I remember back in the early eighties while I in college I would go home to Jamaica every chance I got. Seems I was always home sick back then. What was amazing to me was to see how some of the kids who I grew up with were living in freshly built mansions, complete with tennis courts and three car garages. These kids didn't have a pot to piss in when I left, but now they were blowing up. Of course I knew how they made their money. They made it the old fashion way, selling drugs. Ganga was our biggest export from Jamaica in the seventies and eighties, and there are many Jamaicans who will tell you that it kept our economy afloat. I will never forget the stories of planes taking off and landing all through the night on rural country roads after people would dash out of the hills to construct makeshift runways with home made lanterns. They would load those marijuana planes quicker than a NASCAR pit crew and off they would go.
Of course all that marijuana and all those drugs were coming to A-merry-ca. This country had a huge so called drug problem then, and nothing has changed since. Reagan and Bush (41) were in power during those years, and in spite of their so called "war on drugs ", and Nancy Reagan's anorexic ass crying "just say no", their war was doomed to failure. "Oh field you just want them to legalize marijuana so that your Jamaican ass can smoke it." Well that's half right. I do want it to be legalized, but I don't smoke it......well I did once but I didn't inhale......well maybe I did inhale, but that was a long time ago......and I did have some ganga soup once...enough of my personal life. This post isn't about the field's past indiscretions.
A drug dealer once asked me if I ever saw drugs offered at a discount or if I ever saw drugs being advertised? Of course not, because drug dealers don't have to offer discounts and they don't have to advertise; it's called supply and demand. That is what drives drug sales, and that is why some young knuckle head on a corner will risk serious jail time or death to sell rock cocaine to suburban kids for long dollars.
When the DEA working with Colombian police killed Pablo Escobar in 1993 on a Medellin roof top, they thought they had reached the tipping point of the war on drugs. But boy were they wrong. According to Rolling Stone magazine, the drug policy under Reagan and Bush was largely conducted in a "fog of ignorance". Bill Bennett's dumb ass spent 12 billion on the drug war and used Naval submarines, torpedoes, and F16's all for nothing. Congress panicked and passed tough laws to give poor crack cocaine users longer prison sentences than the wealthy powder snorting Wall Street users. As a result, an entire generation of poor black people have spent their lives behind bars, and have returned to society with no skills, no jobs, and no hope for a productive existence.
Again, according to Rolling Stone Magazine, If Richard Nixon had just listened back then to all those reports of a generation of soldiers coming home from Vietnam stoned with drug habits, things might have turned out differently. Nixon actually appointed a panel who considered decriminalizing marijuana and buying up the worlds opium supply to prevent it from being converted to heroin. But no, in typical rethuglican fashion, Nixon caved to the law and order crowd and A-merry-ca's fear of the hippies and those Negroes in the urban areas. What we have as a result is an out of touch and and fool hardy drug policy in this country which is getting worse every day.
I am not surprised to hear of the RAND Study that says that military efforts and imprisoning addicts is the least effective way to fight the scourge of drugs. They said that top decrease drug use the only thing that works is treatment. How about that? Good old fashioned treatment.
I bet treatment would curb A-merry-can's appetite and thus their demand for drugs. And then my friends down in Jamaica would have to cut back on their lavish spending habits. But unfortunately for the folks at the DEA, my friends are still laughing all the way to the bank. Or should I say the money launderers.
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