AMERICA'S LONGEST WAR

The War On Drugs Is A Failure As Most Other Nations In The World Have
Figured Out

It's too early to say there is a general revolt against the "war on
drugs" the United States has been waging for the past 39 years, but
something significant is happening.

European countries have been quietly defecting from the war for
years, decriminalizing personal consumption of some or all of the
banned drugs in order to minimize harm to their own people, but it's
different when countries like Argentina and Mexico do it.

Latin American countries are much more in the firing line. The United
States can hurt them a lot if it is angered by their actions, and it
has a long history of doing just that. But from Argentina to Mexico,
they are fed up to the back teeth with the violent and dogmatic U.S.
policy on drugs, and they are starting to do something about it.

In mid-August, the Mexican government declared it will no longer be a
punishable offence to possess up to half a gram of cocaine (about
four lines), five grams of marijuana (around four joints), 50 mg of
heroin or 40 mg of methamphetamine.

At the end of August, Argentina's supreme court did something even
bolder: it ruled that, under the Argentine constitution, "Each adult
is free to make lifestyle decisions without the intervention of the
state," and dismissed a case against youths who had been arrested for
possessing a few joints.

In an ideal world, this ruling would have a powerful resonance in the
United States, whose constitution also restricts the right of the
federal government to meddle in citizens' private affairs.

It took a constitutional amendment to enable the U.S. Congress to
prohibit alcohol in 1919 (and another amendment to end alcohol
Prohibition in 1933), so who gave Congress the right to criminalize
other recreational drugs nationwide by the Controlled Substances Act
of 1970? Nobody - and the U.S. Supreme Court has yet to rule on the issue.

A million Americans a year go to jail for "crimes" that hurt nobody
but themselves.

A vast criminal empire has grown up to service the American demand for drugs.

Over the decades hundreds of thousands of people have been killed in
the turf wars between the gangs, the police-dealer shoot-outs, and
the daily thousands of muggings and burglaries committed by addicts
trying to raise money to pay the hugely inflated prices that
prohibition makes possible.

Most users of illegal drugs are not addicts, let alone dangerous
criminals. Legalization and regulation, on the pattern of alcohol and
tobacco, would avoid thousands of violent deaths each month and
millions of needlessly ruined lives each year, although psychoactive
drug use would still take its toll from the vulnerable and the
unlucky, just as alcohol and tobacco do.

But there is little chance American voters will choose to end this
longest of all American wars any time soon, even though its
casualties far exceed those on any other American war since 1945.

The "War on Drugs" will not end in the United States until a
different generation comes to power.

Elsewhere, however, it is coming to an end much sooner, and one can
imagine a time when the job of the history books will be to explain
how this berserk aberration ever came about.

A large part of the explanation will then focus on the man who
started the war, Richard Nixon, so let us get ahead of the mob and
focus on him now.

We can do that because of the famous Nixon tapes that recorded almost
every word of his presidency.

It turns out he started the war on drugs because he believed they
were a Jewish plot.

We know this because researcher Doug McVay from Common Sense on Drug
Policy, a Washington-based NGO, went through the last batch of tapes
when they became available in 2002 and found Nixon speaking to his
aides as follows:

"You know, it's a funny thing, every one of the bastards that are out
for legalizing marijuana is Jewish. What the Christ is the matter
with the Jews, Bob? What is the matter with them? I suppose it is
because most of them are psychiatrists."

Nixon had much more to say about this, but one should not conclude he
was a single-minded anti-Semite. He was an equal-opportunity paranoid
who believed that homosexuals, Communists and Catholics were also
plotting to undermine America by pushing drugs at it.

"Do you know what happened to the Romans? The last six Roman emperors
were fags ... You know what happened to the popes? It's all right
that popes were laying the nuns, that's been going on for years,
centuries. But when the popes, when the Catholic Church went to hell
in, I don't know, three or four centuries ago, it was homosexual ...

"Dope? Do you think the Russians allow dope? Hell no ... You see,
homosexuality, dope, uh, immorality in general: These are the enemies
of strong societies.

That's why the Communists and the left-wingers are pushing it.
They're trying to destroy us."

The reason for this 39-year war, in other words, is that President
Richard Nixon believed he was facing a
"Jew-homo-doper-Commie-shrink-lefty-pope" conspiracy, as Washington
Post writer Gene Weingarten put it in a gloriously deadpan article in
2002. But that is just plain wrong.

As subsequent developments have shown, it is actually a
Jew-homo-doper-Commie-shrink-lefty-pope-LATINO conspiracy.