Drug War
If I could change any aspect of policy in the U.S., ending the drug war would far and away be my choice. Charles Bowden has written some great books on the subject. This quote is from _Down by the River_:
"Drugs are a business, one of the largest on the face of the earth, and this business exists for two reasons: the products are so very, very good and the profits are so very, very high. Nothing that creates hundreds of billions of dollars of income annually and is desired by millions of people will be stopped by any nation on this earth. A Mexican study by the nation's internal security agency, CISEN (Centro de Investigacion y Seguridad Nacional), that has been leaked to the press speculates that if the drug business vanished, the U.S. economy would shrink 19 to 22 percent, the Mexican 63 percent.(1) I stare at these numbers and have no idea if they are sound or accurate. No one can really grapple with the numbers because illegal enterprises can be glimpsed but not measured. In 1995 one Mexican drug-trafficking expert guessed that half the hotel room revenues in his country were frauds, meaning empty rooms counted as sold in order to launder drug money.(2)
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Citations
(1) "The Importance of the Drug Trade in the Mexican Economy," El Diario de Juarez, June 25, 2001.
(2) Todd Robberson and Douglas Farah, "Mexican Cartels Expanding Role in Trafficking," Washington Post, March 12, 1995.
I will leave such aspects of the drug war as larger federal bureaucracies, militarized police forces, mandatory minimums, civil forfeiture, and the effect on other countries, particularly Mexico, Columbia and Peru, to your research.
I think the chance of any change in our drug policy to be slight. Despite the criticism over Iraq I don't see the neoconservatives as having been weakened all that badly. Their position can be summed up as strong government, socially conservative, and a foreign policy that favors engagement in the affairs of other countries. Ending the drug war is not in alignment with any of these.
regards,
raisins
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