Mariahxxx
Official Checked Star Member
Just like health care and guns, the war on drugs has people loyal to each side without any regard to the facts or the economic burden that comes with it.
The war on drugs as we know it was begun by president Nixon, but in reality it goes back to the late 1800's and early 1900's. The first anti-opium laws in the 1870s were directed at Chinese immigrants. The first anti-cocaine laws, in the South in the early 1900s, were directed at black men. The first anti-marijuana laws, in the Midwest and the Southwest in the 1910s and 20s, were directed at Mexican migrants and Mexican Americans. Today, Latino and especially black communities are still subject to wildly disproportionate drug enforcement and sentencing practices. The use of scare tactics on whites was highly successful as they were told that black men smoking weed and doing cocaine would become out of control and begin to rape white women. That's all they needed to hear to make it illegal and that's when the "down with brown" began in the drug war.
When Nixon declared the war on drugs in 1971 a big part of that was to combat the youth movement of rebellion that his conservative constituents were demanding. So he made weed a Class 1 narcotic just like heroine and cocaine. He created a commission to research the issue which was led by Republican Pennsylvania Governor Raymond Shafer. In 1972, the commission unanimously recommended decriminalizing the possession and distribution of marijuana for personal use. Nixon ignored the report and rejected its recommendations. He created mandatory sentencing and
By 1977 11 states had decriminalized pot and Jimmy Carter ran on a decriminalization platform but by 1980 that momentum was dead and the issue died as more teens were smoking weed and white parents were terrified that little Johnny and Suzie would become involved with Negroes and their way of life.
The when Reagan was elected in 1980 the wave of money into the war on drugs began. The funding made it possible to establish the DEA and take on a huge bureaucratic life of it's own. Every year since the funding has gone up, and is currently nearly $30 BILLION dollars a year. The Nancy Reagan "Just Say No" campaign was the beginning of a new era for punishing drug users. Mandatory sentences were created and a no-tolerance policy put into place. It was the same to have seeds in the carpet of your car as it was to have an ounce of cocaine in many states and still is. Florida where I live is a no-tolerance state and people go to state penitentiary for SMOKING weed. Not selling it. Not smuggling it. SMOKING it! Of course penalties for selling and importing are more severe.
The biggest losers in the war on drugs are brown people. A white kid living in the suburbs is very unlikely to be randomly stopped and frisked. Brown people are prosecuted at a rate of 40 - 1 over white people when it comes to drug use. For example, there was a guy in Beverly Hills a few years ago. He was in his late teens early twenties when he got started. He became the extacy king of LA. he was widely known as "THE GUY" I never met him but I heard about him. I used to like rolling back when I was 18 and new in the industry. I did it regularly for about a year until I just got sick of it. But he was the man, and was selling 50,000 hits of X a week. He was attending a private school and word got out what he was doing and made it's way to the Beverly Hills police Dept which contacted his school. His dean sat him down and told him they knew what he was doing and if he didn't stop he would be expelled. No arrest. No jail at all. Just a warning even though there are federal statutes for extacy. A black kid with an ounce of weed would have been in county and had a felony on his record, which keep them from voting (a key element to the war on drugs) and keeps them from having much of a chance in life at getting a real job. In Florida you have to have a background check done to rent an apartment.
There is a Federal Judge who retired because he refused to implement the mandatory sentencing. He said it perfectly "The war is un-winnable but imminently fund-able" with $30 billion a year comes a lot of power and that is intoxicating to politicians.
During the 1980s Reagan wanted to fund the Contras who were fighting the Russian-backed Sandanistas but congress refused to give him the blank check. So what did Ronny do? He put Oliver North in place in Nicaragua and the CIA flew tons of cocaine on US government plane to LA, which funded the Contra movement. It has been documented and proven beyond doubt that this happened. This is literally the birth of crack cocaine and you can thank the Republican hero Ronald Reagan for it. It was flown from Columbia to Nicaragua and then transfered to CIA cargo planes and flown directly to Los Angeles where it was distributed, much of it going to Freeway Rick Ross who was buying more than 2500 pounds of cocaine a WEEK turning it into crack and selling it to street level retailers. He was making hundreds of millions of dollars.
The Reagan administration actually admitted to some of this. Of course a very sugar-coated version. On April 17, 1986, the Reagan Administration released a three page report acknowledging that there were some Contra-cocaine connections in 1984 and 1985, arguing that these connections occurred at a time when the rebels were "particularly hard pressed for financial support" because U.S. aid had been cut off. The report admitted that "We have evidence of a limited number of incidents in which known drug traffickers have tried to establish connections with Nicaraguan resistance groups." The report tried to downplay the drug activity, claiming that it took place "without the authorization of resistance leaders".
The accusations that the CIA was involved was taken so seriously that the head of the CIA himself held a town hall meeting at a high school in Watts to refute the allegations. Little did he know that there would be DEA agents and police officers there who would verify that this was taking place.
One journalist, Garry Webb, reported this. he wrote a book that is fucking amazing and I highly recommend it. The title is Dark Alliance. Strangely enough Garry Webb at the age of 49 died of natural causes lol
To this day Oliver North is not permitted to step foot in Costa Rica for his part in the distribution of cocaine. Of course only one TV network would give someone like this their own show. HMmmmm, I wonder which network that would be???
I know this is a long one but I could write this for pages. This war is as big government as it gets yet it's backed without compromise by the republicans. They won't budge on any of these issues, not even marijuana. Drug use has increased.
But prison is now big business since it because privatized and prisoners are now customers, so of course the republicans will back it! Imagine if we decriminalized drugs and had to release all the people in prison for use! There would be some really pissed of CEO's on wall street.
So which side are you on? Keep fighting the war we can't win and spending tens of billions in the process? Or do we take a different approach since the one we are taking is a miserable failure?
The war on drugs as we know it was begun by president Nixon, but in reality it goes back to the late 1800's and early 1900's. The first anti-opium laws in the 1870s were directed at Chinese immigrants. The first anti-cocaine laws, in the South in the early 1900s, were directed at black men. The first anti-marijuana laws, in the Midwest and the Southwest in the 1910s and 20s, were directed at Mexican migrants and Mexican Americans. Today, Latino and especially black communities are still subject to wildly disproportionate drug enforcement and sentencing practices. The use of scare tactics on whites was highly successful as they were told that black men smoking weed and doing cocaine would become out of control and begin to rape white women. That's all they needed to hear to make it illegal and that's when the "down with brown" began in the drug war.
When Nixon declared the war on drugs in 1971 a big part of that was to combat the youth movement of rebellion that his conservative constituents were demanding. So he made weed a Class 1 narcotic just like heroine and cocaine. He created a commission to research the issue which was led by Republican Pennsylvania Governor Raymond Shafer. In 1972, the commission unanimously recommended decriminalizing the possession and distribution of marijuana for personal use. Nixon ignored the report and rejected its recommendations. He created mandatory sentencing and
By 1977 11 states had decriminalized pot and Jimmy Carter ran on a decriminalization platform but by 1980 that momentum was dead and the issue died as more teens were smoking weed and white parents were terrified that little Johnny and Suzie would become involved with Negroes and their way of life.
The when Reagan was elected in 1980 the wave of money into the war on drugs began. The funding made it possible to establish the DEA and take on a huge bureaucratic life of it's own. Every year since the funding has gone up, and is currently nearly $30 BILLION dollars a year. The Nancy Reagan "Just Say No" campaign was the beginning of a new era for punishing drug users. Mandatory sentences were created and a no-tolerance policy put into place. It was the same to have seeds in the carpet of your car as it was to have an ounce of cocaine in many states and still is. Florida where I live is a no-tolerance state and people go to state penitentiary for SMOKING weed. Not selling it. Not smuggling it. SMOKING it! Of course penalties for selling and importing are more severe.
The biggest losers in the war on drugs are brown people. A white kid living in the suburbs is very unlikely to be randomly stopped and frisked. Brown people are prosecuted at a rate of 40 - 1 over white people when it comes to drug use. For example, there was a guy in Beverly Hills a few years ago. He was in his late teens early twenties when he got started. He became the extacy king of LA. he was widely known as "THE GUY" I never met him but I heard about him. I used to like rolling back when I was 18 and new in the industry. I did it regularly for about a year until I just got sick of it. But he was the man, and was selling 50,000 hits of X a week. He was attending a private school and word got out what he was doing and made it's way to the Beverly Hills police Dept which contacted his school. His dean sat him down and told him they knew what he was doing and if he didn't stop he would be expelled. No arrest. No jail at all. Just a warning even though there are federal statutes for extacy. A black kid with an ounce of weed would have been in county and had a felony on his record, which keep them from voting (a key element to the war on drugs) and keeps them from having much of a chance in life at getting a real job. In Florida you have to have a background check done to rent an apartment.
There is a Federal Judge who retired because he refused to implement the mandatory sentencing. He said it perfectly "The war is un-winnable but imminently fund-able" with $30 billion a year comes a lot of power and that is intoxicating to politicians.
During the 1980s Reagan wanted to fund the Contras who were fighting the Russian-backed Sandanistas but congress refused to give him the blank check. So what did Ronny do? He put Oliver North in place in Nicaragua and the CIA flew tons of cocaine on US government plane to LA, which funded the Contra movement. It has been documented and proven beyond doubt that this happened. This is literally the birth of crack cocaine and you can thank the Republican hero Ronald Reagan for it. It was flown from Columbia to Nicaragua and then transfered to CIA cargo planes and flown directly to Los Angeles where it was distributed, much of it going to Freeway Rick Ross who was buying more than 2500 pounds of cocaine a WEEK turning it into crack and selling it to street level retailers. He was making hundreds of millions of dollars.
The Reagan administration actually admitted to some of this. Of course a very sugar-coated version. On April 17, 1986, the Reagan Administration released a three page report acknowledging that there were some Contra-cocaine connections in 1984 and 1985, arguing that these connections occurred at a time when the rebels were "particularly hard pressed for financial support" because U.S. aid had been cut off. The report admitted that "We have evidence of a limited number of incidents in which known drug traffickers have tried to establish connections with Nicaraguan resistance groups." The report tried to downplay the drug activity, claiming that it took place "without the authorization of resistance leaders".
The accusations that the CIA was involved was taken so seriously that the head of the CIA himself held a town hall meeting at a high school in Watts to refute the allegations. Little did he know that there would be DEA agents and police officers there who would verify that this was taking place.
One journalist, Garry Webb, reported this. he wrote a book that is fucking amazing and I highly recommend it. The title is Dark Alliance. Strangely enough Garry Webb at the age of 49 died of natural causes lol
To this day Oliver North is not permitted to step foot in Costa Rica for his part in the distribution of cocaine. Of course only one TV network would give someone like this their own show. HMmmmm, I wonder which network that would be???
I know this is a long one but I could write this for pages. This war is as big government as it gets yet it's backed without compromise by the republicans. They won't budge on any of these issues, not even marijuana. Drug use has increased.
But prison is now big business since it because privatized and prisoners are now customers, so of course the republicans will back it! Imagine if we decriminalized drugs and had to release all the people in prison for use! There would be some really pissed of CEO's on wall street.
So which side are you on? Keep fighting the war we can't win and spending tens of billions in the process? Or do we take a different approach since the one we are taking is a miserable failure?
