The administrators and enforcers of the smuggling cartels live lives of luxury in Bogotá, Kabul and Mexico City. The upper echelon, the enablers, live in Washington, D.C., Moscow and London. Who are the real kingpins? They are bankers, pharmaceutical house CEOs, weapons manufacturers and a thousand other corporate interests whose gross profits depend on violence, hatred, distrust and deception. The prohibition of drugs is the ideal mechanism to continuously increase the rhetoric of fear and to incrementally diminish our rights and freedoms.
The farm gate price of these "illegal drugs" is less than $5 billion per year. In the US alone, we spend in excess of $65 billion per year, attempting to squelch the flow of drugs, in housing a half million drug war prisoners and in arresting 1.9 million more, non-violent US citizens each year for baggies of plant products in their pocket or purse. The UN estimates the worldwide commerce in these "prohibited" drugs is now $300 billion per year.
Who are the drug lords? They are every politician who lives and breathes war, drugs, terror or otherwise. They are the corrupt corporate heads, malicious media barons, venomous judges and cretinous cops, who, knowing full well the truth, choose to follow their nose to riches, to embrace a lie, to feed their evil cornucopia with the lives of their fellow man.
The pharmaceutical houses and the medical associations decided in the early 20th century that the American people should be denied the right to decide for themselves what to put into their own bodies. We were forced to give up our liberty to choose our own medicines in 1914, in exchange for supposed security regarding our health. In 2009, we are being forced to give up additional, unstated liberties in exchange for unknown, never-to-be-clarified protection. Our slide into this abyss is facilitated by the fear engendered by 100 years of prohibition and the mechanism of deceit that allows the drug war to flourish despite decades of miserable failure.
We are at a juncture where we can choose liberty, truth and justice or we can slide into the arms of big brother, admitting we are powerless over our own lives and are willing to take whatever the drug lords are offering.
* Our latest radio program features an interview with Ryan Grim, author of:
This is Your Country on Drugs - The Secret History of Getting High in America.
100's of programs with judges, doctors, scientists & more at http://www.drugtruth.net