The Forever War

Is it time to end the war on drugs?

There was a big article in The Wall Street Journal today, full of nonsense about the War On Drugs. This got me to wondering who are these people who support this war? I do a little digging and I find this quote on Quora, which links to an article on Harper's:

“You want to know what this was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” - John Ehrlichman, interviewed by Dan Baum

Now this thing, this War On Drugs, is so firmly entrenched in the global economy that I doubt anyone short of the messiah will be able to rescind it. Possibly if this country goes broke, the government might be persuaded to legalize drugs so they can tax them, but I wouldn't hold my breath. The government has been on the verge of going broke for years, but somehow it manages to keep schlepping along.

The War On Drugs brings us a whole raft of problems, but the biggest one by far is that a large segment of the population no longer trusts the government to do the right thing.