(The Party New, n.2, July 1991)

Drugs were a minor problem and a minor source of income for criminals, in 1970. Today, thanks to repressive laws, drug addiction is epidemic, particularly among the poor, while those who make and sell drugs are very rich indeed - and beyond the law when they are not the law.

Why has this happened? It is reflexive of any government to exert absolute control over the people. This is best done by inventing fierce prohibitions of alcohol, say, (in the U.S. from 1919 to 1933) of same-sex, or of doing no work on the Sabbath - and then, once a prohibition is invented, it will, as government knows, be broken.

Since 1950, the United States has been a National Security State that allocates over seventy percent of the federal revenues to maintaining the American war machine. In order to justify these vast expenditures, we must invent enemies.

For forty years, until Gorbachev, Russia and communism were the perfect enemy. Now, in succession, new enemies must be rapidly invented and dutifully demonized by the American media, which is the propaganda arm of what is, in effect, a police state; hence the demonizing of Gheddafi, Noriega, Saddam and, coming up, another go at Castro, a possible return to Saddam and perhaps to Gheddafi. But these enemies come and go.

Bush's famous "war on drugs" is nothing more than a means of keeping the American people under tight control. It is also an ideal "war" because it can never be won. As a result, the United States has the largest prison population, per capita, in the first world - one million; and the money going to the Drug Enforcement Agency, which works closely with the Pentagon and the National Security Council, is simply a means of supporting Bush's "New World Order", otherwise known as the New World American dictatorship.

Meanwhile, our irrelevant Congress debates whether or not to use recently closed military bases as prisons for drug-takers as well as drug dealers while the Supreme Court, now, serenely fascist in its Membership, has ruled that a drug-user in Michigan, found with half a kilogram of cocaine, can be sentenced to life-imprisonment. Can drugs be legalised within the American Imperium? No. In the absence of representative government, there will be no change of a democratic sort. Happily, the American economy is headed for collapse and, with it, will go our imperial - if not fascist, alas - pretensions.