A Conversation with Gustavo de Greiff

November 14, 2002

The only path to ending narco-trafficking is drug legalization: that is to say, the regulation of its production and sale. That is the thesis maintained for almost ten years by Gustavo de Greiff, former Attorney General of Colombia and former ambassador of the same country in Mexico, who says that legalization doesn’t have to produce a rise in the consumption of drugs and, in fact, will end the violence, corruption and the progressive breakdown of society caused by narco-trafficking.

According to de Greiff, it is precisely drug prohibition – a policy that gained force in the 1960s and 70s under the government of president Richard Nixon as a response to street violence provoked by competition between crime organizations for consumer markets. What provokes this violence, as well as the commerce, is its illegal nature, producing enormous profits for drug traffickers and corrupt authorities, a business that will be difficult to stop as long as there are consumers.

Currently an investigator with the Colegio de México, the former attorney general of Colombia explained in an interview with the daily Por Esto! that while he did that job he realized the futility of the drug war: “The police arrested the drug traffickers, dismembered cartels, confiscated property, destroyed laboratories, intercepted drug shipments and, in spite of all that, nothing happened in the general panorama of the drug fight, because it kept coming to the consumer markets, among those, the most important, in the United States. The business is so profitable that if you disintegrate one cartel, other narco-traffickers take its place in the market.”

De Greiff used studies produced by the White House Office of Drug Control to demonstrate that although the drug business is gigantic, it doesn’t rise to the $500 billion dollar figure that has been used to justify the anti-drug policy. Rather, American consumers spend $57 billion dollars a year on illicit drugs or on licit drugs used illegally. To produce a kilo of cocaine and transport it to the United States requires an investment of $2,500 dollars. Later, the North American dealer mixes it with other substances such as talcum powder or flour to increase its weight and distributes it in the street at a value of $20,000 to $30,000 dollars. The enormous profits stay mainly in the United States, while a minor part of the $57 billion dollars mentioned goes to Latin American traffickers.



The Harms of Prohibition



Beyond the street violence and the disintegration of the social fabric, narco-trafficking causes an unmeasured enrichment of the traffickers and also the corrupt officials, he stressed. “A prohibited business can not have success without the collaboration by authorities who close their eyes to the transport or sale of the drug in exchange for money or favors, the same in producer countries and consumer countries. The corruption reaches individuals at all levels of authority, from the police, to the Customs officers, intelligence agents, airports, maritime port managers and, of course, the politicians,” he commented, adding that the profits have also been used to buy arms that benefit violent groups active in the countries of this hemisphere.

De Greiff stressed the importance of legalization of the business, transport and sale of drugs so that the business stops being so monstrously obscene, and to convert it into an ordinary business that additionally will produce taxes that can be invested in the good of society. At the same time, he underlined the billions of dollars that are spent annually to repress drug trafficking that will then be able to be dedicated to other goals. And it’s that in the past ten years drug consumption in the United States has remained more or less stable, but in the same time period the government budget to fight drugs has gone from a billion dollars to seventeen-and-a-half billion dollars (or the more than 18 billion requested for the 2003 budget). This demonstrates the war on drugs is not effective at all, he said.



Fear of Legalization



The doctor in law and former Colombian ambassador in Mexico indicated that one of the great difficulties in bringing about legalization is the fear by the population that drugs will be easier to obtain and raise the number of users. However, the fact is that although drugs are prohibited, they are reachable by any individual in any city of this continent who desires them, he remarked. “Drugs are already everywhere, except that because they are prohibited, small consumers that should be treated as patients go to jail – the bad joke is that nobody is rehabilitated in jail – and the quality of the product is worsened by the elements used to adulterate them (to increase their weight and the corresponding profits), causing more damages to the consumer than if they were pure, as medical research has shown on various occasions.”

In this sense, de Greiff used the example of the legalization of alcohol in the United States, which ended the business of the large mafias involved in it, and did not produce a rise in consumption. “The consumption did rise a little while later due to the psychological problems related to World War II,” he said.

To support his thesis, he cited the study conducted in 1994 by the New York Bar Association called, “A Wiser Path: Ending Prohibition,” in which a committee of experts (politicians, economists, sociologists, doctors, chemists), after analyzing the issue of supposed rise in consumption under legalization, came to the conclusion that the regulation of the production and sale of drugs would not increase consumption notably, as long as legalization is accompanied by medical treatment for addicts and intelligent, honest, educational campaigns to discourage drug use. “Not the stupid and tricky campaigns like the ones used today, that say if you smoke marijuana or try cocaine two or three times you will become an addict: the young people learn for themselves it is not the truth, conclude that everything said is a lie, and decide to continue consuming,” de Greiff commented. He also cited the example of tobacco use, that in spite of being more addictive than cocaine or marijuana according to scientists, has been substantially reduced due to informative campaigns and without causing the damages of prohibition “that would bring the formation of illegal tobacco trafficking gangs, violence and corruption."



The Farse of the Drug War



Another of the obstacles to legalizing drugs are all the individuals involved in the corruption, said de Greiff. “As has been said, all the agencies involved in repression and monitoring, as well as the politicians: Some because their jobs would be eliminated, and others because they would stop receiving the benefits of narco-trafficking through bribes. Their business would end.”

He cited examples that have been publicly exposed of police who seize drugs but only declare half the volume and sell the rest, cases in which large shipments are seized in order to free up other routes through which larger quantities are passing, DEA agents who target some money-launderers while they protect others who practice the same activity, or politicians scandalized by their own drug consumption in private but who promise to combat narco-trafficking in public, while they receive the profits from the corruption and they are also using drugs.

De Greiff mentioned, at the same time, the political game that is played with the numbers of arrests and seizures, that the governments use to publicize their own success in the drug war and to continue justifying the repressive policy, “when, in reality, there is no such success although they imprison more and more drug dealers, since the drugs continue flowing in the same quantities to the consumer markets.”

The government most interested and invested in the policy of the drug war and at the same time is its grand promoter, he said, is the United States government, which has used the policy to subjugate the countries of Latin America. On one end they use the “de-certification” process. De Greiff notes: “They’ve used this on multiple occasions as a threat when U.S. conditions that have nothing to do with the drug war are imposed, as was the case in 1995 when the U.S. Ambassador in Colombia conditioned that country’s certification on changes in a banana export agreement with Europe.” On the other end they use political and military intervention, more and more, to try and maintain domination and protect the warehouse of cheap natural resources for the United States.



Politics, the Media, and Legalization



Remembering that on various occasions politicians throughout the continent have announced their support for legalization (including Mexican President Vicente Fox who once publicly expressed the need that, one day, drugs be legalized), the former Attorney General of Colombia commented that the majority of Latin American politicians are convinced that the drug war is a farce or at very least ineffective: “I speak with many politicians. And many tell me that I am right, that it is the only solution, but they don’t dare say so publicly because they will then be accused of connections with narco-trafficking, like what happened to me.”

Asked about the possibility that the politicians will decide to speak out and promote what they see as necessary – legalization – de Greiff said that, “what is needed is courage, and, disgracefully, there are few brave politicians in the world. But if there were, and above all if various Latin American countries would unite against this farce, without fear of the economic sanctions by the United States, a new day would dawn.”

Completing his suggestion, he said that one way to pressure the politicians would be to demonstrate the failure of the repressive drug policies to the public: “Then the politician will be afraid to be associated with a failed policy. At least the honest or pragmatic politician would feel that way. As for the dishonest politician, we have to take away his business, and that would be made possible by legalization.”

Another problem that the legalization proposal encounters, he continued, is found in the grand disinformation campaigns promoted, above all, by the most interested party: the United States government, a game in which journalists are paid (with money or with information) to affirm again and again that the only solution to the problem of narco-trafficking is repression and that, if legalized, drug consumption would rise. “That’s how it’s understood, including in Colombia, with all the evils that the production and sale of drugs have cost, a recent poll says that only 36 percent of the population is in favor of legalization, and that’s because they are afraid of expanding the drug problem,” he said.

For that reason, he insisted, it is necessary to continue educating the population, showing the people the lies that are said about the drug war, demonstrating that it is not certain that, in spite of the continuing arrests and seizures, the narco-trafficking is not being stopped; showing them that the corruption continues growing and it’s not the case that repression is beneficial. The supply is available to anyone in spite of prohibition. Teaching people to avoid consumption, and these other points, are necessary topics of information campaigns so that the people are careful about drugs, while the addict should be offered the chance to enter a health clinic and not prison. It’s already been demonstrated that treatment can succeed, he said.



Decriminalization and the Benefits of Legalization



Gustavo de Greiff said that in spite of the obstacles in the path toward legalization – “it may be that I don’t live to see it because I’m already many years old (he was born in 1929), but I know that some day drugs will be legalized and it will be shown that we were right” – there are helpful signs in the world such as the experience of decriminalization in Holland, England, recently in Portugal, and the decriminalization of marijuana in some of the 50 United States, with more voices throughout the planet who clamor now for a change in strategy in relation to drugs.

However, he stressed that decriminalization is not enough: It would only avoid that the consumers go to jail or that the dealers have a more peaceful consumer, but it will not end narco-trafficking nor the current corruption by authorities who enrich themselves at alarming levels while those who suffer are the consumers and the general population.

The solution of the problem of drug trafficking is legalization of drugs, he repeated, and he specified that legalization doesn’t have to mean sale in open markets but, rather, the regulation of the business, the production, the transport and sale, with permits for each activity, control over the quality of the product so it is not adulterated, and legal limits such as not selling drug near educational institutions, not advertising their sale in the media, etc., and always accompanied by prevention campaigns against abusive consumption and offering medical treatment to addicts.

De Greiff concluded that this is the way to destroy the business of the narco-traffickers, to end the corruption and the criminal violence that this illicit activity brings, to stop drug money from being used to buy weapons, and to stop the United States from using drug policies to maintain a subjugated Latin America. He added, ironically, “Of course, beyond direct economic pressures, currently the government in Washington counts with new excuses to do that.”



Publisher’s Note: Former Attorney General and Ambassador Gustavo de Greiff will be one of the featured speakers at the historic, first-ever, América wide drug legalization summit, titled “OUT FROM THE SHADOWS: Ending Drug Prohibition in the 21st Century,” February 12-15, 2003, in Mérida, Yucatán. To register to attend this important gathering, or for more information, see:



http://www.stopthedrugwar.org/shadows/

Tyisha the drunk, drug infested homoesuxual lesbian, has been in hell now for almost four years.

www.biopsychiatry.com

PSYCHOPHARMACOLOGY & THE GOVERNMENT OF THE SELF
DAVID HEALY

&

Got any per-capita statistics to support those assertions, matey?

========

Professor Olaf Drummer, a forensic scientist the Royal College of Surgeons in Melbourne in 1996:

"Compared to alcohol, which makes people take more risks on the road, marijuana made drivers slow down and drive more carefully.... Cannabis is GOOD for driving skills, as people tend to *overcompensate* for a perceived impairment."

http://www.ccguide.org.uk/driving.html

"Bush Admirer", you must be confused regarding the poppy situation in Afghanistan and the U.S. taking a hands off position to it. Also, targetting drug problems at the source (ie. Colombia, etc.) is the least effective means of dealing with the drug problem. If one were serious about drugs, they would focus on drug rehab programs.

Still no scientific STATISTICS on health and mortality to support your argument, buddy.

Lots of bombast from a control freak though.

Or course, you would do as you like. I was merely suggesting what the Rand Corporation said would be the most effective means of dealing with the problem. They compared prevention through treatment, criminal justice, interdiction and source control. Looking at cost effectiveness, treatment was found to be 7 times as effective as criminal justice (ie. police arresting people for drug possession). Treatment was 11 times as effective as interdiction, and treatment was 23 times as effective as source control.

The other problem with targetting the source is that the U.S. has no right to carry out such operations (chemical spraying, etc.) in other countries.

However, judging by your post directly above, it sounds like you are not interested in a rational argument.

What sort of control-freak would make nature illegal?

Could we live happily ever after? Perhaps. One's interest in the genetically pre-programmed states of sublimity sketched in The Hedonistic Imperative is tempered by the knowledge that one is unlikely to be around to enjoy them. It's all very well being told our descendants will experience every moment of their lives as a magical epiphany. For emotional primitives and our loved ones at present, most of life's moments bring nothing of the sort. In centuries to come, our baseline of emotional well-being may indeed surpass anything today's legacy wetware can even contemplate. Right now, however, a future Post-Darwinian Era of paradise-engineering can seem an awfully long way off. Mainstream society today has a desperately underdeveloped conception of mental health.

        There's clearly a strong causal link between the raw biological capacity to experience happiness and the extent to which one's life is felt to be worthwhile. High-minded philosophy treatises should complicate but not confuse the primacy of the pleasure-pain axis. So one very practical method of life-enrichment consists in chemically engineering happier brains for all in the here-and-now. Yet how can this best be done?

         Any strategy which doesn't subvert our inbuilt hedonic treadmill of inhibitory feedback mechanisms in the CNS will fail. Political and socio-economic reforms offer at best a lame stopgap. To the scientific naturalist, all routes to happiness must ultimately be biological: "culture" must be neurochemically encoded to exert its effects. Some of these routes to happiness involve the traditional environmental detours. They are too technical, diverse and futile to tackle here. If the quality of our lives is to be significantly enhanced in the long term, then the genetically predisposed set-point of our emotional thermostats needs to be recalibrated. The malaise-ridden norm typically adaptive in humanity's ancestral environment must be scrapped. So while we wait for germ-line gene-therapy to become standard, it's worth considering instead how ordinary early twenty-first century Homo sapiens can sustainably maximise emotional well-being with only present-day pharmacology to rely on. No less importantly, how is it possible to combine staying continuously high with retaining one's sense of social and ethical responsibility to other people and life-forms?

        Extracting reliable information on this topic is extraordinarily difficult for laity and professionals alike. The layman is more likely to be given heavily slanted propaganda. Unvarnished fact might confuse his supposedly uneducated and functionally diminutive brain. Career-scientists, on the other hand, are bedevilled by a different problem. Access to funds, laboratories, raw materials, journal publication, professional preferment, and licenses to conduct experimental trials is all dependent on researchers delivering results their paymasters want to hear. The disincentives to intellectual integrity could scarcely be greater; and they are cloaked in such reputable disguise.

        By way of illustration, it's worth contemplating one far-fetched scenario. How might an everlasting-happiness drug - a drug which (implausibly!) left someone who tried it once living happily-ever-after - find itself described in the literature?

"Substance x induces severe, irreversible structural damage to neurotransmitter subsystem y. Its sequelae include mood-congruent cognitive delusions, treatment-resistant euphoria, and toxic affective psychosis."

Eeek! Needless to say, no responsible adult would mess around with a potent neurotoxin under this description.

        Several excellent researchers play the game by the rules. They keep their heterodox opinions to themselves. Others find such cognitive dissonance too unpleasant. So they gradually internalise the puritanical role and tendency to warped scientific prose expected of them. [Whereas horribly-tortured experimental animals, for instance, blandly get "used" and "sacrificed", certain drugs always get "abused" by "drug-abusers"] On the other hand, some of the most original and productive minds in the field of psychopharmacology - pre-eminently Alexander Shulgin - have already been silenced. Many more careers have been intellectually strangled at birth or consigned to professional oblivion. The danger of poisoning the wells of information, for whatever motives, is straightforward. When young people discover they have been lied to or deceived, over cannabis for instance, they will pardonably assume that they have been lied to or deceived over the dangers of other illegals too. And this, to put it mildly, would be exceedingly rash.

biopsychiatry.com

The cannabis experience has greatly improved my appreciation for art, a subject which I had never much appreciated before. The understanding of the intent of the artist which I can achieve when high sometimes carries over to when I'm down. This is one of many human frontiers which cannabis has helped me traverse. There also have been some art-related insights – I don't know whether they are true or false, but they were fun to formulate. For example, I have spent some time high looking at the work of the Belgian surrealist Yves Tanguey. Some years later, I emerged from a long swim in the Caribbean and sank exhausted onto a beach formed from the erosion of a nearby coral reef. In idly examining the arcuate pastel-colored coral fragments which made up the beach, I saw before me a vast Tanguey painting. Perhaps Tanguey visited such a beach in his childhood.

A very similar improvement in my appreciation of music has occurred with cannabis. For the first time I have been able to hear the separate parts of a three-part harmony and the richness of the counterpoint. I have since discovered that professional musicians can quite easily keep many separate parts going simultaneously in their heads, but this was the first time for me. Again, the learning experience when high has at least to some extent carried over when I'm down. The enjoyment of food is amplified; tastes and aromas emerge that for some reason we ordinarily seem to be too busy to notice. I am able to give my full attention to the sensation. A potato will have a texture, a body, and taste like that of other potatoes, but much more so. Cannabis also enhances the enjoyment of sex – on the one hand it gives an exquisite sensitivity, but on the other hand it postpones orgasm: in part by distracting me with the profusion of image passing before my eyes. The actual duration of orgasm seems to lengthen greatly, but this may be the usual experience of time expansion which comes with cannabis smoking.

I do not consider myself a religious person in the usual sense, but there is a religious aspect to some highs. The heightened sensitivity in all areas gives me a feeling of communion with my surroundings, both animate and inanimate. Sometimes a kind of existential perception of the absurd comes over me and I see with awful certainty the hypocrisies and posturing of myself and my fellow men. And at other times, there is a different sense of the absurd, a playful and whimsical awareness. Both of these senses of the absurd can be communicated, and some of the most rewarding highs I've had have been in sharing talk and perceptions and humor. Cannabis brings us an awareness that we spend a lifetime being trained to overlook and forget and put out of our minds. A sense of what the world is really like can be maddening; cannabis has brought me some feelings for what it is like to be crazy, and how we use that word 'crazy' to avoid thinking about things that are too painful for us. In the Soviet Union political dissidents are routinely placed in insane asylums. The same kind of thing, a little more subtle perhaps, occurs here: 'did you hear what Lenny Bruce said yesterday? He must be crazy.' When high on cannabis I discovered that there's somebody inside in those people we call mad.

[...]

There is a myth about such highs: the user has an illusion of great insight, but it does not survive scrutiny in the morning. I am convinced that this is an error, and that the devastating insights achieved when high are real insights; the main problem is putting these insights in a form acceptable to the quite different self that we are when we're down the next day

---Carl Sagan

http://www.marijuana-uses.com/examples/Mr_X.htm

====================

CARL SAGAN (1934-1996)

We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

Excerpted from a commencement address delivered May 11, 1996.

http://www.seds.org/billa/psc/pbd.html

Shoot on site? A dead or alive bounty? Damn, you are a bellicose one, aren't you. I can see why you admire Bush. I am afraid that I disagree with your solution to the drug problem, though. While your asinine "solution" would get rid of the drug problem by making it pale in comparison to the "drug war" problem, I think most rational people would not see it as any kind of solution at all.

I'm also sorry to say that while your attitude to international law is "screw that", it is international law nonetheless.

Again, I can see that you are not here for rational discourse. I wonder if all Bush admirers are as adverse to rational thought as you are.

I suppose in the interests of linguistic accuracy, one could might want "the drug war" to be an actual war. Other than that, I find the proposal to be nonsensical.

It is in the interest of justice perhaps that you want to abandon justice and embrace injustice to fight lawlessness? Not much of a proposal. If only in rhetoric, U.S. leaders like to pride themselves on following the rule of law, whether it be carrying out civil justice or conducting warfare.

I do not agree that the ends justify the means in this case. I doubt that you do either, but I may be wrong. What you are suggesting, to review, is public execusions of suspected criminals (drug dealers in this case), a flaunting of human rights and violation of international law. I can think of such a regime, recently retired: the Taliban. Charming.

When I read:

As we continue this struggle against drug abuse it is wise to bear in mind George Santayana's line in Life of Reason, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

I remembered that in a different way:

We as human beings, learn from history that we never learn from history.

This is what happened in the prohibition era:

Encyclopedia—organized crime

The organized-crime syndicate in the United States is a product of the prohibition era of the early 20th cent.

Al Capone's annual earnings were estimated at the time of his arrest to be $60 million. When Prohibition was repealed in 1933, an elaborate syndicate of organized crime, built on the multi-million dollar bootlegging industry, had survived. The American Mafia branched out into narcotics, gambling, prostitution, loan sharking and extortion, concerns they still control today.

It's a shame. Today the corruption in organizations like DEA and CIA make this a very profitable business. Legalizing would imply a price around 1% of the current price in the streets, killing the market, and of course, killing the production.

The advantage of growing coca wouldn't be greater than the one of growing bananas.

But, of course, with a billionaire business, involving high and powerful personalities in the american 'society', is almost imposible to stop the market. The reality, faced by rich and poor americans is that they are dealing with drugs every day. Even the president Bush. What a shame.

DJEB - If we're going to have a 'war on drugs' then let's have one. We haven't seen anything approaching 'war' in this category to date.

War means that you shoot your enemies on sight. War means that you bomb your enemy whevever you know their location.

We should be going after drug kingpins whenever we obtain knowledge as to their location.

Let's make good use of those laser guided bunker busters and take out some drug lords.

...is do you want to solve the problem or thump your chest?

As always BA your solution is to ignore any solution that does not involve a "manly" solution that leaves piles of smoking corpses. Not all problems are best solved with "Bunker Busters" and piles of corpses.

Reality is you can send 2 people through a Residential Treatment program, such as Narconon - which has about a 70% non-recidivism rate, for the cost of housing one person one year. In other words for the cost of warehousing someone in "lock-up" is twice as expensive as treatment. And that is only presuming the drug user is locked up for a measly year - the average Sentence is longer than a year.

The cost of the Drug War in Money and the encroachment on the Liberties of others is unacceptable. Perhaps BA would like to live in a Totaltitarian Police State but most of us rather like living in freedom. (Of course BA is a VERY wealthy Businessman so he probably figures he can do what he wishes anyway. I suspect at least some of his sucking up to the Government Party Line has to do with his Electronics Contracts with the Military and/or other Government Agencies.)

An interesting concept Naria the problem lies in the fact that laws of supply and demand are not absolute. For instance should one mix spam (the caned meat) with cinnamon put it in a jar charge a hundred and fifty dollars an once and call it a delicacy, there's a chance it would become caviar of the 21st century. Despite the fact not many can afford a hundred and fifty dollars for an once of anything (demand low) and spam is as plentiful as $.25 meat can be (supply high). Should cocaine be legalized, lets say it destroys the cartels and Pepsi steps in, Pepsi delivers cocaine at a fraction of the cost. Now we have a markedly bigger customer base Pepsi gets super bowl time advertises "Pepsi Blow". Now I won't state it as fact but apparently cocaine is addictive, and a hard habit to kick. We end up with, thanks to Pepsi's incredible marketing machine, a population of cocaine users. Congress steps in declares cocaine illegal. Boom, problem solved. Well lets say that someone, just for the sake of argument, finds it profitable to deliver a product which very few have access to and half the country's population is addicted to, rise of drug trade. But with a spin... half the country is willing to slit their wrist to get it.

Once again just a possibility.

p.s. Sorry didn't intend to have that much bite.

...until we can clean up our own back yard.

Methamphetamine is far more devastating than anything coming from Columbia.

I once saw a bumper sticker I found amusing, it said : "Support the Contras - Buy Cocaine from a Republican"

That being said -

I'm sure that Vlad and his KGB comrades will, as always, view our domestic substance abuse problems with a gleafull eye:

The more stoned the American public is - the easier it will be to subdue.

with cocaine cola, things go better with coke.

But then they had to substitute caffine for the cocaine

after 1937 (I believe) and Teddy's (of the ruff riders) favorite drink was a brandy made with coca which now sells at $30k per bottle.

Legalize it, tax it, regulate it and cut the profit away from the CIA.

Same with all drugs that are now sold on the black market.

Fun facts...

And always a good idea to restate the arguement...

I'm sorry did that not make sense?

Bush Admirer wrote:

"DJEB - If we're going to have a 'war on drugs' then let's have one. We haven't seen anything approaching 'war' in this category to date.

"War means that you shoot your enemies on sight. War means that you bomb your enemy whevever you know their location.

"We should be going after drug kingpins whenever we obtain knowledge as to their location.

"Let's make good use of those laser guided bunker busters and take out some drug lords.

You are not serious are you? Tell me this is a joke. I quote a study by the very conservative Rand Corporation and the best you can do is this?

Why should the U.S. use anti-drug techniques that would be worse than any Taliban oppression, Soviet oppression, Chinese oppression that has ever existed? You have a VERY, VERY heavy burden of proof that such extreme measures are necessary. Here's betting that you can do no more than make assertions that it is necessary.

At any rate, you don't seem to understand what a metaphor is. The "war" in "the War on drugs" is a metaphor, not a literal war.

Post whatever you like in response - knock yourself out. In my eyes you've proven youself to be beyond the capacity for either ration discussion or thought; and you've done more to harm your own argument than I could ever hope to. Have fun.

No comment? Good call!

Why don't we legalize it and instruct companys not to advertise, plus we are a long way from "Pepsi Blow". All we want is to decriminalize people, that's all

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Hi Bush Admirer,

I just came back here all these years later after a nostalgic desire to see once more your comment, which was one of the single most stupid things I have ever seen.