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May 13, 2012
Cognitive Dissonance on the Border
Yesterday I came across a “documentary” on Rupert Murdoch’s Discovery Channel entitled “Texas Drug Wars,” it turned out to be a state police clone of the federal “Border Wars” trash I’d seen earlier on Murdoch's National Geographic Channel; only worse. The decidedly mixed message is that evil Mexican Cartels are doing their level best to smuggle deadly “narcotics” across, under, around, and over the border with a bewildering panoply of techniques that simply can’t be stopped. Fortunately, Texas Rangers and other State Police are on the job with flak jackets, automatic weapons, helicopters, and a panoply of high tech sensors to harass them and (occasionally) intercept their evil contraband- or at least force them to abandon it; thus keeping (some) “off the street” and hurting the cartels in their wallets, “where it hurts."Unfortunately, there is no data on either the evil product line’s production or other costs, or their sales volume, thus the Cartels' profit and loss picture remains highly speculative. In fact, the whole exercise was such utter nonsense, the immediate question any rational viewer should be asking is: why bother?
Silly me. The drug war’s sponsors have been doing this for years because it works. We know that because no matter how much money the drug war wastes and how much human damage it causes, it continues to be a high priority policy for the US and the other “sovereign” governments that pretend to take it seriously.
So long as that’s the case, the drug warriors on both sides of the border will have job security, bribes will be paid, court dockets will be choked with interminable drug cases, the prisons no one can afford will be kept full and we can go on polluting the planet with CO2. Oh yes; we can also save money on public education because many of the the kids arrested on pot charges won’t finish school. An overlooked saving is that because the symptoms they can’t obtain medical insurance to treat are more effectively treated by cannabis, they don’t add to our sky-high medical costs and the booze they don’t drink won’t encourage violent behavior.
There are, of course, other consequences of Nixon’s forty year folly, but discussing them has never been a high priority with the Fourth Estate for reasons they prefer not to discuss; perhaps because the drug war’s villains and heroes in uniform are more interesting to advertisers than a bunch of desperately poor “illegals” willing to risk their lives to cross a dangerous border in search of a better life.
Doctor Tom
Posted by tjeffo at May 13, 2012 07:19 PM