I
loved when Bush came out and said, "We are losing the war against
drugs." You know what that implies? There's a war being fought, and the
people on drugs are winning it. Remember how
the Reagan/Bush axis of racism flourished by synonymizing drugs and their use
with violent black crime. Sickening to consider and we are still swimming upstream
against that kind of thinking. Science and compassion are not looking like they
will fare well in the next set of elections.
What I hate about the war on drugs. All day long we see those commercials: "Here's your brain, here's your brain on drugs", "Just Say No", "Why do you think they call it dope?”
And
then the next commercial is [singing] "This Bud's for youuu."
C'mon, everybody, let's be hypocritical bastards. It's okay to drink your drug.
We meant those other drugs. Those untaxed drugs. Those are the ones that are
bad for you. The war on drugs is a ridiculous waste of resources and does not
help society at all.
The war on drugs has been a phenomenal success for those "fighting" it - the drug lords, the shadow governments, and the criminal "justice" system. For everyone else it's a catastrophic failure beyond words. Don't forget how rich it makes the pharmaceutical companies. Legalizing would increase supply massively, killing their huge profit margins, and their monopoly. Less money for big pharma = less lobbyists, and less money for gov. Too many people are getting rich from keeping drugs illegal. This is the reason they haven't, and still won't be legal for a long time.
Rule
of thumb: Don't call it a "war on" if you can't put "peace with" in instead and make a meaningful sentence.
I'm confused. How is legalizing whatever drugs are being warred against going to harm Big Pharma?
ReplyDeleteAnd do you really think that the Great Society initiative in the '60s was a bad idea? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Poverty
It opposes marijuana decriminalization because it could mean people spend less money on painkillers and anti-inflammatory remedies like ibuprofen. Its primary lobbying group, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), has loads of money to spend. Two years ago, it dropped nearly $22 million on congressional races, demonstrating how big a war chest it can muster. Big Pharma’s financial influence on political action committees is one of the main reasons why the government has not yet repealed marijuana prohibition. Some believe there is simply too much money being made from doctors prescribing synthetic marijuana.
DeleteAnd although Great Society initiative in the '60s had good intentions the results have proved to cause a vicious cycle for citizens in private prisons and have drained billions in tax payer dollars.
To cite from your own source:
"Some economists, including Milton Friedman, have argued that Johnson's policies actually had a negative impact on the economy because of their interventionist nature, noting in a PBS interview that "the government sets out to eliminate poverty, it has a war on poverty, so-called "poverty" increases. It has a welfare program, and the welfare program leads to an expansion of problems."
And “Research Fellow at the Independent Institute James followed this line of thinking when he wrote that "the war on poverty was a costly, tragic mistake [because]...abolishing poverty did not seem far-fetched to the activists ... [and] it was a perspective that led to intolerance ... The simple economic theory of poverty led to a single underlying principle for welfare programs ... In adopting the handout approach for their programs, the war-on-poverty activists failed to notice—or failed to care—that they were ignoring over a century of theory and experience in the social welfare field ... The war-on-poverty activists not only ignored the lessons of the past on the subject of handouts; they also ignored their own experience with the poor."
In March 3, 2014, as Chairman of the Budget Committee of the House of Representatives, Paul Ryan released his "The War on Poverty: 50 Years Later" report, asserting that some of 92 federal programs designed to help lower-income Americans have not provided the relief intended and that there is little evidence that these efforts have been successful.