David Simon with the best thing ever written about the drug war:
We do it because we – and the communal reference is not merely to the ruling class, but to the middle- and working-class voters who tolerate such craven dishonor – live in abject fear that if we dare ratchet down our drug war, then drugs themselves will come closer: Closer to our communities; closer to our schools, our children; closer to our America.
The real risk? In the same way that the psychic effect of terrorism on a population becomes disproportionate to the actual probability of being a victim of terror, so too does our fear of drugs and drug abuse produce grandiose overreaction.
Think otherwise? If you believe for a minute that all of the brutality and lost treasure and human tragedy that underwrites America’s drug war keeps marijuana, or cocaine, or methamphetamine, or heroin from your children, you are entirely naïve enough to soldier in Pharoah’s army. Because regardless of where your kids go to school, regardless of who they keep for friends, regardless of whatever shaded suburb or gated community you inhabit, the truth is that if they want to get high, they will. They know where to get it, and yes, it is there to be got. Everywhere. We can’t even keep drugs out of our vast prison complex, much less a junior high school; if we can’t win the drug war inside a maximum-security prison, where in society do we expect to emerge victorious?
Yet to preserve the vague and unsubstantiated notion that this prohibition is sheltering us and ours, we have transformed it into an open war on the underclass. Rather than trust in our parenting, our resources, our values to guard against the actual and proportional risks of dangerous drugs, we have instead been willing to consign the children of West Baltimore or North Philadelphia or East St. Louis to hell on earth. In places devoid of all other legitimate economic endeavor – places where half the adult males of color no longer have employment – we have rigged the game: The factories are gone, the warehouses are empty. Only the corners remain. There, the only functioning industry gives daily meaning to the other, lost America even as it destroys that part of our nation. There, we have found a way to hunt, and persecute, and finally, monetize our poor for the benefit of a growth industry that actually spends profits lobbying legislatures for harsher drug statutes and more prison construction.
What do we do when Mexico says fuck y’all and legalizes? That day will come.
1. First it is necessary to read Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, a genealogy of this subject.
The to understand the Foucauldian grid of power/knowledge/capital. The drug industry and prisons are big business, so “protecting your children” must be understood for what it is, the same as Homeland Security. With me so far?
Protecting children is a “floating sign” masking what is an empty assertion. The drug war is to be continued at all costs. It is very profitable on many fronts and it creates CONFINEMENT and surveillance our greatest dangers. It allows schools to be under surveillance and allows children to grow up in a culture where metal detectors are everywhere, where paranoia reigns.
As William Burroughs has said a few decades ago, “The persecution of the drug culture will initiate the institution of the fascist state.” Now we have terrorism contributing to the speed of homegrown red white and blue fascism.
To spend energy on debating the hypocrisies of politic ians is Deterrence, to keep you from seeing and considering resistance to things that really matter.
I used to post things like this at Confluence but RD disappears me.