Pubdate: Thu, 04 Nov 2010
Source: Litchfield County Times (CT)
Copyright: 2010 Litchfield County Times
Contact:  http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?brd=2303
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/2900
Author: Mildred Pond
Note: Mildred Pond lives in New Preston.

(UNDECLARED) WAR ON DRUGS IN MEXICO

Soon after George W. Bush was elected president in 2000, he had a
friendly meeting with Vincente Fox, then president of Mexico, during
which President Bush acknowledged America's shared responsibility in
the decades-long war on drugs. Millions of American drug buyers and
users were the principal contributors to the war's continuance. Mr.
Bush openly confessed to Mr. Fox that he was intimately aware of the
misuse of drugs, having once slipped into years of alcoholism himself.
He was by then free of his addiction, but his countrymen's addiction
to drugs continued. In his watch, Mr. Bush told the Mexican president,
the U.S. would take action.

That never happened. Not long after that discussion, 9/11 occurred,
and President Bush took us into a war, then a second, and his promise
to address drug use in the U.S. faded, apparently forgotten. Ten years
later the drug war in Mexico has increased to catastrophic, even
tragic, proportions, spreading further south, into every Mexican
province. Yet, in spite of border arrests, of drug captures, the flow
of drugs into the U.S. continues. The bulk of the drug flow is
marijuana. Not heroin, not crack, not amphetamines, not cocaine-but
marijuana.

American prisons dot the landscape. The U.S. prison population is six
to 10 times as high as most Western European countries. All of our
prisons are filled to capacity, and a high percentage of the inmates
are kids convicted for using or selling marijuana! Connecticut has 19
state and two Federal prisons. Funds are no longer available to build
new prisons.

The costs of operating these prisons are so high that, increasingly,
corporations now administer many of them. They are not doing this
because of compassion for convicted drug users, but for profit--the
system needs 900 new beds (for new inmates) a month. The average
annual cost per inmate in Connecticut is $38,700. "The prison industry
is one of the fastest-growing industries in the United States and its
investors are on Wall Street," according to Global Research, Center
for Research on Globalization.

These private companies have a single motive--profit. So the "costs" of
the Mexican drug war are always balanced by the "profit" of war made
by U.S. companies.

Many Americans view marijuana as a recreational drug of choice, a drug
on a par with alcohol. But no one is arrested for drinking alcohol.
The overwhelming majority of prisoners filling prisons are young men
and women, principally black and Latino, many of them young teenagers,
who have been convicted for simple possession of marijuana.

More and more moms and dads, horrified and heartbroken over their
children's criminal records, are speaking out against drug laws that
unjustly incarcerate young boys and girls. Many school administrators
feel equally helpless and often withhold full disclosure about the
extent of drug use on their premises.

It's been the cops on the beat, engaged for years in drug busts,
street fights, arrests, trials, imprisonment--policemen with years
experience across America--who have come to view the criminalization of
marijuana use as absurdly unworkable. Law Enforcement Against
Prohibition (LEAP) was founded in 2002 when five disheartened cops got
together and asked if there was a better way to cope with the drug
problem. There are now several thousand LEAP members in 45 countries,
from Denmark to Brazil, and they include, besides policemen, judges,
prosecutors and corrections officers.

Joseph H. Brooks, a retired police captain of the Manchester Police
Department, and frequent speaker for LEAP, says that 90 percent of
prison inmates are serving sentences for non-violent crimes. Speaking
at a recent meeting of the American Civil Liberties Union in
Litchfield, Captain Brooks remembered that, among his many drug
arrests over the years for the possession of marijuana, quite a few
were his otherwise law-abiding friends and neighbors. "There is no
medical or scientific reason, other than money and politics, for the
federal government to continue to keep marijuana, in particular,
illegal and listed as a class one drug," he said.

"It's not a toxic substance," Dr. Joycelyn Elders, former Surgeon
General of the U.S., said recently in support of the legalization of
marijuana.

If marijuana were legalized, its flow across our borders would stop,
and our prisons would begin to empty. What about the illegal use of
the more potent, often deadly drugs? We've finally taken on the huge
problem of obesity. Let's take on, with open eyes, our drug problem,
draw up a national plan, establish and fund it. Instead of prisons,
substitute clinics. FDA-approved anti-addiction drugs are available.
With the nation's will behind it, weaning addicts' away from
self-destructive drug habits, would cost far less than what we're now
spending in blindly pursuing a failed, dead end crime approach. And
thousands and thousands of young lives could be turned around.
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake