Never Would Have Guessed This

When I was a Patrolman in the late 80s, about 100 police officers were shot to death each year. One of my most frightening moments was when I received my body armor (relatively new then). I had been waiting a month, still on the job each night working 11-7, and when I put the vest on the first time - I could see how much of me was not protected. Not comforting at all. Lucky for me I was never in need of the vest or more than the vest in 3 years of police work.

I'm glad that it is safer now, and I believe it will be safer still when the US finally gets over drug prohibition.

https://www.fau.edu/newsdesk/articles/police-deaths-study.php

When Will the Dam Break 20160912

Would you support the drug war, prohibition of drugs, if you believed the despair described in the linked article was the symptom of all of the costs of that prohibition?  We have believed that we can protect ourselves from drugs by law for a long time, despite all the evidence to the contrary (evidence like we can't even keep drugs out of prisons).  I view the drug war as just another cultural delusion regarding what the government's monopoly on coercive force can create or accomplish.

Without the drug war, there would be no drug black market, there would be no funding to pay for the guns and ammo, there would be no drug turf over which to fight, the current practice of arresting poor young men dealing would end, so there would be a chance for young poor men to father their own children.  There would be young, poor men around for young poor women to marry.  The chance for family would be restored.

If then experiment - if the drug war, then mass imprisonment is the only way to reduce violence.  Else - no drug war, less violence, less money to be spent by criminals on guns, more incentives to enter the work force (even if it is only the legal sale of drugs).  It wouldn't be utopia, nor will we find utopia under any circumstance.  But a drug war free US would be better than the current bloodbath and the way it pits the populace in these circumstances against the police officers who would try to protect them from crime.  If no drug war, then many fewer reasons for police to confront minorities while each fears and perhaps hates the other.

But of course, this "conservative" author cannot even pin point the drug war as the problem - it would be akin to expressing doubt in the christian god in her circles to suggest that using violence to stop drug use is stupid, dehumanizing and ultimately more lethal to US citizens than al qaida.

‘The streets are gone,” Dean Angelo, president of the Chicago police union, told me last month. The night before, Aug. 14, a Chicago police officer’s son had been killed in a shooting while sitting on his family’s porch, one of 92 people killed in Chicago during the worst month for homicides in the Windy City since July 1993. The August victims who survived included 10-year-old Tavon Tanner, shot while playing in front of his house (the bullet ripped through Tavon’s pancreas, intestines, kidney and spleen); an 8-year-old girl shot in the arm while crossing the street; and two 6-year-old girls.

On Sept. 6, a 71-year-old man was accosted by a teen on a bike while watering his lawn. The robber demanded the man’s wallet and when he refused shot him in the abdomen, then grabbed his wallet before pedaling away.

By Sept. 8, nearly 3,000 people had been shot in Chicago in 2016, an average of one shooting victim every two hours. Five hundred and sixteen people had been murdered. Gun homicides and non-fatal shootings were up 47% over the same period of 2015, which had seen a significant rise in crime over 2014.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-black-body-count-rises-as-chicago-police-step-back-1473631079

When Will the Dam Break?

A day later, Chicago police Superintendent Eddie Johnson, who's been a cop in this city for 27 years — long enough to qualify for advanced degrees in sociology, psychology and economics — provided a pertinent footnote to the Labor Day weekend violence. "Impoverished neighborhoods, people without hope do these kinds of things," he said. "You show me a man that doesn't have hope, I'll show you one that's willing to pick up a gun and do anything with it."

Maybe that's more than a footnote. It might be a chapter, or the thesis. There can't be a simple explanation for why people shoot at each other, destroying themselves and their neighborhoods, can there? No, but gangs — these days, often with weak or no leadership — are at the heart of the violence.

Gang structure has atomized, creating block-by-block turf battles. Gangbangers shoot at each other over drug sales or factional rivalries, over petty insults on social media or over a pair of shoes. They fight and shoot perhaps because they don't care, or perhaps because fighting and shooting gives them something to care about. The shootings beget retaliatory shootings. Illegal guns are easy to find. So are targets.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/editorials/ct-shootings-chicago-police-murder-laquan-johnson-edit-0908-jm-20160907-story.html

You see, it's not the drug war that created all this violence, it is guns.  
If you want to do an insightful, heart felt, moving and depressing article about violence and oppressed minorities and people without hope, you can't mention inconvenient facts like:
-the government oppression of those who want to get high
-fiscal empowerment of those who sell drugs in violation of the law
These all too pertinent facts cannot be mentioned because for an inexplicable reason, we still cling to the idea that government control of drugs is protecting us.  It's not protecting us any more than alcohol prohibition protected us.  Prohibition doesn't make drugs less available, nor did it make alcohol less available.  For those caught up in these turf wars over who gets to sell to whom - from inner cities to small towns in Maine to the nation of Mexico - the drug war is dehumanizing them and killing them.

Thankfully, the evidence is clear and it's only a matter of time until people can speak in public and be frank about the stupidity, the criminality and the barbarity of drug prohibition.

Is This Worth Killing Someone?

As long ago as 1949, H. L. Mencken identified in Americans “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy,” an astute articulation of our weirdly Puritan need to criminalize people’s inclination to adjust how they feel. The desire for altered states of consciousness creates a market, and in suppressing that market we have created a class of genuine bad guys — pushers, gangbangers, smugglers, killers. Addiction is a hideous condition, but it’s rare. Most of what we hate and fear about drugs — the violence, the overdoses, the criminality — derives from prohibition, not drugs. And there will be no victory in this war either; even the Drug Enforcement Administration concedes that the drugs it fights are becoming cheaper and more easily available.
https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/?single=1

I see little justification for the violence the government delivers in the name of stopping the use of drugs.  I fear the decriminalization, much like those must have feared the end of prohibition.  The common habit of thought is pretending the drug war's consequences - gun and other criminal trafficking, subversion of legitimate purposes of law enforcement, empowerment of criminals, thousands dead in drug gang violence and thousands more in jail for non-violent crimes - justify the minimal degree to which the drug war reduces consumption.

I hate what drugs do to humans.  The drug war takes all of that and makes it worse.

How Long Until It Dawns On Everyone

"What law-abiding Mexicans see coming from the United States is a seemingly inexhaustible supply of guns and money being exported into the hands of bad hombres, all in the cause of feeding Americans' insatiable appetite for illegal narcotics.

""It is better to die on your feet," Zapata preached to his men, "than to live on your knees."

"A drug addict does neither, however, and the shattering of lives north of the border takes its toll on society, too, albeit in a less dramatic way than kidnappings and shootouts.

"Best of all, of course, is to live on your feet. For this, Americans and Mexicans need each other, whether they always know it or not. Presumably our two presidents realize this interdependence; hence today's bilateral meeting. Viva la negociación!"
From an email by:
Carl M. Cannon
Washington Editor
RealClearPolitics
Twitter: @CarlCannon https://twitter.com/CarlCannon

Mr. Cannon misses the obvious - were drug transactions not criminalized, the criminals would not be empowered by US demand for drugs that are called "illegal." People pretend that there's no down side to criminalization, while pretending that drug prohibition reduces consumption.  Both assumptions are wrong and in fact - "dead" wrong.