ANOTHER VIEW: Criminalizing Drugs Cause Urban Bloodshed

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ANOTHER VIEW: Criminalizing Drugs Cause Urban Bloodshed
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Posts 10,444 Today 04:45 ANOTHER VIEW: Criminalizing Drugs Cause Urban Bloodshed

Posted: Monday, July 21, 2014 5:45 am
By Stephen Downing

Earlier this month, our nation celebrated the Fourth of July with unprecedented bloodshed. A Chicago newspaper grabbed the biggest headline, saying that police were “Outgunned” with 82 shot and 14 killed. Even Long Beach reported five shootings over an 18-hour period.

The ferocity of the bloodshed was business as usual across the country and the responses from our leaders was exactly the same — across the country — just as it has been year after year after year.

They first declare their outrage and then call for more money and resources to fund the same old failed solutions. The redundancy is mind numbing.

Not once did any one of our so-called leaders risk making reference to the unambiguous source of the violence. The fountainhead that has spawned the gangs and cartels that continues to settle their grievances with guns on the street rather than lawyers in a courtroom — the war on drugs.

Why is that?

The gangs and cartels love drug prohibition because they are the winners and will always be the winners as long as the politicians and law enforcement and the so-called moral leadership of our country keeps saying and doing the same things, over and over and over.

Why can’t We the People see that? Why can’t we see that by regulating and controlling all drugs, the cartels and gangs will lose their main source of income and dry up? Street corner and school ground peddling would fade away, just like it did when we ended the prohibition of alcohol.

Why can’t we see that those who continue to pontificate the same empty solutions for all of the violence are the same ones who feed and nourish their own self-interests at the taxpayer’s trough?

The clear answer is because they don’t want us to see it. They don’t want us to understand that gangs and cartels are not the only ones benefitting from the drug war. They are too.
Drug war money is just too good to give up. They’d rather endure the violence. They’d rather build more prisons. They’d rather pontificate about their “crackdowns” and their Sunday afternoon basketball games and picnics and summer youth programs while they continue to line their pockets with overtime money, bigger grants, military equipment and dues paying, campaign donating public employee unions like police, prison guards, probation officers, social workers and all the others who feed at the drug war money machine.

After all, its “only” the black and brown kids who are dying, going to foster homes or getting macerated into the cesspool of the 43 million who have already been locked down and destroyed by the violence of our nation’s mass incarceration hysteria over the past 40 years.

The only difference now compared to the times of alcohol prohibition is that, in the times of alcohol prohibition, law enforcement — the police and judges — got their money in brown paper bags. Today, they — and all the other drug war apologists and rehab specialists — get their money through legitimate, systematic programs run by the federal government.

That’s why all the pro-drug war brown baggers use their lobbying organizations to fight every reform.

That’s why this nation was “outgunned” over the July 4 weekend.

Stephen Downing is a Long Beach resident.

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