The phrase “War on drugs” is in itself a drug given to the gullible American people and the world at large by successive American establishment. And to think, it is over 50 years since it is in use.
Hypocrisy thy name is USA, Shakespeare in another era would have proclaimed and looking to the vast difference between what is preached and what is acted upon by American Presidents over last 50 years, one cannot but agree.
It was Nixon. Who in June 1971 thundered in a press conference that it was “necessary to wage a new, all-out offensive” as “America’s public enemy number one, in the United States, is drug abuse”
The moral higher ground occupied by the President was hypocrisy in excess even by their own already inflated standards. It is a published fact now that CIA in 1950s administered the drug LSD to unsuspecting Americans to test its effects
The lines are blurred when the word “Public Enemy No 1” is used while speaking of the Governments of the USA and drug abuse at the same time. John Ehrlichman, a close Nixon associate had famously informed that Nixon White House had two enemies: the anti-war left and Black people. Since it couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalising both heavily, one could disrupt those communities.
US enabling the source of income by drug trafficking to right-wing mercenaries in US Contra War on Nicaragua is all too documented In Colombia also US spent billions to keep afloat right-wing governments thoroughly implicated in the drug trade. Since 2006 , thousands of people have been killed in Mexico in a gruesome internal drug war that is backed by US, making several Mexican cities some of the most violent places on the planet.
A major fallout of US’ policy of backing the rivals of less submissive Latin American governments is that it ultimately degenerated into extensive usage of cocaine crack in poor Black neighbourhoods of Los Angeles. Then, ostensibly an offensive against drug abuse, the measures by successive Governments made the social and economic divide between communities more pronounced.
the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of the Reagan administration institutionalised a 100-to-1 disparity in prison sentence lengths for possession of crack – a drug associated with Black people – versus powder cocaine, associated with rich whites. President Trump toed the same line of thinking on “war on drugs” and Biden actually is one of the early advocates for drug-related 100:1 sentencing disparity for crack versus cocaine in the US.
It is hardcore capitalism at its worst, creating a social hierarchy based on racism and discrimination that enables the vulgar enrichment of an elite minority at the cost of the masses.
Starting from the Vietnam War when a poor American was sent to an unknown soil thousands of kilometers away to kill and die for no reason other than politics to USA’s continued ruthless commitment to capitalism which denies its inhabitants basic rights of survival including proper healthcare, People in distress actually require less than such social conditions to turn to drugs.
