...running this new "liberal" thinking on illicit drugs up the ol' flagpole.
It started about six months ago with the rightwing president of Colombia, for godssakes, who came out for legalization of all drugs along with the rightwing president of Guatemala. Now four more rightwing LatAm presidents have joined this chorus.
Think about this. The U.S. has spent (at least) $7 BILLION of our tax dollars in Colombia alone allegedly to eradicate the drug trade. But the cocaine and other illicit drugs just keep on flowing. Getting billions of dollars out of the U.S. for the corrupt, murderous, failed U.S. "war on drugs" is a major "military-industrial complex" industry in Colombia--an industry that showers militarists and fascists with 'filthy lucre', and that has spawned rightwing death squads who murder peasants and labor union leaders, in addition to the murders by the Colombian military itself. FIVE MILLION peasant farmers have been brutally driven from their lands in Colombia, by the Colombian military and its death squads--THE worst human displacement crisis on earth.
Repeat variations of this horror in Honduras, Mexico and wherever the U.S. controls the government, by coup d'etat, stolen election or other means. The rightwing funded and enhanced. The leftwing decimated.
Now they want to legalize drugs. What's wrong with this picture?
In my opinion, this "Alice in Wonderland" picture (upside down, inside out, backwards) is being brought to us by Big Pharma and Big Ag. First, they spend (at least) $7 BILLION of our tax dollars clearing FIVE MILLION peasants off the land--tiny family farms where they grew, say, a few coca leaves for local use, in addition to food for their families and communities, and may have sold a few leaves to drug cartels to supplement extreme poverty incomes; those lands go to the favored drug cartels, to the fascist pals of the Bush Junta's mafia boss in Colombia (former president Alvaro Uribe) AND to Monsanto, Chiquita and other huge "players" in a Big Pharma/Big Ag scheme to monopolize the drug trade through legalization.
Get ready for GMO-ized marijuana sold at your local liquor store! Get ready for pesticide-laced, GMO-ized, DNA patented coca leaf tea at your local Starbucks!
Clear out the peasants. Decapitate the labor movement. Kill other advocates of the poor (teachers, community activists, human rights workers, etc.) Declare Colombia a "U.S. free trade for the rich" zone. All using the "war on drugs" as the excuse. Then legalize drugs.
It is brilliant in its perversity.
Now, I am all for legalizing drugs. The "war on drugs" is the WORST government policy that ever was, bar none. But we may have to live with GMO-ized marijuana to get rid of it.
There is lots more to this story in LatAm and here. For instance, why are the Feds viciously attacking SMALL PLAYERS in the medical marijuana enterprise in California? Cuz, as in Colombia, the small players have to be eliminated first--and in particular those, like the California medical marijuana producers, who have developed the product to a fine degree and created the market. Get rid of the peasants; take over the market. For another instance, Leon Panetta personally went to Bogota, in his first visible travel as CIA Director, to yank the Bushwhacks' extremely dirty mafia boss, Uribe, from the stage (and landed him on a 'silk cushion' probably because of what he knows about Bush Junta crimes in Colombia), to set the stage for Manuel Santos (of the same rightwing party but bitter rival of Uribe) to create U.S. "free trade for the rich" in this new range of products.
Santos was the FIRST LatAm president to call for legalization of drugs. Now it's virtually unanimous among rightwing leaders.
The powerful LatAm Left--apart from Bolivia legalizing the coca leaf (not cocaine)--has been SILENT on this matter. And in fact they've had to take blistering criticism and punishment from the U.S. State Department for alleged failure to cooperate with the corrupt, murderous, failed U.S. "war on drugs." (In fact, they've been more successful at busting the BIG drug lords after they threw the DEA and the Pentagon out of their countries.)
The U.S. "war on drugs" is an imperial policy, employed to support fascist groups within countries, to infiltrate militaries and police forces, to control governments, to destroy democracy and to kill leftists. Now "legalization" will be used to further corporatize countries. It's all one, in my opinion.
It is, of course, better for the killing part to be over with. That's the best we can expect from our government. And it's certainly way past time for the trillion-plus dollar illicit drug revenue stream to be taxed, for the tremendous cost burden of the corrupt, murderous, failed U.S. "war on drugs" to be taken off the backs of those who pay their taxes in the U.S. (the poor, workers, the middle class), for the "prison-industrial complex" to be reformed (now that millions of poor peoples' lives have been destroyed by it) and for the DEA, CIA, FBI, et al, and the Pentagon to get the ~!@#$ out of Latin America. But it's probably too much to ask that the new revenue go to schools and road repair and maybe real health care reform. We can be pretty sure that most people will not benefit from legalization, except indirectly (not being bullied, displaced, imprisoned and murdered). Hear that "sucking sound"?--all the money whooshing into the pockets of the 1%!
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