Wednesday, August 16, 2006
War?? on drugs
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. agents on Tuesday arrested 138 people [nationwide] in a crackdown on a heroin trafficking organization...
Wow - I'm certainly impressed. I can see why this needed to be up in the headlines. Just think, 138 people connected with pushing heroin busted. I'm sure this will cripple the industry. Just imagine, there's probably thousands of addicts without their fix today - or at least 5 or 6 anyway.
ONDCP says:Approximately 398,000 (0.2%) reported past year [2003] heroin use and 166,000 (0.1%) reported past month heroin use. ...worldwide potential illicit opium production increased to 5,361 metric tons. This is up from 3,549 metric tons during 2003. During FY 2003, Federal agencies seized 5,643 pounds of heroin under the Federal-wide Drug Seizure System (FDSS).
Now the preceding paragraph was taken from a government site - so... Anyway, as you can see the government's War on Drugs is going so well, they managed to seize over 2,000 metric tons more heroin that was produced worldwide. Damn good job Mr. Pres. It's math like that is making our economy strong.
The War on Drugs is working even worse than the war in Iraq. We spend billions trying to catch folks importing, manufacturing and dealing drugs. This use and abuse of mind altering chemicals has been going on since Ooog first O.D.ed on mushrooms - and will continue until Mizar III O.D.s on the designer drug, Mind1.1 five-hundred years from now. Unless you change the people's desires, you're not going to get rid of the suppliers. If people want something bad enough, they're going to do whatever they need to do - usually criminal - to get it. If the government wants to do something about drugs, realistically educate the people, then clean-up and decriminalize the drugs and make available to the people who want it, a legal and safe fix. Then instead of having to deal with some lowlife on the corner selling crack laced with fentanyl, drano and who knows what else, they can go to RiteAid and know exactly what they are getting - just like drinking MD20/20 instead of wood alcohol laced with radiator lead.
