Government as baby sitter is a fairly pathetic use of all that power, but it seems inevitable that The War on Drugs would eventually bring us here. We're probably too rich, spolied, and lazy for it to have gone any other way. Parents generally don't want their kids to make the same mistakes that they did, but all too many of them also don't want to take the time to do the job of parenting that would be required to have their kids postpone experimenting with drugs until they go to college. It's easier just to make schools Drug Free Zones and hope that the kids take their latch keys home at the end of the school day like they're supposed to. Resort to mind altering substances has been part of the human evolutionary journey since day one, but it's easier to pay the cops to try to look after our kids than it is to do the job ourselves. And, anyway, it's very clear that we became the sole superpower on the planet because of the millions of our friends, neighbors, and children that have drug convictions, and not in spite of it.
Isn't it!
Operation Intercept, in many ways, can really be pointed to as the begining of what can fairly be called a social mini civil war. The concept was simple enough. In 1969 Nixon announced that he was going to halt the importation of pot across our southern border by requiring that all traffic from Mexico be inspected, and named his plan "Operation Intercept". "It seems", he may well have actually said "that the hippies have gotten out of control and are now threatening our national security. Why, if they had their way, the U.S. would abandon its commitment to support South Viet Nam against North Viet Nam."
People came to know that this was a major issue because border commerce ground to a halt, and the effects could be seen every night on the news, and in skyrocketing prices in the produce department. Trucks heading north backed up for miles, and passenger cars with returning U.S. citizens sitting for many, many hours were on all three channels every night. In fact, in a way, the government lost the first battle in the drug war because reality intruded and it had to surrender our stranglehold on the border. Nixon halted Operation Intercept because the cost of destroying our legitimate commerce with Mexico was greater than the harm from the pot that they were selling us. Of course, the government was never honest enough to make that tidbit public, so the folks on our side only saw that we had a very serious problem that was going to require a major law enforcement effort directed at college kids on the left wing of the political spectrum.
Nixon probably never noticed that drug convictions would keep lots of folks from being able to vote, and that virtually all of them were living on the liberal side of life.
But that was then and this is now, and now what?
Let's throw around a few random numbers!
One big deal today is the tar sands pipeline and the numbers of billions of dollars involved make it not just a big deal, but A VERY BIG DEAL. And yet those numbers pale compared to just one year of the volume of dollars involved in the underground drug economy engendered by our current regimine of prohibition. (Dollars spent largely, by the way in creating pipelines of another sort.) And then let's multiply this number of dollars, and their social, economic, etc., impact by the number 40, which represents the duration of our latest bout of prohibition.
So what do we get? A number that is more than 100 times the cost of the tar sands pipeline, and perhaps as much as 1,000 times.
I mean, on our side, we know we are fighting deep pockets, and maybe impossibly deep pockets, when we join this latest battle against big oil.
So then why do we continue to delude ourselves that we make any sense in the context of either our own value systen, or the ultimate flow of economic forces when we vote year after year, decade after decade to shut down the pipelines that bring us (in the larger sense) one of our obviously highly desired consumer products?
Any time that "We The People" throw a trillion dollars aginst what "We The People Acting As Our Government" is spending far more than that to keep ouselves from doing what we want with our lives, it seems like a time of self reflection ought to be called for.