Saturday, June 10, 2017

On the Unending, Failed Drug Wars

I am building a dossier to undergird a long series of articles advocating legalization, universal legalization of all illegal drugs, because prohibition is a failed policy, all that it really accomplishes is it rationalizes the spewing of massive sums of money across innumerable government agencies at all levels, which ends up becoming its own form of addiction and corruption. 

If we expect to ever truly combat the spectre of drug addiction that is eating the guts out of America right this moment, we have no choice but to explore legalization, and more, to compete directly against the Mexican cartels for the arms of American junkies by providing medicinal grade smack to those junkies in government clinics at no charge. 

I understand that many will consider this a shocking proposal, and many will dismiss it as outlandish thinking, but if you merely assess the dynamics of the heroin industry and take an analysis of it to its extreme, you end up with the conclusion that legalization and management of heroin addiction in government clinics is the only option that makes concrete sense.

When American junkies can get their medicine direct from the government for free, petty crime will evaporate. Junkies will no longer have to scam and steal to fund their addictions. American police forces will save billions. American cities will be suddenly much safer. 

The Mexican cartels that provide much street heroin, and those organizations that smuggle Afghan heroin, will be confronted by competition at the street level, and considering their quality assurance problems throughout their distribution networks, most junkies will prefer government clinics. 

At this point, junkies in American cities have no idea what is used to cut their heroin, and they are dying in droves due to Fentanyl overdoses and overdoses of other ingredients. 

If one goal of American drug control is the reduction of overdose deaths, providing medicinal grade opiates in government clinics to junkies may help. Unfortunately, I do not think that it will be a magic bullet and significantly resolve it. 

Some inveterate junkies will get their daily dose at a government clinic and then seek to top off using street drugs. 

Let them. They will inevitably overdose. 

Our policy should be to no longer resuscitate junkies, no more applications of Narcan to save overdosing junkies, as this will eliminate the worst drug abusers through Darwinian self-selection. 

This is brutal, but it must be done. We should emphasize to all junkies who enroll in government drug clinics that they are on their own. The government will help, but there are limits to that help. 

We should provide medicinal grade opiates to help addicts manage their addictions, with no strings attached, but if they go on the street to get more than medical professionals prescribe, they should not be resuscitated. 

The opiate market is the only market in history that literally kills its constituent customers and still continues to grow. Capturing large segments of that market by providing opiates directly to addicts through government health clinics, we may finally be able to interfere with the dynamics of that gigantic market. 

The greatest opposition to such an approach will come from law enforcement and from the banks. Both are addicted to the funding for anti drug policies. The banks, of course, launder all dark money. Yes, they sometimes get fined, but such fines pale in comparison to the magnitude of the dark funds that they launder. 

Law enforcement agencies are addicted to the DHS grants and the DOJ grants that they receive every year, as well as to the tyranny of asset forfeiture.


I will write more on these issues in coming days. 

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