war on drugs – The Burning Platform

IN THE WAR ON TRUTH, IT’S TIME TO BECOME HEROES

“Truth is treason in an empire of lies.” – George Orwell

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. …We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized.

Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. …In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons… who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.” – Edward Bernays – Propaganda (1928) pp. 9–10

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“Axis of Evil” seems to be interchangeable, based upon who the Deep State needs to be the enemy at any given time. Bush junior first coined the phrase in his January 29, 2002 State of the Union speech when describing Iran, Iraq and North Korea. Of course, we know his Deep State handlers then falsified claims of 9/11 involvement and WMDs, to take out Sadaam and steal his oil. The barely cogent doddering old fool senator McConnell this week declared Russia, China and Iran as the new “Axis of Evil”. You notice Iran is still in the club, but they now consider two nuclear armed superpowers to be evil and enemies. Kim Jong Un must be so disappointed at being kicked out of the club.

Continue reading “IN THE WAR ON TRUTH, IT’S TIME TO BECOME HEROES”

THE HORROR! THE HORROR!

I’m constantly amazed by the ability of those in power to create a narrative trusted by a gullible non-critical thinking populace. Appealing to emotions, when you have millions of functionally illiterate, normalcy bias ensnared, iGadget distracted, disciples of the status quo, has been the game plan of the Deep State for the last century. Americans don’t want to think, because thinking is hard. They would rather feel. For decades the government controlled public education system has performed a mass lobotomy on their hapless matriculates, removing their ability to think and replacing it with feelings, fabricated dogma, and social indoctrination. Their minds of mush have been molded to acquiesce to the narrative propagandized by their government keepers.

“The problem isn’t that Johnny can’t read. The problem isn’t even that Johnny can’t think. The problem is that Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.” – Thomas Sowell

With a majority confused, distracted, malleable, willfully ignorant, and easily manipulated by false narratives, heart wrenching images, and fake news, the Deep State henchmen have been able to control the masses with relative ease. The unanticipated rise of Donald Trump to the most powerful role in the world gave many critical thinking, anti-big government, skeptical curmudgeons hope he could drain the swamp and begin to deconstruct the massive out of control Federal bureaucracy.

Continue reading “THE HORROR! THE HORROR!”

State-Sanctioned Theft – The Failed War On Drugs And Cops’ Abuse Of Civil Forfeiture

Submitted by Lorelei McFly via CopBlock.org,

One of the biggest lies our government tells us is that it wages the War on Drugs to keep us safe. More than 40 years after it was started, we know that it has been a colossally-expensive epic failure on its stated goals, was intentionally designed to further disenfranchise marginalized groups, and has become a full-fledged assault on our civil liberties.

Even with all the billions of tax dollars it spends each year, and all the flashy photo ops of seized drugs stacked on tables, the Drug Enforcement Agency only stops 1% of the illegal drug supply from being distributed in America, according to the video below. Not only is law enforcement pathetically inept at stemming the flow of drugs, they are active participants in the illicit drug trade at both the federal and local level:

That drug prohibition causes far more harm than it supposedly prevents would not even be a question of debate were it not for the fact that so many people’s livelihoods now depend on waging it. The ugly unspoken truth is that the War on Drugs is a massive jobs and funding program for law enforcement that is operated under the guise of saving people from the evils of substance abuse.

Continue reading “State-Sanctioned Theft – The Failed War On Drugs And Cops’ Abuse Of Civil Forfeiture”

IS IT TIME TO END THE WAR ON DRUGS?

SOME WARS AREN’T MEANT TO BE WON

FOURTH TURNING – THE SHADOW OF CRISIS HAS NOT PASSED – PART FOUR

In Part One of this article I explained the model of generational theory as conveyed by Strauss and Howe in The Fourth Turning. In Part Two I provided an overwhelming avalanche of evidence this Crisis has only yet begun, with debt, civic decay and global disorder propelling the world towards the next more violent phase of this Crisis. In Part Three I addressed how the most likely clash on the horizon is between the government and the people. War on multiple fronts will thrust the world through the great gate of history towards an uncertain future.

War on Multiple Fronts

“The risk of catastrophe will be very high. The nation could erupt into insurrection or civil violence, crack up geographically, or succumb to authoritarian rule. If there is a war, it is likely to be one of maximum risk and effort – in other words, a total war. Every Fourth Turning has registered an upward ratchet in the technology of destruction, and in mankind’s willingness to use it.” – Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning

The drumbeats of war are pounding. Sanctions are implemented against any country that dares question American imperialism (Russia, Iran). Overthrow and ignominious imprisonment or death awaits any foreign leader questioning the petrodollar or standing in the way of America spreading democracy (Iraq, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, Egypt). The mega-media complex of six corporations peddle the government issued pabulum about ISIS being an existential threat to our freedoms; Russia being led by the new Hitler and poised to take over Europe; Syria gassing innocent women and children; and Iran only six months away from a nuclear bomb (they’ve been six months away for the last fourteen years). Hollywood does their part with patriotic drivel like American Sniper, designed to compel low IQ unemployed American youths to swell with pride and march down to enlistment centers, located in our plentiful urban ghettos.

The most disconcerting aspect of Fourth Turnings is they have always climaxed with total destructive all-out war. Not wars to enrich arms dealers like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, but incomprehensibly violent, brutal, wars of annihilation. There are clear winners and losers at the conclusion of Fourth Turning wars. Leaders mobilize all forces, refuse to compromise, define their enemies in moral terms, demand sacrifice on the battlefield and home front, build the most destructive weapons imaginable, and employ those weapons to obtain victory at any cost.

It may seem inconceivable that war on such a scale will happen within the next ten years, but it was equally inconceivable in 1936 that 65 million people would die in the next ten years during World War II. We valued all the wrong things and made all the wrong choices leading up to this Crisis and during the early stages of this Crisis. The accumulation of unmet obligations, unpaid bills, un-kept promises and unresolved issues will provide the fuel for an upheaval that will shake our society to its core and transforms the country’s direction for the next sixty years. The outcome of the conflict could be tragedy or triumph. Our choices will make a difference.

There will be war on many fronts, and they have already begun. The culmination will likely be World War III, with the outcome highly uncertain and potentially disastrous.

Continue reading “FOURTH TURNING – THE SHADOW OF CRISIS HAS NOT PASSED – PART FOUR”

NYPD Union Leader: Reducing Marijuana Arrests is “Beginning of the Breakdown of a Civilized Society”

Guest Post by Adam Dick

Reported efforts to begin following through on New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s 2013 election promise to reduce marijuana arrests in the city has distressed Sergeants Benevolent Association police union President Ed Mullins. Mullins is quoted Wednesday in the New York Post lamenting that “If the current practice of making arrests for both possession and sale of marijuana is, in fact, abandoned, then this is clearly the beginning of the breakdown of a civilized society.”

The city’s apparent move to reduce the number of marijuana arrests comes soon after an October joint report of the Drug Policy Alliance and the Marijuana Arrest Research Project publicized that the number of marijuana possession arrests in New York City were on track to remain the same under de Blasio’s leadership, or even increase, compared to arrests under Michael Bloomberg, the preceding mayor.

Of course, the truth is that there is nothing civilized about arresting people and throwing them in jail for making the choice to use, buy, or sell marijuana. Such choices have been tolerated or accepted in much of the world for centuries and were legal under United States law for the majority of the nation’s history. US legal prohibitions and punishments were imposed in the 20th century, including with the enactment of laws such as the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 and marijuana’s inclusion in schedule one of Controlled Substances Act of 1970, thus applying the most expansive level of prohibition to actions involving the plant. In contrast, looking further back to the origins of the US, we find that Founding Fathers grew hemp on their farms, including George Washington at Mount Vernon and Thomas Jefferson at Monticello.

A time traveler from the American 1800s, when marijuana and other now-illegal drugs were legally grown, bought, sold, and ingested, would likely find perplexing the comment that it is uncivilized to refrain from arresting and jailing people for such peaceful activities and commerce. Indeed, such a time traveler would probably immediately recognize that it is instead the police-state approach exhibited in Mullins’ comment and demonstrated each day in the enforcement of the drug war that is uncivilized.

But, Mullins need not talk with a time traveler; he can witness himself in the states of Colorado and Washington, and soon more American jurisdictions, that even legalizing marijuana is not a step away from civilization.

It is hard to believe that Mullins really believes his dire warning. Instead, as with the response of other drug war beneficiaries to marijuana prohibition rollbacks, Mullins is probably making his Chicken Little pronouncement in a desperate attempt to keep the war on marijuana easy money flowing in spite of the apparently unstoppable move toward nationwide marijuana legalization. Mullins is a police union leader after all.

Mullins also reveals a broader agenda behind his support for continuing the high number of New York City marijuana arrests when he comments in the Post article, “If we’re not making marijuana arrests, then we may not pop someone who has a warrant on them or who committed felony crimes.” Indeed, the drug war exception to the Fourth Amendment and to similar state restraints on police action has proven a convenient path to abusing people with impunity. And, when you put enough people through the wringer, you will find a person here and there with a warrant or who you can book for a crime.

One of those “crimes” the Post article reports is often uncovered in the city’s marijuana policing is illegal gun possession—a victimless crime just like marijuana possession.

As a candidate, de Blasio both criticized Bloomberg for being too severe in the pursuit of marijuana law violators and said, “amen for what [Bloomberg] did on gun control. I think we should go the next step.” Might the next step include replacing the marijuana pretext for city police abusing people with a gun pretext? We can hope not. But, the city taking that step may give Mullins some hope for preserving the warped “civilized society” he cherishes—at least in New York City.

AFGHANISTAN SETS A RECORD

What year did we arrive to free Afghans from the clutches of the Taliban?

This is called winning hearts and minds?

It seems we are having as much success with the War on Terror as we are with the War on Drugs.

It almost appears like we don’t really want to win these wars. I wonder why?

Washington, 21 October 2014 (Reuters) – Opium poppy cultivation in Afghanistan has hit an all-time high despite years of counter-narcotics efforts that have cost the US $7.6bn (£4.7bn), according to a US government watchdog.

The UN Office on Drugs and Crime [pdf] reported that Afghan farmers grew an “unprecedented” 209,000 hectares (523,000 acres) of opium poppy in 2013, surpassing the previous high of 193,000 hectares in 2007, said John Sopko, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction.

“In past years, surges in opium poppy cultivation have been met by a coordinated response from the US government and coalition partners, which has led to a temporary decline in levels of opium production,” Sopko said in a letter to the secretary of state, John Kerry, the defence secretary, Chuck Hagel, and other top US officials.

“The recent record-high level of poppy cultivation calls into question the long-term effectiveness and sustainability of those prior efforts,” he said on Tuesday.

Afghanistan produces more than 80% of the world’s illicit opium, and profits from the illegal trade help fund the Taliban insurgency. US government officials blame poppy production for fuelling corruption and instability, undermining good government and subverting the legal economy.

The US has spent $7.6bn on counter-narcotics efforts in Afghanistan since the start of the 2001 war, it said.

Sopko said the UN drug office estimated the value of poppy cultivation and opium products produced in Afghanistan in 2013 at about $3bn, up on the $2bn estimated in 2012.

“With deteriorating security in many parts of Afghanistan and low levels of eradication of poppy fields, further increases in cultivation are likely in 2014,” Sopko said.

He said affordable deep-well technology brought to Afghanistan over the past decade had enabled Afghans to turn 200,000 hectares of desert in the south-west of the country into arable land, much of it devoted to poppy production.

In a letter responding to the findings, the US embassy in Kabul said the rise in poppy cultivation and decline in eradication efforts by provincial authorities was “disappointing news”. It said American officials were helping Afghans develop the ability to lead and manage a long-term counter-narcotics effort.

HOW PSYCHEDELICS SAVED MY LIFE

SSS will love this article. I did a lot of these when I was in college and I still have generally fond memories of tripping in the outdoors.

Who would like to drop acid with this chick? *raises hand*

How Psychedelics Saved My Life

Emmy-winning investigative journalist says ‘magic’ mushrooms and ayahuasca treated her PTSD and anxiety.

Amber Lyon
Photo Credit: Photo Courtesy of Amber Lyon

June 17, 2014 |

The following article was written by Amber Lyon and first appeared onReset.me:

I invite you to take a step back and clear your mind of decades of false propaganda. Governments worldwide lied to us about the medicinal benefits of marijuana. The public has also been misled about psychedelics.

These non-addictive substances- MDMA, ayahuasca, ibogaine, psilocybin mushrooms, peyote, and many more- are proven to rapidly and effectively help people heal from trauma, PTSD, anxiety, addiction and depression.

Psychedelics saved my life.

My Experience with Anxiety and PTSD Symptoms

I was drawn to journalism at a young age by the desire to provide a voice for the ‘little guy.’ For nearly a decade working as a CNN investigative correspondent and independent journalist, I became a mouthpiece for the oppressed, victimized and marginalized. My path of submersion journalism brought me closest to the plight of my sources, by living the story to get a true understanding of what was happening.

After several years of reporting, I realized an unfortunate consequence of my style- I had immersed myself too deeply in the trauma and suffering of the people I’d interviewed. I began to have trouble sleeping as their faces appeared in my darkest dreams. I spent too long absorbed in a world of despair and my inability to deflect it allowed the trauma of others to settle inside my mind and being. Combine that with several violent experiences while working in the field and I was at my worst. A life reporting on the edge had led me to the brink of my own sanity.

Because I could not find a way to process my anguish, it grew into a monster, manifesting itself into a constant state of anxiety, short-term memory loss, sleeplessness, and hyperarousal. The heart palpitations made me feel like I was knocking on death’s door.

Why I Chose Psychedelic Drugs Medicines

Prescription medications and antidepressants serve a purpose, but I knew they were not on my path to healing after my investigations exposed their sinister side effects including infants being born dependent on the medicines after their mothers couldn’t kick their addictions. Masking the symptoms of a deeper condition with a pill felt like putting a Band-Aid on bullet wound.

I was made aware of the potential healing powers of psychedelics as a guest on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast in October 2012. Joe told me psychedelic mushrooms transformed his life and had the potential to change the course of humanity for the better. My initial reaction was one of amusement and somewhat disbelief, but the seed was planted.

Psychedelics were an odd choice for someone like me. I grew up in the Midwest and was fed 30 years of propaganda explaining how horrible these substances were for my health. You can imagine my jaw-dropping surprise when, after the Rogan podcast, I found articles on the prodigious effects of these substances that behave more like medicines than drugs. Articles like this one, this, this , this, and this. And studies such as this, this, this, this, this… and this … all gut-wrenching examples of how we’ve been misled by authorities who classify psychedelics as schedule 1 narcotics that have ‘no medicinal value’ despite dozens of scientific studies proving otherwise.

Tripping Around the World

Having only ever smoked the odd marijuana joint in college, in March 2013 I found myself boarding a plane to Iquitos, Peru to try one of the most powerful psychedelics on earth. I ditched my car at the airport, hastily packed my belongings in a backpack and headed down to the Amazon jungle placing my blind faith in a substance that a week ago I could hardly pronounce: ayahuasca.

Ayahuasca is a medicinal tea that contains the psychedelic compound dimethyltryptamine, or DMT. The brew is rapidly spreading around the world after numerous anecdotes have shown the brew has the power to cure anxiety, PTSD, depression, unexplained pain, and numerous physical and mental health ailments. Studies of long-term ayahuasca drinkers show they are less likely to face addictions and have elevated levels of serotonin, the neurotransmitter responsible for happiness.

If I had any reservations, doubts, or disbeliefs, they were quickly expelled shortly after my first ayahuasca experience. The foul-tasting tea vibrated through my veins and into my brain as the medicine scanned my body. My field of vision became engulfed with fierce colors and geometric patterns. Almost instantly, I saw a vision of a brick wall. The word ‘anxiety’ was spray painted in large letters on the wall. “You must heal your anxiety,” the medicine whispered. I entered a dream-like state where traumatic memories were finally dislodged from my subconscious.

It was as if I was viewing a film of my entire life, not as the emotional me, but as an objective observer. The vividly introspective movie played in my mind as I relived my most painful scenes- my parents divorce when I was just 4 years-old, past relationships, being shot at by police while photographing a protest in Anaheim and crushed underneath a crowd while photographing a protest in Chicago. The ayahuasca enabled me to reprocess these events, detaching the fear and emotion from the memories. The experience was akin to ten years of therapy in one eight-hour ayahuasca session.

But the experience, and many psychedelic experiences for that matter, was terrifying at times. Ayahuasca is not for everyone—you have to be willing to revisit some very dark places and surrender to the uncontrollable, fierce flow of the medicine. Ayahuasca also causes violent vomiting and diarrhea, which shamans call “getting well” because you are purging trauma from your body.

After seven ayahuasca sessions in the jungles of Peru, the fog that engulfed my mind lifted. I was able to sleep again and noticed improvements in my memory and less anxiety. I yearned to absorb as much knowledge as possible about these medicines and spent the next year travelling the world in search of more healers, teachers and experiences through submersion journalism.

I was drawn to try psilocybin mushrooms after reading how they reduced anxiety in terminal cancer patients. The ayahuasca showed me my main ailment was anxiety, and I knew I still had work to do to fix it. Psilocybin mushrooms are not neurotoxic, they’re nonaddictive, and studies show they reduce anxiety, depression, and even lead to neurogenesis, or the regrowth of brain cells. Why would governments worldwide keep such a profound fungi out of the reach of their people?

After Peru, I visited curanderas, or healers, in Oaxaca, Mexico. The Mazatecs have used psilocybin mushrooms as a sacrament and medicinally for hundreds of years. Curandera Dona Augustine served me a leaf full of mushrooms during a beautiful ceremony before a Catholic alter. As she sang thousand year-old songs, I watched the sunset over the mountainous landscape in Oaxaca and a deep sense of connectivity washed over my whole being. The innate beauty had me at a loss for words; a sudden outpouring of emotion had me in tears. I cried through the night and with each tear a small part of my trauma trickled down my cheek and dissolved onto the forest floor, freeing me from its toxic energy.

Perhaps most astounding, the mushrooms silenced the self-critical part of my mind long enough for me to reprocess memories without fear or emotion. The mushrooms enabled me to remember one of the most terrifying moments of my career: when I was detained at gunpoint in Bahrain while filming a documentary for CNN. I had lost any detailed recollection of that day when masked men pointed guns at our heads and forced my crew and I onto the ground. For a good half an hour, I did not know whether we were going to survive.

I spent many sleepless nights desperately searching for memories of that day, but they were locked in my subconscious. I knew the memories still haunted me because anytime I would see PTSD ‘triggers’, such as loud noises, helicopters, soldiers, or guns, a rush of anxiety and panic would flood my body.

The psilocybin was the key to unlock the trauma, enabling me to relive the detainment moment to moment, from outside of my body, as an emotionless, objective observer. I peered into the CNN van and saw my former self sitting in the backseat, loud helicopters overhead. My producer Taryn was sitting to the right of me frantically trying to close the van door as we tried to make an escape. I heard Taryn scream “guns!” as armed masked men jumped out of the security vehicles surrounding the van. I watched as I frantically dug through a backpack on the floor, grabbing my CNN ID card and jumping out of the van. I saw myself land on the ground in child’s pose, dust covering my body and face. I watched as I threw my hand with the CNN badge in the air above my head yelling “CNN, CNN, don’t shoot!!”

I saw the pain in my face as the security forces threw human rights activist and dear friend Nabeel Rajab against a security car and began to harass him. I saw the terror in my face as I glanced down at my shirt, arms in the air, praying the video cards concealed on my body wouldn’t fall onto the ground.

As I relived each moment of the detainment, I reprocessed each memory moving it from the “fear” folder to its new permanent home in the “safe” folder in my brain’s hard drive.

Five ceremonies with psilocybin mushrooms cured my anxiety and PTSD symptoms. The butterflies that had a constant home in my stomach have flown away.

Psychedelics are not the be-all and end-all. For me, they were the key that opened the door to healing. I still have to work to maintain the healing with the use of floatation tanks, meditation, and yoga. For psychedelics to be effective, it’s essential they are taken with the right mindset in a quiet, relaxed setting conducive to healing, and that all potential prescription drug interactions are carefully researched. It can be fatal if Ayahuasca is mixed with prescription antidepressants.

I was blessed with an inquisitive nature and a stubbornness to always question authority. Had I opted for a doctor’s script and resigned myself in the hope that things would just get better, I never would have discovered the outer reaches of my mind and heart. Had I drunk the Kool-Aid and believed that all ‘drugs’ are evil and have no healing value, I may still be in the midst of a battle with PTSD.

The Creation of Reset.me

This very world that glamorizes war, violence, commercialism, environmental destruction, and suffering has outlawed some of the most profound keys to inner peace. The War on Drugs is not based on science. If it was, two of the most deadly drugs on earth—alcohol and tobacco—would be illegal. Those suffering from trauma have become victims of this failed war and have lost one of the most effective ways to heal.

Humanity has gone mad as a result.

I spent ten years witnessing the collective insanity as a journalist on the frontlines: wars, bloodshed, environmental destruction, sex slavery, lies, addiction, anger, fear.

But I had it all wrong journalistically. I had been focusing on the symptoms of an ill society, rather than attacking the root cause: unprocessed trauma.

We all have trauma. Trauma rests in the violent criminal, the cheating spouse, the corrupt politician, those suffering from mental illness, addictions, inside those too fearful to take risks and reach their full potential.

If it’s not adequately processed and purged, trauma becomes cemented onto the hard drive of the mind, growing into a dark parasite that rears its ugly head throughout a person’s entire life. The wounds keep us locked in a grid of fear, trapped behind a personality not true to the soul, working a mundane job rather than following a passion, repeating a cycle of abuse, destroying the environment, harming one another. The most common and severe suffering is inflicted during childhood and hijacks the driver’s seat into adulthood, steering an individual down a road deprived of happiness. Renowned addiction expert Gabor Mate says, “The major cause of severe substance addiction is always childhood trauma.”

We live in a world full of wounds and when left untreated, they’re unceremoniously handed from one generation to the next, so the cycle of trauma continues in all its destructive brutality.

But there’s hope. We can transform the course of humanity by collectively purging our grief and healing at the individual level, with the help of psychedelic medicines. Once we collectively heal at the individual level, we will see dramatic positive transformation in society as a whole.

I founded the website reset.me, to produce and aggregate journalism on consciousness, natural medicines, and therapies. Psychedelic explorer Terrence McKenna compared taking psychedelics to hitting the ‘reset button’ on your internal hard drive, clearing out the junk, and starting over. I created reset.me to help connect those who need to hit the ‘reset button’ in life with journalism covering the tools that enable us to heal.

It’s a human rights crisis psychedelics are not accessible to the general population. It’s insane that governments worldwide have outlawed the very medicines that can emancipate our souls from suffering.

It’s time we stop the madness.

This article first appeared on Reset.me and waspublished with permission from Reset.me and the author.

Amber Lyon is an Emmy Award-winning investigative journalist, author, filmmaker, and former CNN correspondent. Lyon created reset.me to encourage and promote journalism on natural medicines and therapies for depression, anxiety, stress, PTSD, addiction, and other health conditions. Reset.me strives to help expand consciousness, enhance spirituality and well-being.

Good Riddance to the Nanny State’s Massive, Mindless and Monumentally Meretricious War On Drugs

Via David Stockman’s Contra Corner

At age 27 Lucy Steigerwald still knows how to call a spade a spade:

…. the war on drugs is still raging. And we need to keep remembering it’s truly a war. This means half the people in our bulging prisons are both casualties of and prisoners of war. And while we keep progressing with recreational legal marijuana laws…. we cannot forget about the people who are still being punished due to the most dangerous moral panic in U.S. history. Legal precedent be damned; letting every single nonviolent drug criminal out of prison today would be the right thing to do.

Amen! Washington’s massive, mindless and monumentally meretricious war on drugs is surely one of the largest social policy disasters ever launched from the corridors of the beltway. It has plagued the continent with savage drug cartels that thrive on government created scarcity and the artificial 1000-fold elevation of drug prices which finance military-scale distribution networks. It has cruelly recruited millions of young people, especially in low-income neighborhoods, to a perilous life as drug smugglers, mules, runners and dealers or busted them for minor possession—-and then consigned them to extended sentences in the criminal training camps which comprise the nation’s bulging prisons. And it has foisted upwards of $40 billion per year on taxpayers for no valid purpose of state than to protect people from their own choices, habits, addictions and self-harm.

At long last the lunacy of the War on Drugs seems to be dawning on even mainstream voters and politicians, as reflected in liberalization referendums across the nation. But as a reminder of how the Nanny State can burrow itself deeply and intractably into the daily life of society, Lucy Steigerwald makes another cogent observation:

I’m 27, but I still remember a time when nobody – nobody – with any kind of shot at winning political office dared discuss ending the drug war.

Funny thing. I am 68 and went to work in Washington at a time when nobody—really nobody—had even thought of starting a drug war.

So the lesson from the nation’s finally fading War on Drugs could not be more clear. Beware of politicians promising to “fix” problems that are not any business of the state in the first place. These schemes of uplift and betterment presently grow into cruel, intractable abominations.

By Lucy Steigerwald

…the moment the scorched policy of the war on drugs slows at all, it is tempting to pull a “W” on the aircraft carrier and declare “mission accomplished.”   But in May 2009, the Obama administration’s drug tsar, Gil Kerlikowske, declared that they weren’t going to call it “the war on drugs” anymore. After all, said Kerlikowske, “people see a war as a war on them. We’re not at war with people in this country.”

The Obama administration has made some token shifts towards less draconian methods of fighting, such as drug courts – which have their own problems – but Kerlikowske was basically lying. War is a nasty, disturbingly accurate, word for what the government has done for 40-plus years (mostly with public approval or at least indifference). The Korean War wasn’t a “police action,” and the door-busting, life-ruining parts of the   war on drugs did not end after their general decided calling a spade a spade was bad PR.
That switch, and other meek rhetorical gestures, have been pure show on the part of the hypocritical Obama administration until they began to timidly improve last year with some unofficial sentencing reform guidelines….(but) the legalization of recreational marijuana in Colorado and Washington State in 2012 truly did change the game. Weed was legal, really legal, for the first time in 70 years. And so far, Attorney General Eric Holder— – who is also backing more concrete sentencing reforms now –– has let those states be.

Everyone – particularly the heroic drug policy folks who made this possible– deserves to celebrate this victory. I’m 27, but I still remember a time when nobody – nobody – with any kind of shot at winning political office dared discuss ending the drug war. Not even medical marijuana was a safe enough subject on which to opine. You didn’t so much as come out against such things as they didn’t come up for debate at all. In the past five or so years, we have moved from that to this – this being mainstream politicians like Republican Governors Chris Christie (NJ) and Rick Perry (TX), and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, all declaring that drug laws need to be changed.

Marijuana reform is a popular issue for people, and the politicians are finally trying to catch up. It is incredible that it now safe enough an issue for non-libertarian, pro-big government politicians to endorse a truncated version of a drug war truce. But we can’t declare victory yet. This 40-year nightmare has ruined too many lives and busted too many civil liberties to count. The cause, like all of America’s ill-advised, brutal adventures do at first, sounded so nice – a drug-free society.   The result was the largest prison population in the world, and less freedom for all of us.

This war has long been global as well as domestic. We have a Drug Enforcement Administration that acts like the Central Intelligence Agency in Latin America, and has colluded with the National Security Agency at home. The United States has browbeaten other nations into following its warped example on drug policy. In Mexico, powerful drug cartels have killed 60,000 people and US policy has made that worse. And why bother repealing Posse Comitatus’ restrictions on soldiers enforcing law at home, when you can just make police indistinguishable from an army?

There is very little about this campaign against drugs that is not a literal war, at least since {Richard Nixon} made it so. And it needs to end now.

http://original.antiwar.com/lucy/2014/03/26/the-war-on-drugs-remains-literal/

We need peace more than we need legal propriety. We need to end this war,free all the prisoners, and never again trust the architects of misery and social   engineering – especially when they began to sell their next grand adventure.