"The War on Drugs" a Bust?

[GUBU]

Y'all've heard of the war on drugs.

Maybe you've watched Breaking Bad or started Narcos (yet to watch).

Well there's this thing called the war on drugs in which the government fights against the demand and trade of drugs within it's borders.

However the U.S is very bad at this...

The rehabilitation in America is horrible.

And the way we enforce it does not help.

Giving longer jail sentences out to those who sell drugs or take them does not help in any way.

You might think...

"Well, if I want drugs, but I can't do the time, then why do it at all."

This the first approach I took to this topic.

How ever I was wrong.

Turns out that people'l do what ever to get to their drugs...

Kill, Steal, Mug, Risk disease.

However in country such as Switzerland during the 80s there was a huge spike in heroin use. So they took a risk, and here's what we learned...

They opened up free rehabilitation centres, gave free heroin in those centres except it would be high quality and the needles would be clean.

People who take drugs realize the effects and want to stop, but they can't. The rehabilitation is almost never good.

So Switzerland would give these addicts social workers too and they would eventually help the addicts find homes and guess what?

The use of heroin dropped significantly, stoping this crisis.

However, I wonder, how come the U.S or other countries don't try this method anymore.

Decrease crime rates, less drug use, and heck, if regulated some drugs could be legal too!

But I wonder, why?

Here's a video on the topic that is more in depth.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJUXLqNHCaI

The UK's heroin crisis started simply because Maggie Thatcher stopped the 700 or so addicts from being able to get the drug on perscription. Most of them were WW2 or Korean War vets who had been hooked on heroin because they were given it as pain relief for war wounds.
Because these people could no longer get their fix they turned to criminals to get the drugs, and started the trade in heroin, some of them even having to become pushers themselves to feed their, now very costly, habit. And the gangs themselves realised how lucrative the trade was and expanded their operations massively.

So thanks to Maggie being mean to a few hundred war heroes, the UK now has a massive drugs problem.

[GUBU]

But I wonder, why?

Stop wondering.

http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/j...ks-hippie/

Report: Aide says Nixon's war on drugs targeted blacks, hippies

"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people," former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman told Harper's writer Dan Baum for the April cover story published Tuesday.

"You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities," Ehrlichman said. "We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

I bet they won't be talking about this in your next history class.

You can go as far back as J. Edgar Hoover, who started the whole shebang in an effort to keep his FBI funded. After the mafia were busted and prohibition was ended (thanks very little to the FBI) Hoover was mad to find something to keep his bloated agency going. He hit on the idea of turning cannabis into marijuana, creating a big scare about how it affected people making them habitual criminals and immoral people, and claiming that it was Mexican gangs who controlled the supply of cannabis (Trump could learn a few lessons in hate from Hoover). So the drugs war was started by a kleptomaniac criminal in charge of a branch of US law enforcement.

[Rev. Rye]

You can go as far back as J. Edgar Hoover, who started the whole shebang in an effort to keep his FBI funded. After the mafia were busted and prohibition was ended (thanks very little to the FBI) Hoover was mad to find something to keep his bloated agency going. He hit on the idea of turning cannabis into marijuana, creating a big scare about how it affected people making them habitual criminals and immoral people, and claiming that it was Mexican gangs who controlled the supply of cannabis (Trump could learn a few lessons in hate from Hoover). So the drugs war was started by a kleptomaniac criminal in charge of a branch of US law enforcement.

Actually, you can go even further back: Around the turn of the century, even before anyone knew who J. Edgar Hoover was, Cocaine was being promoted for use by dock workers, in an attempt to get them impervious to the effects of temperature and give them more energy. Of course, as you can expect, it fucked up the people who used it. After briefly starting a scare about people being coerced into taking cocaine and being sold into prostitution, they found an angle that really struck a nerve when people started reporting crimes done by black people on cocaine.

Some brief examples:

• In 1901, the Atlanta Constitution wrote: "“Use of the drug [cocaine] among negroes is growing to an alarming extent."
  
• According to Edward Huntington William M.D., in an article written around the time Cocaine became illegal nationwide in 1914, "once the Negro has reached the stage of being a 'dope taker' (dope here referring to cocaine) . . . he is a constant menace to his community until he is eliminated . . . Sexual desires are increased and perverted, peaceful Negroes become quarrelsome, and timid Negroes develop a degree of 'Dutch courage' that is sometimes almost incredible. . In the language of the police officer, 'The cocaine nigger is sure hard to kill' - a fact that has been demonstrated so often that many of these officers in the South have increased the caliber of their guns for the express purpose of 'stopping' the cocaine fiend when he runs amuck."
  
• A 1910 survey done by the federal government said: 'cocaine is often the direct incentive to the crime of rape by the Negroes in the South and other sections of the country. Southern sheriffs believed cocaine even rendered blacks impervious to .32-cal. bullets (as a result many police departments switched to .38-cal.)." Allegedly, there were even rumours that cocaine gave the user superhuman marksmanship skills, and, therefore, it was advised to shoot first, ask questions later.
  
• In an article in the Literary Digest around the same time: "Under its (cocaine) influence are most of the daring crimes committed . . . Most of the attacks upon white women of the South are the direct result of a cocaine crazed Negro brain."
  
• One judge in Mississippi went so far as to say that giving a "Negro" cocaine is more dangerous than injecting a dog with rabies. I can't find the original quote, but I think it can be found in the March 20, 1905 issue of the New York Times in the article: "Negro Cocaine Evil: Mississippi Judge Urges Grand Jury to Punish Druggists." Maybe someone with a NYT subscription can confirm this.
  
• Reportedly, the Atlanta Race Riots of 1906 were caused by outrage against crimes done to white women by cocaine-addled black men.
  

And I just picked some of the most egregious examples!

You see, the rabbit hole of the link between drug prohibition and fucking with minorities goes a lot further than a lot of people realise.