Mike Gallagher's series of reports on drug addiction in the Albuquerque Journal reminds me that there are still some shreds of journalistic ethics at our city's only daily newspaper. The undercurrent I take away from the first two segments of this series is that things never change when it comes to drug problems in the Land of Enchantment. Yes, clientele goes more upscale and the most favorite drug changes back and forth. But, all of the efforts at stopping this love affair with narcotics are pathetic and will remain so because you cant change peoples craving for their highs. The only thing we do is throw enormous sums of money at it. Untold millions for law enforcement and incarceration. And the laws just cause more violence and larceny. This whole drug war is a poster child for stupidity.
3 comments:
Emphasized by the problems within APD that Officer Jay Gilhooly listed in Ms Krueger's column
There is some momentum growing among the elites in Latin America for taking a new approach to the utter stupidity of the drug war. Some in the US, too, where most of the shots are called.
If anyone is interested there are a couple of web sites in English that keep up on this pretty well, one from a Mexico perspective and one is more general about the drug war.
http://americasmexico.blogspot.com/
http://www.narconews.com/
The first by the way is a project of the Center For International Policy's Americas Project which is a handy site for seeing what's going on in Latin America.
http://www.cipamericas.org/
But as far as drugs in America, I wonder if there is something to be done about "peoples craving for their highs."
On the one hand you can can argue that yes, intoxicants of one kind or another have always been part of human existence. I see all kinds of things more from that point of view the older I get. It becomes a matter of practicality. Certain things have to be lived with so approach them from that angle.
But then there's the other point of view. We are the product of our environment, largely. Why do some people use and abuse and some can take it or leave it? Is there something missing in certain peoples' lives? Something amiss in the world we have created in general, so that certain kinds of people fall prey to drugs and alcohol, to use them as escape mechanisms?
This point of view if nothing else serves as a reminder that we have to keep trying to make this a better world.
In either case I think it can be agreed that the war on drugs has been the wrong approach. There are 30,000 to 60,000 deaths in Mexico depending on who you believe since Felipe Calderon took office and militarized the country as part of the drug war that can attest to that.
Well said, Jim!
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