United States’ Brain on Drugs

There can be no doubt that Mexico, Columbia, Peru, Afghanistan, and Burma produce prodigious amounts of drugs: marijuana, cocaine, meth, heroin and more. But, what isn’t generally stated in the battle of words over the “drug war” is that the United States population is the major consumer of these drugs.  Demand drives production in this very real and complicated picture. Not only is it the case that the US consumes and therefore drives the upward demand for drugs, it is also the producer of handguns and machine guns used to “weaponize” the drug dealers.  The US population, wittingly or unwittingly, enables  the so called drug war even as it spends billions of dollars, imprisons hundreds of thousands non-violent lives and contributes to the breakup of hundreds of thousands of families and the peoples in Mexico, Columbia, Burma, Afghanistan and a few other not-so well known countries suffer the violence and terror of murderous gang-entrepreneurs making billions off of suburban US households.

Mexico is a beautiful country as is Columbia and yet US government and citizen driven policies contribute to the desperate mess caused by those policies. Then Secretary of State Clinton makes the serious mistake of describing Mexico as another Columbia…a country messed up by US drug policies and gun policies.

It is without a doubt true what Mexico’s President Calderon means when he says of Clinton’s remark: “I think the main thing we have in common with Colombia is that both of our countries suffer from U.S. drug consumption,” * * * “We are
both victims of the enormous American consumption of drugs, and now the
sales of weapons.”

While Mexico, Columbia, Afghanistan and other countries suffer from violence at unconscionable levels, the US continues to consume and demand the very drugs the US government has been saying for more than thirty years it wants to stop.  The United States’ Brain is on Drugs when it should be on cleaning up its own house to reduce and eliminate demand for weapons, drugs in the suburban communities that have all of the money to spend for these things. Legalizing marijuana and taxing it might just be a good start…the price would drop pretty quickly.