Obama's Drug War

[ProudDad]

For those who might imagine that the 2009 stimulus package was an aberration, Obama's proposed drug control budget for 2011 reveals that hard economic times are not translating into any scaling back of the drug war. John Carnevale, former director of planning and budget at the ONDCP, testified before a Congressional subcommittee charged with reviewing the 2011 drug control budget in April that "with the arrival of the Obama administration came the hope that a new budget would emerge that would redress the failures of the past"; but instead the new budget looks much like the old one. To make matters worse, Carnevale explained, the 2011 budget does not represent a comprehensive accounting of federal drug control expenditures. Many spending categories that have been counted as "prevention" or "treatment" are actually funding law enforcement or non-drug-related programs—calling into question the claim that treatment funding is on the rise. In Carnevale's words, "The last time this nation saw such a large emphasis on supply reduction was the Reagan administration."

Whether one believes, as Carnevale apparently does, that Obama's drug war is actually worse than his predecessors', one thing is clear: Obama is in no hurry to scale it back to any significant degree, much less end it. The drug war is now too deeply rooted in our nation's political and economic structure to be cast aside. The war rhetoric may have ended and the song may have changed, but the system hums along.

http://www.thenation.com/article/156997/obamas-drug-war?rel=emailNation

[Warren DeMontague]

1. Color me shocked.

No matter how bad the budget problems get, there will always be money to kick down the doors of pot smoking cancer grannies. Just like the military. Everything is "on the table" except those sacred cows.

[frylock]

2. last time this nation saw such a large emphasis on supply reduction was the reagan administration

knr

[Jackpine Radical]

3. This country is so fucked up,

its priorities are so screwy, its conceptions of reality so distorted, its people so misinformed, that there must either be a rapid waking-up or there will be a total societal collapse.

If that happens, I predict that there will be 2 basic modes of existence: one, based on a cooperative connections among people, and the other, a bunch of little forts occupied by paranoid and self-absorbed, survivalist "rugged individualists." The latter will be enacting Thomas Hobbes' vision of the primitive life: Nasty, brutish and short. The former will lay the groundwork for whatever is to become of our species.

[Arctic Dave]

4. Always got to fund the "drug war". Because if you called it by its real name

which is, "militarize the police across the country to squash the American People when they get uppity" funding.

[ProudDad]

5. Not only that but voter supression

is another "beneficial" side-effect of the phony "war on drugs(tm)"...

For them...