Illicit Drug Trafficking Is Not An Act Of Terrorism
on the invalidity of the premises
The folly of the Drug War is the conceit that legal penalties play some crucial role in “deterring” decisions by people to use lethally dangerous drugs. We have decades on end of evidence to the contrary. Understand the risky preconditions under which people are using them: they’re purchasing a product of unknown purity and quantity that might kill them. Every new purchase of a lethally dangerous drug carries that risk. If that reality isn’t deterring someone from voluntarily choosing to use a dangerous drug, the legal risks aren’t going to deter them.
“Not enough consequences” to drug abuse as it is? Really? Has compounding the consequences with legal penalties helped to solve the problem? How about treating every teenager arrested for drugs as a Drug Addict in need of Rehabilitation, assigned to mingle in the company and society of other confirmed Drug Addicts?
This is not the same thing as saying that society should tolerate public drug use, or ignore enforcement of the laws against shoplifting, car-break-ins, ignoring curfews in public parks, or any of the other malum in se criminal offenses committed by dysfunctional drug abusers and addicts. But drug use is not a criminal behavior in itself, and it’s been a huge mistake to treat it that way. Personal possession of alcohol was not criminalized during alcohol Prohibition. User criminalization would not have deterred users, it would have made the situation ten times worse.
As for the illicit market: any honest assessment has to include both sides of a prohibition policy: criminal penalties do work to keep many people out of the business of supplying the demand. But they also amount to conceding a career criminal monopoly over the supply of the forbidden substance. That means that drug dealers are subject to arrest and conviction for unscrupulously providing unsafe substances to an unregulated consumer market. A market of people voluntarily purchasing the substance, at their own risk.
An official U.S. government policy that classifies drug dealers as terrorists is ridiculous. And if its faulty logic is accepted uncritically, it’s entirely possible that policy will eventually be applied within U.S. borders.
Instead of scapegoating people who sell unsafe, hazardous and unregulated products to a base of willing customers as “terrorists”, we need to direct more attention toward solving the problem of people who have sold unsafe, hazardous and unregulated products to a customer base that has consumed them unwillingly. And, it increasingly appears, unwittingly.
Yeah. Disposable plastics. PFAS. PFOS. BPA.I didn’t order that. I’m a hippie. Pro-natural world, anti-materialist, anti-toxic waste, recycler, secondhand consumer.
But someone ordered that. For their grandchildren.
It wasn’t my call. I’ve been long been part of that vast cohort of Americans who were rendered politically powerless as part of their forcible exclusion from Respectable Society, because Doper. “Druggie”, in the original ascribed status parlance.Hippie- and then Aging Hippie. Brain-damaged burnout. Unlike the teetotaling Joe Biden and Donald Trump. The cream of the Baby Boom.
They say an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. In the case of plastics, it seems like the benefits of prevention might have been worth a hundred pounds of cure. But that ship has sailed. So we’re left to pick up that bill. Which makes the recent full-court press for a multi-trillion dollar front-loading of investment in “Artificial Intelligence” appear all the weirder, as a vision of the human future. I can’t help wondering what a multi-trillion dollar investment in tertiary water treatment plants and other human population support infrastructure and public works might accomplish, if only Roboworld wasn’t given top billing.
How is it that sellers of cocaine to a willing consumer base are now branded “Terrorists”, but people who poisoned wells for decades are not even branded as criminals?
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"Drugs!" is a pretext. Nothing more.
To be fair, redefining "drugs" as "terrorism" is the same logic that leftists have used in the past "silence = violence".