Thursday, July 8, 2010

Prohibition 2.0 Is Now 50 Years Old....and George F. Will Is Worried About Lightbulbs and Salt


It Is Hard to Miss the Compelling Comparison between alcohol prohibition and drug prohibition, with both prohibitions yielding amazingly similar and intensely deleterious side-effects. Leave it George F. Will, writing in The Washington Post, to find a way:


Instead, Mr. Will peers under his bed and into his closet, and finds comparable bogeymen of.....encouraging reduced sodium-intake and the use of energy-efficient light bulbs.

It Seems like a Stretch, to imagine the speedboats of incandescent-bulb smugglers and iodized-salt-sneakers outrunning our 21st century U.S. Coast Guard.

Maybe Those of Us who back in the 1960s predicted the worldwide cartel-wars of drug prohibition did not know what we were talking about.

But the Evidence, both of the damage of drug wars and of the lesser drug-use damage where drugs are not prohibited, argues that we Hippie-types back then did know what we were talking about. And those who continue to oppose a reasonable regulatory relationship with psychoactive drugs——even today, after more than fifty years  of epidemic incarceration and anti-productive treatment——keep their sense of facts separate from their confirmed, destructive opinions.

Ideology Is Blind. It is intolerant. Its foolish consequences are murdering people throughout Mexico and on our border. It bankrolls the Taliban and al Qaeda.  It fuels drug-cartel wars in Colombia, in Brazil, even here in the U.S., exacerbating our immigration issues. Its priced support for Afghan poppy farmers means that the war in Afghanistan likely will remain a fool’s errand for decades more to come.

Ideology Kills. It ruins countless lives. It destroys families and the benefits of American capitalism. 

So Long as the Blind continue to support the price floor underneath the drug industry, we will keep reading foolish essays, by such illuminati as George F. Will, on how being forced to lower your salt intake will push Americans into a life of crime.

Regards,
(($;-)}
Gozo!