US waves white flag in disastrous 'war on drugs'

[StarfarerBill]

By Hugh O'Shaughnessy, The Independent/UK

After 40 years of defeat and failure, America's "war on drugs" is being buried in the same fashion as it was born – amid bloodshed, confusion, corruption and scandal. US agents are being pulled from South America; Washington is putting its narcotics policy under review, and a newly confident region is no longer prepared to swallow its fatal Prohibition error. Indeed, after the expenditure of billions of dollars and the violent deaths of tens of thousands of people, a suitable epitaph for America's longest "war" may well be the plan, in Bolivia, for every family to be given the right to grow coca in its own backyard.

The "war", declared unilaterally throughout the world by Richard Nixon in 1969, is expiring as its strategists start discarding plans that have proved futile over four decades: they are preparing to withdraw their agents from narcotics battlefields from Colombia to Afghanistan and beginning to coach them in the art of trumpeting victory and melting away into anonymous defeat. Not surprisingly, the new strategy is being gingerly aired in the media of the US establishment, from The Wall Street Journal to the Miami Herald.

Prospects in the new decade are thus opening up for vast amounts of useless government expenditure being reassigned to the treatment of addicts instead of their capture and imprisonment. And, no less important, the ever-expanding balloon of corruption that the "war" has brought to heads of government, armies and police forces wherever it has been waged may slowly start to deflate.

More:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-waves-white-flag-in-disastrous-war-on-drugs-1870218.html

[MH1]

1. That war should have ended long ago

kudos to Obama administration for quietly ramping it down.

Now to stop prohibition in this country.

And oh yeah let's give opium farmers legal, non-taliban markets and stop withholding palliative care from those who need it.

[thunder rising]

2. I'd like to think this is true ... but I'm not holding my breath.

[malaise]

3. K & R

About time

[Tejas]

4. Quote for Truth.

"Prospects in the new decade are thus opening up for vast amounts of useless government expenditure being reassigned to the treatment of addicts instead of their capture and imprisonment."


Going to put a whole lot of people out of a job, a job that should never have existed in the first place. Hopefully the destruction of families due to the hardships of incarceration of their loved ones will cease soon.

[Pharaoh]

5. Thank you Obama!

it's long overdue that we stop treating addicts as criminals! K&R

[RUMMYisFROSTED]

6. The WoD wasn't a failure.

Many fortunes were made.

Who cares about the lost and ruined lives, anyway?