United States' 'drug war' is a failure

Al Gore and George W. Bush surely disagree on some issues, but drug control isn't one of them. The subject is a total nonissue during this election, and the only drugs being discussed are the prescription kind.\nGeorge Bush Sr. was a proponent of the war on drugs, the idea being that drugs, not social failure, cause crime and poverty. But his war was a selective one, targeting drugs such as marijuana while others, such as alcohol and tobacco, remain freely available. \nThe U.S. Supreme Court figures deaths related to smoking at 400,000 a year. That's more than all deaths from homicides, car accidents, AIDS, alcohol, fires and illegal drugs combined. And yet we force other nations, such as Thailand in 1990, to accept cigarette advertising in their countries under threat of economic sanctions. \nWhy this hypocrisy on behalf of both parties? What is the actual purpose of the drug war, given the really lethal drugs are legal and profitable?\nWe can get some idea from a study released by the Rand Corporation and funded by the U.S. Army and the Office of National Drug Control Policy. The study found money spent on domestic drug addiction treatment -- providing medical care and counseling to drug addicts -- was seven times as effective in terms of decreasing drug use as money put into law enforcement.\nSo if our current program of arresting juveniles for drug use and enacting harsher and harsher penalties on them for first offenses is wasteful and inefficient, as the Rand Corporation and a number of other studies have shown, why do the major parties stand in favor of it?\nBecause the drug war has the effect of disposing of people our government, corporate community and military think are useless: peasants in other nations and the poor population in the United States. How does this happen?\nConsider President Bill Clinton's Colombia Plan. It varies little in substance from the similar foreign strategies used by previous administrations of both parties. The plan involves a two-year allotment of $7.5 billion to be given to Colombia's government by the United States, Europe, the IMF and the World Bank for economic development and to nourish democracy. Unfortunately, the money for economic development flows into the pockets of wealthy foreign investors who own most of the nation's resources. \nThis just leaves the military aid, including a huge amount of military training by the United States. Colombia has among the worst human rights record in the world. A death toll of 3,000 and a refugee increase of 300,000 a year is agreed on by many sources, from Human Rights Watch to the United Nations to the State Department, which said in 1999 "government forces continued to commit numerous, serious abuses, including extrajudicial killings." This places blame for the terrorism of Colombia on our government and its foreign policy, because we're paying for it. Not that Colombia is unique in this respect -- the United States has supported dictators all across Latin America to protect the investments corporate America has made in those nations.\nHow does this relate to the drug war? \nOur government's support for military training of the Colombian paramilitary forces is justified in terms of destroying cocoa crops before they can be sent to the United States and sold in the form of cocaine. Historically, our intervention in the affairs of Third World nations and elsewhere has been justified in painting any dissenting group in that country as "communist." But since those resources are already owned by powerful corporate interests, it's the responsibility of the State Department and the CIA to support death squads and paramilitary forces abroad to stamp out the threat, or to overthrow governments if they show signs of resisting the U.S. agenda.\nBut without a Soviet bogeyman to justify imperialism, a new pretext is needed to maintain "U.S. interests," which really means "corporate interests." That's why we have the drug war, in which poor peasant populations in poor countries can be massacred under the banner of "Stopping Drugs at the Source."\nAnyone familiar with George W. Bush's younger years knows drug use by the wealthy is ignored. But do you think the poor black kid in the ghetto with a joint in his pocket will get the same treatment?\nGreen presidential candidate Ralph Nader wants to end the drug war and cut off aid to countries that torture and kill their own people. Gore and Bush are silently unanimous that these projects should be escalated. The choice is up to you.