By Robert Crisman

("The Freedom Socialist", October-December 1990, Seattle)

The following article is the last of a three-part series

on "Drugs and Death Squads". Part I desribed the history

and motives behind CIA involvement in the world drug

trade, while Part II provided a political overview of the

drug wars, with a special look at Colombia.

This article makes the case for community-controlled drug

legalization in the U.S., arguing that such legalization,

together with jobs and job training, decent education,

nationalized health care and real drug rehabilitation,

would mark the beginning of drug sanity in America.

What we have in U.S. government's War On Drugs is

madness, rooted directly in the legalization of drugs.

First, it should be obvious by now that, so long as there

is a demand for drugs, proscription is utterly futile.

The State Department blathers about "eradicating drugs at

the source" in drug-producing countries - as if the U.S.

had the money and political muscle and will to stomp out

the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of coca- and

opium-growing farmers from Pakistan to Peru. State also

talks about interdiction, stopping drugs at the

U.S./Mexico border, all 2,000-plus miles of it. Maybe

they can do it with caulking cement.

Beyound futility, prohibition is counterproductive.

Banning has made cocaine and heroine the world's most

profitable commodities, hence magnets for enterprising

mafiosos and bankers. Also, drug war repression, arising

from prohibition, has interlocked with joblessness,

poverty and racism to intencify alienation, cynicism and

despair, especially among young people. It has helped

ensure a growing demand for chemacal escape from brutal

realities.

Method to the madness.

It's insanity all right, but there's an ironclad logic

behind it.

Consider that dopedealing dictators and death squads in

Asia and Latin America have long been the watchdogs of

U.S. economic and political hegemony there. The

heroin-trafficking Pakistani Army made possible the CIA's

covert war against the Soviets in neighboring

Afghanistan. The Medellin Cartel's MAS death squads,

trained by Israeli surrogates of U.S. Intelligence, are

bulwarks of anti-Left counterinsurgency in Colombia.

At home, drugs shipped courtesy of these and other

friends in hot places have helped keep the ghettos and

barrios in narcosis since the early 1970s - and obvious

dividend for the political Low-'n-Order crowd.

Despite the anomalous presence of stright-arrow narcs in

government, the U.S. doesn't really want to eliminate the

drug trade. If just wants to keep them illegal. In

addition to the megaprofits and the political benefit of

strung-out ghettos deriving from the legalization, what

better excuse is there at this time than the "drug

crisis" for a legal U.S. police state?

This isn't to say that Washington wouldn't like to impose

some sort of "civilized" modus operandi on traffickers;

the present unbridled gangsterism and corruption

attending the trade are now large threats to the

hemisphere's stability. Be that it may, the main things

are to keep drugs illegal and step up the Drug War.

Look at the more dramatic initiatives of that war in the

U.S. this past couple of years: police sweeps and

National Guard occupations of ghettos from coast to

coast; anti-loitering laws supposedly enacted against

suspected drug dealers and users, but whose real targets

are people of color (throug 80 percent of users and the

big U.S. drug deallers are white); the proliferation of

random forced drug testing throughout industry; the

jailings of pregnant women who use drugs; the Immigration

and Naturalization Service's "anti-drug" terrorism

against Mexicano and Central American immigrants; the

gutting of Fourth Amendment search-and-seizure

protections by the U.S. Supreme Court; the Department of

Housing and Urban Development's proposed evictions of

families of suspected drug dealers from public housing;

proposed congressional legislation, such as HR 4079,

which would create concentration camps on military bases

for "drug users".

Concentration camps! How long before ovens start smoking?

End game.

It shouldn't take an Einstein to see that the drug war

aims at completely eradicating human rights in the U.S.,

culminating in genocide against "surplus" and

"undesirable" elements - drug users, AIDS sufferers,

people of color, lesbians and gay men, feminists,

radicals, social activists of all stripes, the disabled,

the generally "unproductive" and intractable.

You ask how this is so? Look at things from the

capitalists' bottom-line standpoint: the U.S. economy is

a mess, and the mess is terminal. The due date is near on

that multi-trillion-dollar debt that Reagan and Co.

racked up in the '80s. And has anyone counted all the

jobs that are gone from the U.S. for good, to Mexico,

Taiwan, the Philippines, where labor is cheaper and

profits for capitalists are higher? Meanwhile, two-thirds

of Black teenagers are out of work, permanently, under

the profit system. They're the first of the "surplus"

slated for the camps, but only the first; there's hardly

a U.S. worker who doesn't fear that she or he could be

the next of the "unemployables".

These are desperate people - millions of them - and

desperate people are dangerous. Who knows what the next

social explosion will bring?

If you were George Bush, what would you do? Launch a

preemptive strike against a potential threat, that's

what. Hence the drug war.

Then too, since Gorbachev started waltzing around with

Wall Street, anti-communism has waned somewhat as a

protext for sending guns and troops abroad. Mythical

leftist "narco-guerrillas" are now the excuse for

resurrecting the war against communism and sloughtering

insurgent South American Indians and peasants.

Sanity.

Drug prohibition is a triple whammi: it has helped boost

drug availability and consumption; it is paving the way

for a legal U.S. police dictatorship; it is now the

rallying point for the Vietnamization of Latin America.

There is no way out of this drug-war mess except through

the legalization of drugs. An end to prohibition would

remove the excuse for the legal destruction of the Bill

of Rights. It would counteract the dehumanization of drug

users and kibosh the mind-set that justifies repression

rather than treatment for drug abuse.

It would deep-six the drug profits of mobsters and

bankers, and with them the rightwing drug-smuggling death

squads who help keep the entire "free world" unfree.

Legalization - with procurement of drugs and all

regulations pertaining to their distribution worked out

and controlled by the concerned communities - would at

last provide the framework for eventually detoxing the

U.S.

The drive to legalize will take some united and radical

effort by the people of color communities, the labor

movement, AIDS and anti-intervention activists, civil

libertarians and feminists. Wall Street, George Bush,

Congress and pro-establishment Black and labor leaders

don't want it. Legalization would entail divorcing those

dictators abroad and making social well-being an economic

and political priority at home. It would mean wresting

control of social policy away from the bureaucrats and

cops who don't give a damn about us and our problems, and

treating drug abuse as the medical and social welfare

concern that it is.

Legalization would mean changing the entire country from

top to bottom, from one ragged end to the other.

The question of money allways comes up. Where will the

needed billions and billions come from? The government

should pay for the whole shebang and finally give us some

tax-dollar value. It can start by shifting that nine

billion dollars Bush has slated for "anti-drug" SWAT

teams and storm troopers over to treatment facilities and

research, scools, job training, health care, and so forth.

More money will surely be needed: so dismantle the CIA

and the war machine and tax the rich 'til it hurts.

Bush, the banks, and big business will resist this

cleansing approach to the problem, of course; illegal

drug-running is capitalism's life-support system.

What does this mean? It means that our fight against the

drug police leads in a fairly straight line to a face-off

against the entire capitalist state and to a socialist

revolution - our only means for finally laying to rest

the American drug sickness.