The War On Drugs Lives Up To It's Name

Calif. police dodge bullet in booby trap attacks

HEMET, Calif. – Police officers in this retirement town in rural Riverside County have been on edge in recent weeks. Someone is trying to kill them.

First, a natural gas pipe was shoved through a hole drilled into the roof of the gang enforcement unit's headquarters. The building filled with flammable vapor but an officer smelled the danger before anyone was hurt.

"It would have taken out half a city block," Capt. Tony Marghis said.

Then, a ballistic contraption was attached to a sliding security fence around the building. An officer opening the black steel gate triggered the mechanism, which sent a bullet within eight inches of his face.

In another attempted booby trap attack, some kind of explosive device was attached to a police officer's unmarked car while he went into a convenience store.

"There's a person or people out there, a bunch of idiots, trying to do damage to us," Hemet Police Chief Richard Dana said. "We can't expect our luck to hold up, we need help."

These same gangs in Mexico have killed many thousands of people. they kidnap family members of police officers, then take them somewhere secluded to torture them to death, then dump the bodies in the streets to, send a message.

These things happen in wars. The Drug War is no different. Ronald Reagan knew what he was doing when he dubbed it the War on Drugs. Right away, he began using the military solution to slaughter people, to take control of the distribution and sale of drugs. But there is so much money to be made in a prohibitionary setting, that no nation can be expected to keep control of it. Other nations and independent companies want a share of the profits and they are happy to slaughter people too.

Arizona is now dealing with the opening stages of this kind of problem.


Americans love wars. They love violence. So long as it's on television and some far away place. Now this war is coming to America.

As the New Great Depression deepens, we'll see this war spread throughout the USA. It's be like the 1930s all over again. Cops will slaughter gang members in shootouts. Gangs will then slaughter cops and their families in their homes. People in the periphery will be slaughtered as collateral damage. Innocents will be caught in the crossfire.

The violence in Mexico has crossed the border. It's coming to a town near you. There's a lot of money at stake. And the danger increases the profits. Increasing violence makes more money for the drug dealers, and for the people who sell military gear to police organizations. As the violence increases gun and home protection sales will go up.

There's a lot of money to be made in turning up the heat and increasing the number of Americans that are killed. and when there's money to be made, Americans know they have a duty to go for it.

It seems Joe Bageant agrees with this sentiment:
We were never a people to miss a chance to turn a buck, even on drugs, hopelessness, fear, poverty, criminality and misery. These days there is plenty of misery to go around, especially since drugs generate the other others. None of which is news to most of the lefties reading this. However, to the average American watching Jay Leno crack Tiger Woods jokes, the fact that a sizeable portion of our national economy depends upon keeping the drugs flowing across our borders would come as surprising news. Not surprising enough to get up off the couch for, but nonetheless surprising for a moment.

As for the real numbers in this miserable drama of national affairs, only the pointy heads care. For most of us, national numbers don't mean much these days. Once the discussion soared off into the tens of trillions, average working folks lost any numerical moorings they might have had, which were never very good to begin with. So the numbers regarding the massive industries based on the War on Drugs simply get lost somewhere out there among the trillions. After all, what's $50 billion a year spent for our narcotics cops?

Well, $50 billion makes just chasing the dopers an industry the same size as the movie business, and slightly bigger than the telecom industry. Furthermore, the narco cop industry is joined at the hip with the American prison industry -- the world's largest -- a $45 billion enterprise based on drug convictions. Which of course entails the court systems and billions to the syndicate of lawyers, the state's officially recognized commissars of peasant conflicts. Standing in the wings are the rest of the commissariat, such as the drug rehabilitation professionals. With such a fat hog of public funds there for the cutting, it was only natural that the Department of Homeland Security would increasingly focus its 225,000 employees and $42 billion budget on the drug wars. As for the working slob who has never even seen a bag of weed, he gets his chance to contribute to the drug war industry too, through drug testing in the workplace (25 million tests per year at between $25 and $50 each). With America now panhandling on the global street corner for international loans, nobody is about to cut loose the domestic profits of the drug war industry -- profits sustained, of course, by its dedicated lack of success.