Vietnam, Lost
Iraq, Costly
War on Drugs, Priceless
The War on Drugs, the Mast-O-Con Club card, is priceless because it has already cost us what the War in Iraq has cost us, yet the Drug War was lost decades ago.
It’s priceless because it will continue to cost at least $50,000,000,000 -- that's $50 BILLION -- a year until we put an end to it. Putting an end to the War part doesn’t mean we can afford to get out of the business of attending to the drug problem in the United States.
The con job is not the huge cost of the Drug War; it’s that we’ve been waging this war for 35 years and gotten NO WHERE. We are not one step closer to putting a dent in it. Therefore, the money you and I continue to spend getting nowhere will continue to get us nowhere.
Yet we have the knowledge to finally get somewhere, to put a dent in this lost war just by shifting focus a bit. But it will take changing the public’s minds and adjusting public policy. The same things are at stake in this Drug War as in the Iraq War – human lives, including yours and mine and the millions of other touched by one individual’s substance abuse and addiction.
One Person
You know someone abusing or addicted to drugs or alcohol. That person has an immediate family of grandparent(s), parent(s) and sibling(s), and in many cases step families. The extended family includes aunts, uncles, cousins. All those immediate and extended members have close friends and acquaintances. There are teachers and classmates, the users’ friends, law enforcement people, attorneys, drug court personnel, counselors, and on and on and on.
The effects roll outward, outward, outward, like a stone in water that creates circles, circles, circles, until you have a wave. The people affected increases exponentially.
Six Degrees of Separation
It is extremely difficult to get an accurate number of drug users/abusers/addicts in the U.S. The primary method of calculating the number is – and I am not making this up – for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration to interview, a.k.a., call by telephone, American households. We have to rely on the respondents to tell the truth.
How many winks, I wonder.
The common sense assumption says that the figure of some 20 million Americans has to be a low-ball figure.
Then consider the “six degrees of separation” theory and soon you have the entire American society affected. We’ve looked everywhere for answers.
This Drug War, lasting 35 years, has gone on longer than all America’s wars added together. This one has cost millions of lives, billions of dollars, more than a few Czars, and 11 federal agencies – including the State Department, Justice Department, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Homeland Security, and more. We’ve thrown millions of non-violent drug offenders into jails and prisons, which cost umpteen more dollars.
It’s crazy. As Einstein said, insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
And now, finally, after looking everywhere, using untold resources, spending billions of dollars, we know where alcohol and drug addiction lives. We finally know. We were staring at it all along, but didn’t have the technology to show it until the recent past. Now we have no more excuses for waging this insane Drug War.
More in later posts.
No comments:
Post a Comment