and in that dirty canoli world, the baker once had no choice, there was a situation in that chaos whereby he and someone else only had one fat canoli, the bakers pal took a bite, shared the other half with the baker and the baker consumed it, caught diseases from that shared canoli and his life as he knew it, changed...
The war on drugs is really a war on people.
Oh, and here I was thinking
Oh, and here I was thinking that Gil said that the 'drug war' was over and everything was rainbows and lollypops.. when did it start back up again?
Napolitano is Pro-Fiction on Prohibition
Despite the consistency with which the U.S. government pats itself on the back for a job poorly done, it’s still embarrassing when one of its hack bureaucrats openly lies to one or more neighboring countries with the expectation that anyone with any brains is going to believe what she says. This is the sort of thing that gets shoes thrown at politicians.
As Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano owes it to her fellow citizens to get real in her assessments of international threats and issues. A seething drug war on one’s border with a fatality rate closing in on the total number of American casualties in Viet Nam is no measure of success. Prohibition was supposed to prevent victims, not create them. Whether it’s getting arrested or killed in a drug war, or being forced as a taxpayer to fund wasteful strategies, a majority of citizens are victimized by failed prohibition policies that would have been declared obsolete and off limits eight-decades ago were it not for pandering phonies like Napolitano and Harry Anslinger, to name a few.
Anyone in the United States who really wants to consume an illegal drug can do so. The drug situation exists as it does because prohibitions create black markets, and black markets make it easier to obtain drugs than would otherwise be the case were drugs to be regulated like legal ones. All Janet Napolitano has proven by her claim of drug war success is that she is completely clueless about national security, which makes her incompetent and unfit to serve in her appointed position as Secretary of Homeland Security.
Giordano
She ain't stupid
I fully agree with you, Giordano. The sad thing regarding Janet Napolitano is that she is not clueless, incompetent or unfit. Far from it, she knows exactly what she is saying, doing and asking others to do. And she is not alone.
As a matter of fact, such levels of utter cynicism and blatant manipulation permeate the US government from top to bottom, starting with the US congress and president Obama. It involves every branch of the US government and every official in the US administration—from State Secretary Hilary Clinton to Drug Czar Kerlikowske , from DEA supremo Leonheart to William Brownfield, US assistant secretary of state for international narcotics and law enforcement affairs.
Despite all the evidence to the contrary, they keep arguing that the War on Drugs is a success. And to top it off, keep repeating the same mantra again and again: the only way to solve the so-called drug problem is doing more, not less, of the same.
Gart Valenc
Twitter: @gartvalenc
Website: http://www.stopthewarondrugs.org
Indeed! For the bureaucrats
Indeed! For the bureaucrats like Napolitano, the drug prohibition is very much like The Goose That Lays Golden Eggs.
One must protect the Goose at all costs. The truth cannot be uttered.
Dirt poor coca farmers
Colombia is the third largest
Gart, Thank you for that
Homeland Security would like
Homeland Security would like nothing more than to fuse the war on terror with the war on drugs. These psychopaths see the drug industry and drug users as a huge base in which to propel their new prison economy. This is evident by the Obama administration's war on medical marijuana and USA medical marijuana producers and suppliers. By taking down the domestic wholesale market, the marijuana trade falls back to criminal cartels and organized crime. So then it is easier to frame the marijuana issue as one of national security, rather than a public health issue.
The War on (Non-Corporate) Drugs
"A thousand dead children means we're winning war on drugs." ~ Michele Leonhart
And here I thought that Psychopaths got medicated or insitutionalized. . . turns out they get hired by Duh Gutterment.
War on Drugs: The Holy Grail It Ain't
Well said, James S. I invite you to read what I wrote in my blog about a similar statement by Leonhart, here:
http://bit.ly/wSe4Xi
Gart Valenc
Twitter: @gartvalenc
You can't legislate morality.
You can't legislate morality.
It's more Simple than that
Why is there a war on drugs? Why are we carelessly polluting our world? Why do you have to pay for healthcare? Why is inequality spreading? What's with the MSM? What's curtailing our liberties and government? These problems all have a common genesis. It is the agenda of the wealthy power elite class created from the systemic fascination with monetary wealth, greed, and the exploitation and theft of others under such fair guises as free market capitalism where really only corporatism and corruption prevails. Currently the prison-industrial complex in which prisons (increasingly privatized themselves) and the corporations contracted to build, operate and maintain them are making insane amounts of money warehousing citizens, over half of which are minor drug offenders. Many judges have been corrupted with payments from facilities that will later house the people convicted by them. There is also a reason the united states is one of 3 countries (the other two being Afghanistan and the Vatican) that has not ratified the Kyoto protocol (a seemingly reasonable multinational agreement to lower carbon emissions according to an, all be it, lenient (considering the consequences of polluting the earth) timetable for those of you who don’t know). And no such action will be taken until the elite class will agree it is profitable. ‘Green’ alternatives will only materialize and the war on drugs will end only when the change is deemed profitable, its as simple as that. Many fraudulent ‘green’ alternatives will appear in the meantime to satisfy the average activist including wind farms (which have an overall negative carbon footprint when you account from the materials and means to build them, a disgusting lie really), fraking for natural gas, which is so obviously disastrous for the environment, and the most laughable one, clean coal. Any sort of 'progress' whether it be social, political, economical must first face the behemoth that is the wealthy elite and their merciless endeavor for profits. It's always about money, always. If your theory about any social or political or even ecological dilemma doesn't include the incentive to make money, it is wrong. MY OWN OPINION: I fear it is too late for the modern world however. By the time the momentum in the industrial world has changed the biosphere and the ecosystem will have been significantly altered. And I believe the complacency of people and the continued assurance of the complacency of people set up by the powers at be have ensured this disastrous outcome. The global population will begin to decline (something that hasn’t happened for over 1400 years if only accounting local Europe) slowly, then more rapidly as we struggle to attain basic things like fresh water, which is becoming scarce at an alarming rate, millions of people will be displaced and killed by spreading deserts and other natural killers like the super bugs we have bred from generations of ignorant and unethical anti-bacterial usage (perpetuated again by the pursuit of profits by pharmaceutical companies around the globe) which will likely kill many people left in the post industrial stone-age. All of which may begin in our life times if we are lucky enough to witness looming catalyzing calamities such as the landslide tsunami originating from the cumbre vieja in the canary islands which is poised to destroy the eastern seaboard of the USA, or the over due super large earthquake along the san andreas fault which will likely devastate California, or most dangerously the super volcano that is Yellowstone national park erupting in our lifetimes. Not to mention the probabilistic certainty a sizable asteroid will strike the earth leading to another inevitable extinction event. Yes, I foresee fear and discrimination will again become the human races mother and father and we will as a whole be pushed back into another kind of dark age. If there is any lesson to be learned from this plight I believe it lies in the recognition of some basic truths. That we are all one, that we must recognize that in a globalized, civilized world the surplus of one person’s needs and desires is at the expense of another mans needs and desires. We need to recognize that no one earns more than they need and that all people share resources. We must also recognize that injustices descend from inequality, and that the misunderstanding of this cause and effect has created many of the longstanding issues in society. And most importantly that human beings and nature are inseparable, harmonious, and inescapably part of the same system. A system which that will likely see the end of our species. And that our only hope is to return to equilibrium in that system, to stop living beyond our means, or face certain annihilation.
The drug war has gone too far
The Drug War has gone too far.
Sitting in your Ivory Towers
making laws against the flowers
while flowers of your choice are fine.
Coffee, cigarettes and wine
State Supported
State Promoted
Advertised and Subsidized.
With wiretaps and pre-dawn busts
your Pot Commandos power lusts
make the cartels rich as nations
while you pass your legislations
designed for sound bite
spin gyrations.
You burn their crops.
You corrupt their cops.
You drive prices to their tops.
Spending billions.
Watching millions.
Confiscate a home, a car
Bend over search
Piss in the jar.
Supply-demand and rising prices
paid in blood and sexual vices.
They cope with dope
but it’s you that pays
with midnight fears of alleyways.
You’re both torching pipes and laying lines
Who’ll be first to change their minds.
The Drug War has gone too far.
Great poetry!
Jim Ware.
I like that old poem by Franklin Adams in 1931
PROHIBITION IS AN AWFUL FLOP.
WE LIKE IT.
IT CAN'T STOP WHAT IT'S MEANT TO STOP.
WE LIKE IT.
IT'S LEFT A TRAIL OF GRAFT AND SLIME
IT'S FILLED OUR LAND WITH VICE AND CRIME
IT'S DON'T PROHIBIT WORTH A DIME
NEVERTHELESS, WE'RE FOR IT.
Sincerity sadly lacking
As has been mentioned herin by many,these politicians are cynical and corrupt in every aspect of their lives.Small wonder that they calculate that the best step,politically,is to promote and support the war on drugs.Obama,for one,did a 180 on cannabis as soon as he saw that he actually had a shot at being president.He appointed as his running mate one Joe Biden explicitly because he was seen to be hard on drugs.These people know that their own CIA has been knee deep in the drug trade since the early 60's.Smuggle them in and sell them in America's ghettos to pay for all those black ops they're so fond of.Oliver North got a job on Faux and freeway Ricky got time.Reagan probably had alzheimers.What is truly horrifying is the emphasis placed on marijuana by government policy and the office of the drug czar while Amerika's children turn to meth and oxycontin.Prohibition is an obvious failure and all the drug war has accomplished is to put the manufacture,sale and movement of all drugs into the hands of a far more organized and lethal group than in the past with the result that drugs are cheaper,more plentiful and stronger.Gangs are now everywhere and heavily armed.It used to be the neighborhood drug dealer was someone you went to school with.Now it's all gangsters and if the neighborhood guy try's to step out he will probably be shot.This is the progress they speak of?At least the people in Latin America have learned that the harder you push,the harder they push back.There will always be someone willing to fill the void as long as prohibition artificially inflates the price of drugs.It will end only one way.It's just a matter of how many more lives must be shattered or taken away before these politicians stop lying to us and do the right thing.Right now,they have wars to pay for.
Post new comment