Maybe this looks & sounds familiar, like maybe Oliver Stone familiar?
Helicopters flown by CIA mercenaries, filled with government troops and US advisors, swoop down on jungle villages at dawn in a tropical country. They come in firing and dropping gas and napalm and they quickly round up everyone in the village.
A few selected villagers are immediately shot “trying to escape”, while the rest are made to stand by while their homes and belongings are burned.
Women and little girls are taken aside for raping, runny-nosed children hide anywhere they can, and old people are beaten with rifle butts for various reasons. There are no young men left in the village to beat, arrest or kill.
Since the villagers obviously are guilty of consorting with the enemy the entire village, or what remains, is taken on a forced march to a government relocation camp, built by US aid.
Meanwhile back at the village aircraft piloted by other CIA mercenaries begin flying low over the landscape for miles around the village dumping hundreds of tons of toxic chemicals that poison the land, water, plants and animals, destroying all possibility of the people ever coming home.
But this is not Vietnam – it is Colombia.
Beginning with the election in 2000 of George Bush and his White House full of would-be foreign policy Machiavellis, and followed by eight years of the Gang Who Can’t Shoot Straight, Americans have had sixteen years of the enormous distractions of Iraq and Afghanistan to keep them from realizing that the US was playing out the Vietnam War all over again in Colombia.
This war has been going on for over sixteen years, and according to the US there is just as much Coca being grown and Cocaine being produced in Colombia in 2014 as there was in 1999. So like most US wars of aggression masked by any of the usual deceits – “War On Terror”, War On Drugs”, or War To Save Democracy” – the war in Colombia accomplished nothing but destroying the lives and the environments of millions of innocent people and further enriching politicians and generals. Per usual.
However, since this particular war was at its most brutal in the beginning, which coincided with the US invasion of Iraq, it was most conveniently overlooked while it was going on, and has since been filed along with yesterdays news by those who control the media in the US. But it happened.
Plan Colombia refers to a One Billion US/year bundle of “programs”, an innocent word for a bunch of deviously-named, US-sponsored state terrorism strategies in Colombia. Beginning in 2000 the US began sending waves of “advisors” to Colombia, accompanied by all the usual military hardware. There these US soldiers hooked up with large right-wing paramilitary organizations and the piddling little Colombian Army and Air Force and began raining violence and death down on millions of people who lived in the Coca-growing regions.
Colombian paramilitary death squads operating under the direct control of the US military would helicopter into a village just before dawn – lessons learned in Vietnam – and begin pulling “suspected guerillas and criminals” from their homes and executing them on the spot, or hauling them to waiting helicopters. Those left behind were told to pack up and move to government “relocation centers” or the soldiers would be back to burn their village and kill them. There were a number of “My Lai” incidents during these raids involving US personnel that were totally suppressed. Nobody has ever been held accountable.
From 2000 – 2003 nearly 2 million people were first sprayed with poison, then bombed with fire, then attacked by soldiers, and then “relocated”. In this same period over 3000 civilians were executed by US-sponsored death squads and many more simply disappeared.
Now in 2016 the villages are mostly abandoned and those that remain are pitiful shells of the prosperity that Coca growing brought them. As part of “Plan Colombia” the US did its usual “lets give the natives another way to make a living” routine and spent millions upon millions building idiotic “aid projects” like Yucca mills in the middle of nowhere that formerly semi-prosperous Coca growers were supposed to keep supplied with Yucca roots, at pennies a kilo, to be ground into flour. Brilliant. Just fucking brilliant.
There are dozens of these monuments to stupidity (or maybe something a bit more sinister) lying around rural Colombia, and meanwhile the Coca growing has moved on to other parts of Colombia, FARC has signed a peace treaty with the government, and the US president has just had a smileyface press moment with the president of Colombia as they celebrate victory in the war on whatever it was.
“Criminals like Guzman-Loera are responsible for bringing hundreds of tons of illicit drugs into the United States every year, and are responsible for tremendous amounts of violence and death in our own country and across the world,” the US State Department said yesterday, referring to the most recent capture of Mexico’s Al Capone.
A very standard bit of official verbal misdirection there, but especially annoying when you ask yourself what the hell the Department of State is doing in the drug kingpin commenting business. Of course the answer is – it’s just another use of the Big Lie technique by one of the major Police State conspirators.
“Criminals like Guzman-Loera” would not exist, and the violence and death would not exist, if the US had not erected a Police State structure of Drug Laws that create the criminals and make the violence and the deaths inevitable.
The criminality, the illicitness, the gross profitability, the violence and the death would disappear not if every so-called “kingpin” like Sr. Guzman-Loera were to be arrested, but they would end toot sweet if all the laws against the natural drug plants and their minimally-processed derivatives were simply abolished.
OMG – a Kingdom with no Drug Laws? Imagine.
A US without Police State Drug Laws might still import hundreds of tons of cocaine, heroin and Cannabis until domestic growers and producers got going, but without legal or police interference in the traffic those imported items would be priced by the simple process of supply and demand just like Papayas and Bananas.
There would be no incentive for smuggling.
There would be no violence between drug gangs for territories. How many drive-bys do you see between rival beer or cigarette distributors?
There would still be people who abuse the natural drugs and become addicted to them, and maybe even more than today (though studies suggest not), but the lifestyle consequences of addiction would be far, far less harsh for many if not most addicts.
People who chose to waste their lives spaced out 100% on drugs would do so, just like they do now, but people who simply like to maintain a daily buzz – exactly how people do now with Coffee & Sugar, not to mention Alcohol – would be able to do so with no social issues attached.
Finally if drugs were legal and priced at liquor store levels there would be far fewer drug-related crimes like robbery and prostitution. Not a lot of alcoholics rob or fuck strangers simply to buy alcohol. But to buy Cocaine or Heroin in the Kingdom of the Drug Laws you have to have some serious money, and that means stealing or hustling. And the Police State likes it that way just fine – or it wouldn’t be that way, would it?
So if the Drug Law Police State were abolished, the US Department of State and the rest of the government structures supported by Drug Law money, wouldn’t be able to use people like Sr. Guzman-Loera as a boogeyman anymore.
And their budgets would shrink drastically.
That is why it is very important to the US Department of State for Mr. and Mrs. USA to believe their line of evil bullshit even though that is clearly, at least to some of us, exactly what it is.
The Government of Peru is a major buyer of Coca Leaf in the Valley of the Apurimac-Ene-Mantaro Rivers, referred to in ever-charming government acronym style as “The VRAEM”. This Valley lies at the heart of the Andean mountain chain and could easily have been the model for Shangri-la. As it is, the Peruvian government, in league with the US Police State, has turned the Valley of the Apurimac-Ene-Mantaro Rivers into a war zone targeting peaceful Coca growers.
Interestingly the Peruvian government is also a major buyer of the Valley’s Coca Leaf, but the government buyers are well-known as cheapskates. That’s probably because – officially – government buyers and selected foreign buyers like Coca Cola are supposed to be the only buyers in the valley. They figure they’re doing the Coca growers a favor.
Of course, the Cocaine Cartels beg to differ with that, as do a substantial proportion of valley residents. And so there is no peace in the valley.
The Peruvian government owns and controls the non-Cocaine use of Coca Leaf through a monopoly named ENACO. This state-run company produces the official line of Coca tonics, medicines drinks and snacks for domestic consumption.
Peru’s politicians are in the Coca Leaf Remedios business because Coca Remedios are so deeply ingrained in Peruvian society that their use cannot be stopped – oh, and also because it’s a handy way to make some very nice revenue.
However, private entrepreneurs are not allowed to compete with the government monopoly, so Peruvian Coca Leaf products remain stuck with an incongruous “Soviet” look and excruciatingly ho-hum marketing. Too bad for Peru – Bolivian entrepreneurs and government officials are already making creative headway in the world markets for Coca Leaf and Coca Leaf medicines. (Pretty soon some country in Europe like the Netherlands or France is going to open up to Coca leaf entrepreneurs. The US is probably going to keep its Federal asshole puckered but one or two of the states ought to give Coca Leaf legalization a good hard look. )
Meanwhile, back in Coca Valley. At the same time that it low-balls the farmers’ Coca Leaf and makes cheesy Coca Leaf products, the Peruvian government wages war against any “extra” Coca growing by the people of Coca Valley. If they grow more than they are told to by the government, or if they refuse to sell to ENACO because of its ridiculous prices for their precious leaf, GOP burns and poisons their fields and makes their lives as miserable as possible. After all, their bottom-line motive is to satisfy the requirements of the US Police State that wants to be able to show the world that Peru is trying very, very hard to eradicate illicit Cocaine production. Very hard.
But Aha! Peru has come up with a plan! GOP wants the people of Coca Valley to grow only enough Coca to satisfy the government’s requirements, and then to convert to growing crops like bananas and cocoa – assisted of course by friendly “experts” from the US and UN.
Of course if you are a farmer in Coca Valley and your family has been growing Coca for generations and you don’t happen to like the chintzy prices the government is willing to pay, are you going to let the police rip out your Coca plants and make you start over with Bananas? Quite a few Coca Valley residents have not been pleased when approached by men with guns proposing this plan, and a few have gotten downright rowdy. Thrown rocks ‘n stuff. You know – terrorism.
So to complete the farce the Peruvian government declared the VRAEM a war zone a few years back, it ever since has been battling against the quickly shrinking remains of the once-powerful Shining Path rebels – as of late 2015 SL is down to under 100 guerillas, mostly old men and teenagers.
To go after this fearsome band the Peruvian government keeps sending in waves of troops, missiles and helicopters, while the US leaps in with space-based surveillance, military aircraft, dark ops and night raiders, chemical warfare assistance and high tech drones. All this firepower is arrayed against ragtag remnants of what was once a well-organized and very effective rebellion.
These survivors fight on, using the vast forests and jungles of the Coca Valley, an area the size of Switzerland, to hide in.
So this is the threat – a hundred tired rebels who are definitely at the end of their Shining Path. Can you imagine, a hundred guys getting together in the mountains almost anywhere else in the world and the central government spending $250 Million a year to try to get rid of the rebels and eradicate a few thousand hectares of croplands at the same time – and failing?
“The Peruvian government’s (2014) counternarcotics strategy includes ambitious goals for eradication, interdiction, and alternative development, and addresses associated issues such as the control of precursor chemicals, organized crime, money laundering, and the rule of law. The Humala Administration increased its counternarcotics budget from $220 million in 2012 to $256 million in 2013. For the first time, Peru contributed $11.6 million towards eradication efforts and concomitant aviation support, which historically has been funded by the United States.” US Department of State
OK, so the Peruvian government spends $256 Million of mostly US money a year to – what – combat terrorism and cocaine trafficking and deal with other related dangers to the children, like free speech? And the US is right there helping out with money, technology, guns and manpower, just like the US was when the Fujimori government, funded by US foreign aid money, forcibly sterilized hundreds of thousands of Indian women in the 1980s in so-called “population control” programs.
Speaking of terrorism, let’s look at the terrorist activities of the Shining Path guerillas that are being used to justify all this government-initiated violence a little more closely.
So, how big a threat to the peace and tranquility of Peru is the Shining Path, actually? Here’s the US Department of State list of every one of the terrorist incidents involving the Shining Path in 2014. (Don’t worry – it isn’t a real long list)
On April 9, Peruvian police arrested 28 leaders of the Movement for Amnesty and Fundamental Rights – a front organization that advocates for the release of imprisoned SL founder Abimael Guzman. Those arrested included two of Guzman’s long-time lawyers, Afredo Crespo and Manuel Fajardo. The 28 were charged with terrorism and terrorist financing using narcotics revenue. On August 4, the National Anti-Terrorism Court, citing lack of evidence, ordered that the 28 be released from pre-trail detention. Although the court ordered the detainees released, it did keep the charges intact so the trial can move forward.
A May 16 clash between security forces and the SL in the Junin region left one SL guerilla dead and another wounded. The rest of the column was able to escape, but soldiers recovered weapons, ammunition, and communication equipment.
On June 17, a combined Peruvian military and police force killed three SL terrorists in the VRAEM emergency zone. The joint patrol recovered a number of weapons, including a heavy machine gun that SL fighters reportedly stripped from a Russian-made Mi-17 helicopter they shot down in a 2009 attack that killed three soldiers.
In August, security forces rescued six adults and three children from a work camp in the VRAEM used by SL to provide food and logistic support for its members.
In August, police officers in the UHV arrested Oscar Silva, who is believed to have been the second-in-command to “Comrade Artemio,” who was captured in February 2012.
In September, soldiers rescued 11 people, including six children, who were being forced to work for SL in Junin’s Satipo district.
On November 2, security forces announced the arrest of Filemon Huillcayaure, considered one of the top financiers of SL in the VRAEM.
OK – there you are. That’s the Peruvian government’s 2014 body count in the US-sponsored War On Narco/Terror in Coca Valley. The totals include: 0 soldiers dead or wounded; 4 SL terrorists killed, 1 wounded; and 20 people including children rescued from slave labor for the Shining Path.
And that’s after a full year of running around this valley the size of Switzerland with thousands of troops, helicopters, attack jets, tanks, HumVees, guns and rockets, and the latest ground, air & space-based surveillance technology courtesy of the US. All this technology and manpower chasing approximately 100 Shining Path guerillas (now minus 4) as they shake down Coca growers, take pot shots at soldiers, hide in the jungle, enslave the occasional villager, and make Coca Base to generate an income.
So, now that we all know how well the “War On The Gang Of 100 Terrorists” is going – how about the “War On Coca Plants”?
“Peru remained the world’s top potential producer of cocaine for the third consecutive year, and was the second-largest cultivator of coca, with an estimated 50,500 hectares (ha) of coca under cultivation in 2012, the most recent year for which data is available. The majority of cocaine produced in Peru is transported to South American countries for domestic consumption, or for onward shipment to Europe, East Asia, and Mexico via private and commercial aircraft, and land and maritime conveyances. Peru is a major importer of precursor chemicals used for cocaine production.
“ President Ollanta Humala dedicated substantial resources to implement Peru’s 2012-2016 counternarcotics strategy. The strategy calls for a 200 percent increase in the eradication of illicit coca by 2016. The Government of Peru remains on pace to meet its ambitious targets in this area, and in 2013 eradicated in the Monzón River Valley, a hostile area with little state presence, for the first time in decades. Sendero Luminoso (SL or Shining Path) operating in the Apurimac-Ene-Mantaro River Valley (VRAEM) relied on cocaine trafficking for funding, and killed and wounded several police and military personnel during counternarcotics operations.”
Oops. It looks like even with hundreds of millions of dollars, armadas of military-scale technology, thousands of heavily armed soldiers and police, and humungous firepower applied year after year, you still can’t (or conveniently don’t want to) deal with 100 guerillas operating in an area the size of Switzerland, and at the same time in spite of this all-out War you also still have the distinction of being the world’s top potential producer of cocaine for the third consecutive year, and you were the second-largest cultivator of coca in 2014.
This whole US-promoted War On Drugs/War On Terror thing really isn’t working for you is it?
Respectfully, I have a suggestion to offer.
Peru has a world-class renewable natural resource in the Coca plant and the people who have grown it for centuries. Why not go with what you have instead of playing a losing game in return for Yankee dollars? Why not just tell the US to go home, make peace with the Cartels and let them make and export all the Cocaine they want as long as they pay taxes, work with the indigenous people to build a Coca Leaf-based economy throughout the country, build a health industry based on Coca Leaf treatment at spas scattered throughout the mountains, and allow private enterprise to apply the entrepreneurial spirit to development and global sales of Coca-based medicines?
Next, pay off Shining Path and let them go home for God’s sake – including those you are holding in prison. I imagine that $50-$100K per SL guerilla would do it – a total of $5-10 Million (one-time investment) to get the whole hundred of them to lay down their weapons, for which they receive amnesty and a piece of land to grow Coca. And the SL in prison who agree to go home and live peacefully ought to get the same deal.
So Government of Peru, instead of spending hundreds of millions every year on a couple of wars that are going nowhere and aren’t even yours, plus terrorizing whole communities of your People, why not lead the world and declare that Coca is a gift from nature and that the Peruvian government will no longer stand in the way of those who wish to make their living by growing and making products from it – including Cocaine. What the rest of the world thinks shouldn’t matter.
I mean, hey there, government of Peru – don’t you have better things to do than chase 100 members of the Gang Who Can’t Shoot Straight, a bunch of peaceful Coca growers, and gangs of very determined Cocaine makers? Didn’t that US-sponsored clown Fujimori bring down enough evil on Peru to make the government finally decide to work for rather than against the People? If everybody’s happy in Coca Valley who cares what the US thinks?
It can happen. The US isn’t so tough anymore. Just ask your neighbors in Bolivia.
“The Intercept” has just run an excellent piece outlining the lobbying efforts of the Opioid Manufacturing sector of the Pharmaceutical Industry to scuttle new Federal regulations that would attempt to make it harder for doctors to prescribe Opioid drugs like Oxycontin. The major manufacturers involved in the lobbying are Purdue, Cephalon, Endo, and Janssen (a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson).
The efforts of these parasitical manufacturers to maintain open season on the wholesale addicting of new “patients” while at the same time keeping up the flow of millions of tablets of these drugs that somehow manage to leak into the street market ( who, us?), is symptomatic of the thug-like nature of virtually the entire pharmaceutical industry.
When you look at the numbers you see that pills are the main “Opioid” killers, not Heroin, not Morphine, and certainly not Opium from the Poppy, and for all the hype about synthetic Opium pills like Oxy, the job they do of relieving pain is no better than a pipe of good opium. Of the 47,000+ drug overdose deaths counted by the CDC in 2014, 8800 were due to Heroin, which leaves +38,000 due largely to pills.
The single justification for the “Opioid” pill industry’s existence is that their products are claimed to be safer than natural Opium, Morphine, or Heroin. If you want to find the reason for the industry’s panic at the increase in Opioid pill deaths, look at the ratio between deaths from the dreaded slayer of youth Heroin and the supposedly safe if used as directed wonder pill.
If a huge part of your industry’s claim to fame is that your product is safer than the juice of the poppy then you have to be pretty upset when people are finally realizing that your pills are killing users nearly 5:1 compared to the fruits of the little flower.
Consider for a moment two possible tracks for our society – the one we are on and the one that could have been, and yet might be.
The track our society has taken is to turn our health, just like we’ve turned most of the other key aspects of our lives, over to highly intrusive institutional management. Most of us no longer have any management role in our food, our children’s education, our family and community security, our finances, or our privacy. One of the results of our capitulation to pervasive institutional management of our lives is that the exponentially-growing health industry, always quick to spot (or make) an opportunity, responded by creating vast numbers of expensive, enormously profitable drugs for all those astounding new diseases of modern society that patients are required to take by their doctors who give no natural options in place of the medical management system’s proprietary pharmaceuticals.
The second track, which might have been, is that all of the medical knowledge gained by doctors, patients and society at large in the 1700s and especially the 1800s regarding three of the great natural drugs – Opium, Coca and Cannabis – might have been kept and nurtured rather than discarded and largely forgotten. Had those three natural medicinal drugs not been demonized and outlawed as part of the warped spiritual movement of the early 1900s that gave birth first to Prohibition and later to the War On Drugs, these three great natural drugs would be available today as a part of the :People’s Pharmacy” just like hundreds of other herbal, natural medicines.
The industrial pharma industry would still have developed, and a lot of people would still be victims of their concoctions, but without the legal framework lovingly erected over decades by authoritarian conspirators there would be a whole segment of the Medical industry devoted to the use of all natural medicines, not just those permitted by the state as part of its role in enforcing the monopoly of Industrial Pharma over medicinal products.
Even more important, a nationwide, community-bases network of natural medicine practitioners would have evolved – people in every community who knew how to grow all of the ancient medical herbs and who utilized the advances of technology to produce ever-more effective but still natural medicines.
Of course we have a great model for this system in the network of Medical Cannabis growers and patients who are finally emerging after the long night of Prohibition – which is still in the very earliest stages of dawning – to point to and see what might have been for ALL the great natural medicines and not just Cannabis, and not just in a few states in the US and a few countries in the world.
In a society where those who wanted any form of any natural drug could grow and prepare it for themselves, or could go to a reputable dispensary or belong to a regulated collective, then we would certainly have some addicts among these people, but they would be able to lead as normal a life as they chose to live without the constant suffering, pain, and jeopardy of addiction to “illegal drugs” and all the horrors that go with that scene.
People with little income would not be driven to prostitute themselves and do violence to feed a drug habit if the drugs they wanted were freely available in safe, natural forms. It is possible, is it not, that given access to natural drugs in a climate free of violence and exploitation many if not most people could use drugs and still lead a normal life even if trapped in circumstances of poverty.
I believe that centuries of recorded experience in societies worldwide shows that the overwhelming problem with addiction is how society treats addicts. If an addict is free to lead an otherwise productive and normal life, many will do so, and those who won’t would have been lost whether drug laws made them criminals or not.
Perhaps what makes addiction so awful for so many people isn’t what the drug does to them, it’s what society does to them as a consequence of their addiction. The popular image of addiction is what is used to sell all the prevention/intervention programs that flourish around addicted people. Human degradation in every form is shown as a consequence of drug addiction, and many people buy that and think no further. But consider the number of people who are technically addicted who lead normal, productive lives in comparison with those whose lives are supposedly ruined by addiction, you begin to realize that plenty of people are addicted to drugs and other substances and don’t descend to street prostitution, emaciation, bleeding scabs and sleeping in alleys. It seems that one begins to see that maybe it is circumstances and not the drugs themselves that determine the direction that addiction takes. Remove all the harsh punishments for addiction and I wonder – what would happen to addiction?
If the illegal status of drugs and the consequences for addiction were removed, at least drug addiction would no longer be part of the trap that ensnares millions of people in the US. Poverty and exploitation would continue in other ways – unless of course (you never know) some kind of new dynamic was released in poor communities by removing the key role of criminalized drug addiction in keeping the iron collar of poverty and exploitation firmly clamped around their necks.
The BBC has done it again with outstanding photography and gripping first-person stories of the Mochileros who farm and trade Coca in this beautiful valley deep in the Peruvian Andes. The atrocities that the US Drug Laws and our paramilitary War On Drugs have committed in the communities of this remote valley are well-documented in this excellent photo-essay although the crimes and their consequences are implicit rather than explicit. How the people of this beautiful valley live now is well documented here; how they could be living if not for the criminal insanity of the US is left unsaid.
Coca growing goes back to pre-historical times in this valley but the modern world’s insatiable demand for Cocaine has warped traditional Coca Leaf growing into a dangerous mix of guerillas, drug cartels, government agents, and foreign military/covert operations.
The BBC tells this story with a level of story and graphics that takes you directly into the Mochileros’s world and allows you to walk with them on their dangerous path through the mountains with a backpack full of Cocaine.
As I read this story I couldn’t help but wonder what life could be like in this beautiful valley if the people were free to tap into their Andean heritage to make natural coca medicines for the world instead of being forced to work as human mules.
Children of parents incarcerated under drug laws suffer injuries so severe and so devastating that if their case could be brought before a jury they would be compensated at the same level as a quadriplegic child victim of a drunk driver.
The masterminds behind the US War On Drugs have always sold it on the basis of the terrible costs that drugs impose on innocent children. But quite the opposite is true – it is the Police State and its vicious drug laws that make criminals out of parents and thereby impose horrific, life-crippling costs on millions of their children.
Approximately 500,000 of the 900,000+ parents in US State & Federal prison in any given year are there for drug-related crimes. The 1,000,000+ children of these Drug Law prisoners are especially victimized because the crime under which their parents are imprisoned does not exist in nature.
Even in the most remote societies on earth, murder is murder and theft is theft. These are natural crimes, and are universally punished. But drug crimes only exist when governments create them, a process that is historically corrupt and self-serving.
Illegitimate government agencies that injure children while exercising illegitimate authority based on an illegitimate legal structure ought to be held accountable, even if that means simply calculating and naming the harm that these thugs in suits and uniforms do to children.
Most of us know that the Drug Laws cost our American society $100 Billion a year in state and federal “drug fighting” budgets, but my goal in this post is to out one of the rarely-considered costs of the WOD – the lifetime costs of the predictable and preventable damage done to children and families of parents imprisoned under these laws.
The Lifetime Damage Done To Children
The research is unequivocal. Kids with parents in prison face greater exposure than parented children to an array of harmful events and experiences that have lifetime consequences including early violent death. These kids suffer far more than their parented peers from early pregnancy, dropping out of school, gang involvement, a juvenile arrest record, lifetime poor health, risky sexual and chemical behavior, unemployment, and lifetime dependence on social services. Whatever life was like before their parent was imprisoned, it is far worse these kids afterwards.
It is unfair that any children suffer because of the crimes of their parents, but there is a difference between children of parents who, for example, commit violent deadly crimes and children of people imprisoned for drug crimes.
Children of violent criminals lose their parents as a result of their parents’ wrongdoing, and what happens to these children isn’t right, or just, but it isn’t the result of a corrupt government system. But children who lose parents imprisoned under the drug laws are victimized not by their parents but by a corrupt, entrenched system.
Neither the crime nor the agencies and courts nor the cartels nor the pervasive exploitation of the poor would exist if not for these Drug Laws. And neither would the damage that Drug Laws do to the children of those who are illegitimately imprisoned under those laws.
Hey Kid – What’s Your Life Worth?
If your parent is imprisoned because of drug laws, and especially if that person is your only parent, then your life probably isn’t worth a whole lot. Here are some of the reasons why – and good luck kid.
You’re probably going to earn a lot less in your lifetime than your parented counterparts
You will probably be sexually abused and physically mistreated or assaulted by adults multiple times.
You’re are more likely to be a victim of violent street crime than your parented counterparts
You will also be more likely to commit violent crime than your parented counterparts
You’re health will probably never be good and you will probably die young
You will probably have low social and communications skills and will not be able to develop support networks
You will probably live in blighted and polluted surroundings
You will probably have low self-esteem and be victimized by others
You will probably have a juvenile and then an adult police record
You will probably have multiple sexual contacts resulting in pregnancy
If you are male you will probably not take a role in your children’s lives; if you are a female you will probably be a single mother
Your children and grandchildren are more likely be born neurologically & physically damaged than those born to your parented counterparts
Since the rise of the Police State founded on Drug Laws in the early 1970s approximately 5 to 7 Million children have had parents imprisoned because of these laws. Many if not most of these children have experienced the life just outlined, and incurred the resulting lifetime injuries, as a direct result of having their parent imprisoned under Drug Laws.
So, what would the damages to their lives be worth, in a sane world?
If a child is horribly injured and crippled for life as a consequence of a deliberate malicious act of a person or institution, society’s laws typically hold that person or institution to be both criminally and civilly liable for the injuries they caused to the child. There is no reason at all why the government, institutional and corporate Drug Law predators and beneficiaries shouldn’t be held accountable for the injuries they have caused over the past 50 years.
There is a lot of precedent for assigning legal liability to governments and institutions as well as to individuals, groups and organizations for injury that they cause. Specifically, compensating children for harm done to them under the legal cover provided by criminally negligent private and public institutions is well established. For examples we need look no further than the huge sums paid as War Crimes compensation by governments for atrocities committed by their military forces, the Billions paid by corporate criminals worldwide as civil – rarely criminal – penalties for their desecration of human environments and lives, and the enormous sums paid by Catholic Dioceses around the world to compensate victims for the crimes against their childhood by pedophile priests.
Which brings us back to the roughly 1 million children in any given year in the US who have lost their parent – often their only parent – to the drug law system. Is there a reasonable figure for the damage done to each of these children by the Drug Laws and if so, what is it?
Given that some children of Drug Law prisoners suffer more severely than others. Some are rendered into the equivalent of a lifetime quadriplegic by having a parent taken away, while others are cared for by other loving adults until their parent can return and suffer only minor damage. It is impossible to say how many of the 1 Million children of imprisoned parents in a given year will suffer severe damage, but another glance at the first table in this post would suggest that 50-75% of them may well be traumatized for life by what they are forced to endure by the Drug Laws.
So would an average of $1 Million per child be too much compensation for the suffering, pain, and a lifetime of potential productivity and happiness taken away from 1 Million children by the false imprisonment of their parent under Drug Laws?
Would anyone be satisfied with a $1 Million jury award for a child made quadriplegic by a drunk driver or turned into a vegetable by being sexually assaulted and beaten?
Probably not. $1 Million is probably ridiculously low. So since it is way too conservative, let’s use $1 Million as a basis for calculating the total cost of the War On Drugs in terms of damage to children.
A number of research studies agree that the total number of children of parents imprisoned under the Drug Laws since the early 1970s is between 5-7 Million children.
Assuming an average of $1 Million in lifetime damages per child, this means that the War On Drugs has caused between $5-$7 Trillion in total damages to children and families since its most recent incarnation began in the early 1970s.
That $5-$7 Trillion is real money lost to millions of children over their lifetimes. Their loss is certainly as real as the loss to a child who is permanently injured in an accident. That $5-$7 Trillion is not simply income and opportunity that these children will collectively lose because they will never have the opportunity to obtain it, it is a cost also born by the greater society. When the children of prisoners suffer their loss, society also suffers that loss because it represents the productivity, health and well-being of that person that will never be realized and in far too many cases they become a social welfare burden.
The damage and lifetime costs to each child victim of the War On Drugs begin the moment that prison cell door slams behind their Mommy or Daddy just as surely as the damages and lifetime costs begin the moment a drunk slams into a child on a bike.
In Conclusion
If I seem to be stretching things a bit with the notion that the US government has been assaulting millions of parents under false pretext for nearly 50 years with its War On Drugs and in the process crippling millions of their children for life, please reflect on how many children the US military assaults, cripples and kills by self-proclaimed “accident” or as admitted and excused “collateral damage” every year around the world. Is this a government that is above feeding off the lives of its weakest and poorest?
While the Drug Law structure is solidly entrenched and fully institutionalized, especially at the federal level, it ultimately has no legitimacy except for what comes out of the barrel of a gun.
In the next part of this ongoing series of posts I plan to calculate the economic loss imposed on those tens of millions of people around the world who must endure the hell on earth of violence, crime, poverty and degradation that has been created not by the evil of drugs, as generations of propagandists have claimed, but by the evil and devastating Drug Laws that have been endlessly promoted and often imposed on other countries by the US government.
The recent ruling by the Mexico Supreme Court that opens the way to the legalization of recreational Marijuana in Mexico has also potentially opened the door to a powerful new economic resource for the country, which would piggyback on an already-existing medical tourism industry. With very little effort, Mexico could create a nationwide system of “Centros de Coca Curacion” and become the leading center for Coca Leaf therapy in the world.
Each year hundreds of thousands of North Americans and Europeans head to Mexico for everything from dental procedures to fertility treatment to intricate neurosurgery. They are comfortable doing so because for generations North Americans and Europeans have experienced successful, inexpensive, highly competent medical treatment in Mexico. Medical treatment in Mexico is a known, fully accepted option. There are even a number of US health insurers who pay for medical treatment in Mexico such as BlueShield of California through its “Access Baja” health plan.
All that Mexico would have to do would be to legalize the possession and use of Coca Leaf and at least two potentially huge new medical industries would open up. Coca Leaf spas where people could go for relaxation and treatment, and Coca Leaf medications similar to those already being manufactured in Bolivia and Peru. Medical treatment at Coca Leaf spas would be closer, cheaper, and more familiar than having to fly to the southern Andes. Plus Mexico has a huge traditional community of healers as well as all varieties of contemporary medicine from allopathic to naturopathic MDs.
Freely available Coca Leaf medications in the form of teas, pastilles and – almost certainly – some version of Vin Mariani would soon make their way into the world market. This is already happening in Peru and Bolivia.
There would be no need for the Mexican government to spend a single peso to accomplish this. Turn on the green light and Mexican entrepreneurs would jump on this opportunity immediately.
Mexico would not have to wait for Mexican farmers to get Coca plantations established – it would be a simple matter of the Mexican government allowing the regulated importation of fresh Coca Leaf from Bolivia while licensed & regulated Coca plantations were coming of age in the Mexican mountains. Since it takes several years to get a Coca plantation fully productive the imported leaf option would enable the Mexican Medical Coca Leaf industry to begin immediately, with existing health spas and clinics, and even straightforward tourism destinations, simply adding Coca Leaf treatment to their healing repertory.
This activity wouldn’t interfere with the powerful cartels either. It would be relatively easy to control where the freshly harvested Coca Leaf wound up, and the cartels have no trouble getting all the Cocaine they want from Colombia anyway. Besides, there would probably be at least a few Cartel leaders smart enough to see the incredible opportunity in Coca Leaf spas, just as I am quite certain that the imminent legalization of Cannabis has quite a few Cartel leaders contemplating the potential of Medical Cannabis treatment centers.
Mexico has no shortage of fantastically beautiful mountain and coastal locations for both kinds of spas – Coca Leaf and Cannabis – and could in a very short time become a global medical tourism destination. However, perhaps more important to the revival of rural Mexico’s economy, there are over a hundred natural hot springs that are not used much if at all by tourists and outsiders, known to the locals as “Balenearios”. You can find an extensive listing of Mexican Balenearios in a fine book by Mike Nelson entitled “Spas and Hot Springs of Mexico”.
While these locally-known resources are not usually set up for accommodating outside visitors, the simplicity of making Coca Leaf treatments available to visitors would mean that with very little effort – a few guest houses and a little restaurant or two – hundreds of struggling little towns throughout Mexico’s mountainous regions could transform themselves into destinations for the more adventurous health seekers who wanted to avoid the cloying atmosphere of upper-class health spas. Balenearios are primarily located in the states of Aquascalientes (duh), Guanajuato, Michoacan, Mexico, Morelos, Puebla, Queretaro, Hidalgo and San Luis Potosi, so medical travelers would have a wide range of choices.
This means that instead of having to travel to Peru or Bolivia for access to Coca Leaf for treating and curing everything from Alzheimer’s to Congestive Heart Failure, North Americans could travel easily and inexpensively to Mexico. And of course many Mexicans living in the US would be even more incentivized than non-Hispanics to make the journey for Coca Leaf treatment as an alternative to the broad range of diseases and conditions that are treatable and curable with this simple, powerful, natural medicine.
There is also other reasons why Mexico should consider making Coca Leaf legal immediately. It would bring new life to small towns that have local hot springs and possibly traditional healing centers in remote areas. In many cases it would give Mexicans living in the hostile environment of the US, working for slave wages, an opportunity to return home and earn a good living in their home town or village. Finally – and this is no small matter – it would give Mexicans an excellent opportunity to give the Estados Unidos a great big middle finger salute and a hearty “Hasta la vista, baby”.
Oh, and just because it would be the right thing to do, the Mexican government ought to pass laws ensuring that no US citizens who was or is a US Federal government employee in any of the agencies involved in narcotics law enforcement, could receive treatment in any licensed Mexican Medical Coca Leaf or Medical Cannabis spa. Decisions to profit from participation in evil should have consequences, after all.
Helicopters flown by CIA mercenaries, filled with government troops and US advisors, swoop down on jungle villages at dawn in a tropical country. They come in firing and dropping gas and napalm and they quickly round up everyone in the village. 
