Drug Wars
for release 03-26-09
Dallas, Texas
by Lightning Rod

Maybe I'm just a nostalgic old hippie. I remember when the drug trade with Mexico was a benign enterprise. We would go down to Mexico and stay in the farmer's hacienda and take our little 50 or a hundred pounds of his crop back to Texas and sell it to our friends. No problem, no drug wars, no cartels. Family business.

But that was before the drug trade became WalMartized. Corporations which we call drug cartels grew. Now they compete with automatic weapons, which we provide, for the profits, which we provide. Ain't America great? It's the Land of Opportunity. If we won't let the Mexicans pick our crops or make our widgets, we at least let them sell us our dope.

In the process of this service, masses of money are involved. Money is the wind in the sails of the illegal drug trade. There is so much money involved that thugs and gangs and governments try to secure their slice of the pie by whatever means. We are seeing the results of this sinister transaction on our Southern border.

More people have been killed in this greedy and needless guerilla war in the last year than have perished in Iraq and Afghanistan in the past six years. It's a large problem.

Secretary of State Clinton fairly well defined the problem. She acknowledged that the 'War on Drugs' has been an utter failure. And she also said that the problem was based on America's appetite for drugs. But that's as far as she went. What she didn't say was that the real wind in the sails of this ship of violence and corruption is money, not dope.

I don't know if it's the anorexic legacy of Nancy Reagan or what. But we seem not to be able to see that we have made the problem worse with our drug laws. If we legalized and controlled all drugs, the problems on the border would evaporate.

We control and tax cigarettes and booze. It's an asset to the commonweal. But we insist on making what could be another sin-tax asset into a liability. We even made a 'War' out of it. Instead of taxing the drug dealers, we are letting them tax us. We spend more than a billion dollars a year to maintain the thugs at the DEA. Corruption is endemic. We are being asked to dispatch troops to the region. It's insane.

The Poet's Eye has seen this subject from all angles. I think we should legalize and control ALL drugs. Let the buyer beware. If we simply decriminalized marijuana, that would take more than 50% of the revenue out of the pockets of the criminals on our border.

You know I smoked a lot of grass.
Oh Lord! I popped a lot of pills.
But I've never touched nothin'
That my spirit couldn't kill.
You know I've seen a lot of people walking 'round
With tombstones in their eyes.
But the pusher don't care
If you live -- or if you die.
God Damn! The pusher.
God Damn! The pusher.---Steppenwolf

Hoyt Axton wrote that song! If it weren't for him, I might not be a songwriter today...


http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/03/24/miron.legalization.drugs/index.html

Drugs will have to be de-criminalized (if not legalized) in this country sooner or later. You're not a lone voice in the wilderness with this well-written cry for common sense.

We very recently here in ELP had one of our city councilmen propose a city amendment to legalize pot with hopes that it would start a dialogue in Tejas. The mayor nixed the idea because he feared reprisals of the money kind from the state coffers.

The enormous amounts of money being made in the trade probably prop up banking systems on down to mom & pop businesses in Mexico, the U.S., Canada and who knows what other countries.

Hell of a situation in Juarez right now. I'd never go over there and I don't think many people are despite the huge influx of the Mx Army, altho the murders apparently have almost come to a halt. The cartels moved out to who knows where...?

Seems like the Mexican equivalent of prohibition! Break out your tommy guns - the Mexican mob's got control of distribution, and the government. You do have to wonder if the CIA is behind any of this - maybe they also realize that the sin tax from legalization would generate significant revenue - maybe even enough to fund AIG's executive bonuses! ,

amen roxybeast sistah
oklahoma outlawyer lady
north of turner falls
paradise in the valley
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i saw cia planes aflyin out in vietnam
like
we went "everywhere" and so where was they a-goin'
i often thought about if i had the cajojeneez then that ah asspire to noww
i'd have followed that silver version of my very own plane
silver not camouphlauged not laughable, unaffable,
a flyin west outa pleiku towards south laos across the mountains
blue and green and cloudy misty high and cool
damn
we went up the valley to kontum, the valley where the major got popped
outa the sky in his big bright shining lie chopper
a target for termination as the war was won
against his inspired leadership of local indiginous defense forces
against the nlf and so the south vietnamese were routed
without a shot unable to stand alone
were never vietnamiizzed
and the cia went on through laos into thailand and the burmese mob.
yeah i saw a vision of a crashed silver cia plane
up on a sloping plateau atop a mountain's edge
with spilled drugs flowing out onto the grasses that grow on high
alpine grasses in indochina where blood stains and dried chemicals remain
whilst in mehico the mob is well and heoowing
tombstones are a good biz
here lies old jimbo
he smoked pot til he became a stoner bimbo
living in satorick limbo in perpetuo
cause i can no longer go to juarez on a sunday afternoooon