Prohibition Redux

The US experiment to prohibit the sail and use of alcohol was by any measure a grand failure. The only thing it succeeded in doing was to create rich and powerful criminal elements. It was eventually recognized as the failure it was bu even those who had supported it and abandoned. The "war on drugs" has also been a a very similar failure but is still going strong. In early 2006 I wrote the following:

While the war in Iraq may outrageous there is another war that is equally outrageous and is truly bi-partisan, the war on drugs. Like the war in Iraq it has accomplished nothing positive, consumed vast sums of the nations wealth and ruined lives. The reasons for the war on drugs are similar to the reasons for the war in Iraq.

• Political Power


• Corporate Wealth and Power


• Religious Zealotry

Like the "war on drugs" the "war on terror" is a metaphorical war. In an excellent article in the Washington Post, The Lost War, Misha Glenny reports that it is not only as big a failure as prohibition in the 1930's the criminal elements it is supporting are the very ones we are allegedly fighting in the "war on terror".

Thirty-six years and hundreds of billions of dollars after President Richard M. Nixon launched the war on drugs, consumers worldwide are taking more narcotics and criminals are making fatter profits than ever before. The syndicates that control narcotics production and distribution reap the profits from an annual turnover of $400 billion to $500 billion. And terrorist organizations such as the Taliban are using this money to expand their operations and buy ever more sophisticated weapons, threatening Western security.

In the past two years, the drug war has become the Taliban's most effective recruiter in Afghanistan. Afghanistan's Muslim extremists have reinvigorated themselves by supporting and taxing the countless peasants who are dependent one way or another on the opium trade, their only reliable source of income. The Taliban is becoming richer and stronger by the day, especially in the east and south of the country. The "War on Drugs" is defeating the "war on terror."

Go read the entire well written piece.

More on the "War on Drugs" can be found here.