US waves white flag in disastrous 'war on drugs'

[Judi Lynn]

US waves white flag in disastrous 'war on drugs'

After 40 years, Washington is quietly giving up on a futile battle that has spread corruption and destroyed thousands of lives

By Hugh O'Shaughnessy
Sunday, 17 January 2010

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.

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

[bemildred]

1. Shafer Commission, 1970:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Commission_on_Marihuana_and_Drug_Abuse

[EFerrari]

2. If this is true, then how would the author explain the build up

in Colombia? Wasn't that ostensibly to fight the "war on drugs" or am I remembering that incorrectly?

[Judi Lynn]

5. Time for a diversionary tactic. Look, over there, it's ________ (fill in the blank), again.

They never run out of thinly disguised "reasons" to occupy and control.

We should get up a pool right here, to name the next rationalization they'll use. One possibility: they'll claim the loss of trade with Venezuela is destroying Colombia's economy, therefore retaliation is self-defense! Gotta go get'em, or Colombians will starve.

Of course, there's always any ol' Operation Northwoods-styled tactic which would serve, and we know they're honed for something like that. It's what they DO.

They would easily consider blowing up a bus filled with Colombians, claiming Hugo Chavez did it, just as the Colombian officers blew up a car and claimed it was the FARCs the day Alvaro Uribe was sworn in the first time. (It's amazing that story ever saw the light of day anywhere, but it did make it out to be noticed outside Colombia.)

[Vidar]

3. Recommended even if it's wishful thinking. I need some.

[EFerrari]

4. I hear that, Vida!

[Downwinder]

6. I've heard they are developing a medical tourism industry in Colorado.

[Peace Patriot]

7. I'm afraid I don't share the author's optimism. Too much evidence to the contrary. nt