« More Government Medical Practice | Main | When war is your policy of choice; how do you admit defeat? »
December 14, 2006
Welcome Support...
Over the past few months, I’ve been pointing out that America’s war on drugs has been a forty year failure which bears a striking resemblance to the equally forlorn, but much more recent, war in Iraq; one which will enter its fourth year on March first.
Drug war casualties remained largely uncounted for years while slowly crowding our prisons and populating our inner cties with the homless. American military casualties in Iraq have been assiduously counted ever since an insurgency began shortly after the quick initial military victory. Although an attempt was made to ignore them at first, the growing numbers of civilians casualties generated by the insurgency have since became much more visible to an increasingly disapproving global audience.
Nevertheless, domestic support for our Iraq policy remained surprisingly strong until some ill-defined threshold was crossed quite recently, but I hadn't noticed any formal comparisons between Iraq and the drug war until this past week; which is why I was so gratified to read Neal Peirce’s articulate and hard hitting December 11 column.
Admittedly, one column hardly represents a trend; but given the rapid unraveling of our Iraq war, its days as a credible policy would seem to be numbered and although we may be considerably further from a repudiation of our more deeply entrenched drug policy, its resemblance to the Iraq fiasco could greatly simplify that task. It would also help if the reform community were to catch up with some of our more articulate and well informed drug policy critics in the media: John Tierney, Arianna Huffington, and Neal Pierce, for example.
Doctor Tom
Posted by tjeffo at December 14, 2006 04:44 AM