Posted on 03/22/2016 4:28:55 PM PDT by drewh
I would say here, judging from the amount of homeless druggies on the street, it’s closer to 25%.
Yet he governed as a Republican liberal.
“Wowwww maaan, like, far out! Heavy.”
Yes we made fun of Nancy at the time, but she really got through to many of us.
“The only way to “win” a war on drugs is to secretly intercept and deliberately poison the drugs with random poisons.”
I know. I have had the exact same thought many times. It wouldn’t be moral, however.
Absolutely true.
I think we ought to do like Saudi Arabia and execute drug dealers and drug distributors. How do you have a proper war without getting serious? But we don’t, and then we whine about the prisons getting full.
I agree the word war is wrong.
but I disagree that the sellers and users of heroin, crack and roxy shouldn’t be arrested.
It’s almost IMPOSSIBLE to afford an addiction without committing crime.
I’m not allowed to kill myself according to law. That law would have to be stricken too.
and pot, OBVIOUSLY, is WAY different than those other ones and even alcohol.
but the DEALERS of pot, they’re BRUTAL. I’ve seen beatdowns over pot corner ownership. Making pot legal has always made sense to me, if alcohol is going to be.
The REAL question about the War on Drugs:
Why, in 1919, was an amendment to the Constitution needed to give the federal government power to regulate or prohibit a chemical?
Why has NO amendment to the Constitution been needed to give the Congress power to regulate or prohibit thousands of other chemicals?
I think you are closer to the truth about the “War on Drugs”. The Left tried to make the concept of illegal drug use one of free choice. They never gave a damn about the cost in human lives lost in the drug production chain from Latin America and Asia to the inner cities and outer farms.
That same mentality is, today, responsible for the horrible rise in heroin use which is devastating liberal New England states like a mini-AIDS plague.
And I might add that Red China was behind much of the heroin/opium that flooded Europe, esp. Amsterdam, Hong Kong, Vietnam, and the western US/Canada through the port of Vancouver.
While in Taiwan in the summer of 1971 (as both a newspaper journalist and a special seminar student), I was able to interview Fu Shu Ren, one of Mao’s bodyguard’s during the swimming of the Yangtze River which appeared in Life magazine. (Ren was later a Red Guard activist but got sick of the internecine slaughter he saw taking place in eastern China and defected to Taiwan).
Ren had a special pass that allowed him to travel around Red China unhindered and in Yennan Province, he saw miles of fields of opium poppies growing, as well as visiting a plant that manufactured the very same type of box (long, rectangular) used to ship heroin to Hong Kong and Amsterdam.
I was shown police photos of those seizures and those bags matched those Ren saw.
However, he did not see the actual heroin/opium production facilities.
Meanwhile, due to something I helped uncover while interviewing a senior No. Vietnamese military defector, our intell guys found out about Hanoi’s shipping heroin by train from Red China down the west side of No. Vietnam to other points for shipping via other means (i.e, carried across the border into SVN or shipped in by boat).
One of our Navy jets on a routine patrol over NVN spotted a train and blew it to hell. Unbeknownst to the pilot, he had hit a heroin train. The NVA thought that this was a targeted kill and that the US knew about these trains. Reportedly they changed their shipment plans to use small boats going down their coast to their agents in SVN.
I was told, while in SVN in the Fall, 1970, that the heroin sold to our soldiers ran up to 90% pure, a purity that could only be reached by higher technological processing of the raw opium sap. The opium turned to heroin in the “Golden Triangle” (Laos, eastern Burma, possibly Thailand, but also boarding Red Chinese provinces) was of much less a purity, usually ranging from about 5%-15% or so because it was only refined once or twice before being sold and shipped out to Bangkok and SVN.
Red Chinese sailors and even ships have been seized during the 70’s in Europe and Hong Kong with heroin onboard.
The one war on drugs almost never covered by the US media was the one waged by the communists against American and western nations.
One journalist, Alfred McCoy, blamed all the heroin in SVN on its production by our Meo allies in Laos, but this was leftist BS. The Meo didn’t have the technology/supplies to supply a higher purity heroin like the No. Vietnamese and Red Chinese. Some of their heroin might have been smuggled into SVN by unscrupulous Americans, but the was never an American policy.
Just some thoughts from an old SVN/Cambodia journalist.
He’s confessing from the great beyond, conveniently enough for the typical garbage piece from Harper’s.
FAIKL. They weren’t decimated. They became powerful democrats.
You doubt this? Why?
The WWI and WWI generations: generations that went and got themselves killed and maimed like lambs to the slaughter in two totally unnecessary wars.
The start of the war dates back to the repeal of prohibition. You had a large force of enforcement officers, only some of whom could be employed in revenue collection or deployed against moonshiners and the like. In FDR's America, just as today, government workers were special and couldn't just be made redundant like the rest of us. So those who couldn't be employed in existing agencies such as BAFT or the IRS were employed against the fledgling narcotics industry.
The famous film Reefer Madness which many of us saw in the 1960s dated from this time. Some of us actually took that film seriously, but our younger siblings were laughing it out of classrooms all over America by the 1970s.
I'm curious as to how many Freepers remember it?
Long story short is that if any president is to be blamed for the War on Drugs, it would be FDR, with a major assist in expanding it to be credited to Lyndon Johnson.
LOL! Did you ever nail it!
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