by Jon Rappoport

April 2, 2013

www.nomorefakenews.com

Thirty years ago, Nancy Reagan launched her version of the war on drugs: “just say no.”

She campaigned on that slogan all over America.

She was lampooned as an idiot.

Now, some researchers estimate that 60% of the Mexican economy would crash if the drug business disappeared there. We have US street gangs operating as retailers for Mexican cartels. We have Mexican cartel soldiers living in suburban homes outside American cities, guarding rooms piled to the ceiling with cash.

US banks are laundering drug money. In Mexico, battling cartels have murdered 50,000 people over the past several years.

We have scores of serious reports from former DEA agents about the collusion of US federal agencies in the drug trade.

Right now, in Chicago, US attorneys are winning delay after delay in the trafficking trial of Jesus Niebla, a Sinaloa cartel lieutenant who was busted in 2009. The issue? Niebla’s lawyers claim the US government granted Sinaloa immunity from prosecution, in return for intell on rival cartels. The government doesn’t want possible evidence of this claim to see the light of day.

The war on drugs was lost a long time ago.

How many lives do you think have been destroyed, how many marriages ruined, how much violence committed, on the basis of booze since 1933, when Prohibition was lifted?

Legalize drugs, don’t legalize them, people find them and buy them and ingest them. They develop physical illnesses. They deteriorate.

The number of lives destroyed by drugs, and the peripheral ripples, continue to increase.

We’re left with: just say yes or just say no. And it isn’t some Sinaloa chief who says it. It’s the user, the person who swallows it or snorts it or shoots it. It always was.

For those people who love citing poverty, abuse, lack of education as the social causes of drug use, the answer is a program to lift up the poor. But despite billions of dollars in aid, over decades, such a program, in the hands of the government, hasn’t shown results. The actual intent to foster dependence on government is the covert purpose of this op.

It may be insensitive and cruel to suggest that the poor have to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and revolutionize their own communities, but it is another hard fact of life. The government isn’t going to do it. All previous attempts have ended in disaster. The condition of the poor in this country is worse than it was 30 years ago.

So even at that level of society, “just say no” applies. People who are better off may find this intolerable. They may say we can’t consign the poor to making their own hard decisions. They may say it’s inhuman. They may say Bill Gates can save Detroit with computers in every classroom. They may say anything. But what they’re saying isn’t making any difference.

I fully realize that making no difference doesn’t deter these caring individuals from their idealism. They wear it as a badge of honor, and they don’t give a damn what the results show.

The federal government is fully aware, for example, that drug gangs in inner cities are causing enormous destruction. But are these gangs the targets of any successful program of deterrence or elimination?

On a larger scale, is Mexico going to destroy its drug business? The answer in both cases is no.

People speak of high-level corruption. Of course it exists. Governments and banks profit from drugs. In many ways. You could say banks are leaders in the drug business. You could say they ultimately run it.

But what does that do for the addict, for the chronic user?

The person at the end of the supply line, the user, says yes or no. If you think there is no wisdom in that, you’re surrendering far more than lives destroyed by drugs. You’re advocating the destruction of lives in which the freedom to choose is eliminated by a social construct that, in one way or another, denies such freedom exists.

It’s a hell of a lot harder to affirm freedom in Iraq than it is in Scarsdale or Beverly Hills. But that doesn’t mean we should have invaded Iraq and mangled millions of lives. If we really wanted freedom to exist there, we would have left those people to their own devices. Why? Because you can’t deliver freedom like a steak on a plate to someone else.

They have to take it. And sometimes that means risking life and limb.

My best friend, when I was 20, killed himself on drugs. He could have chosen a different road. He didn’t. It was expected, by his wife and friends, that he would kill himself. Naturally, they wanted him to get healthy and strong instead, but he went another way. They were there to help him, but he didn’t take the help. So they knew he would do himself in.

He was smart enough to know he had a choice. He chose. On some level, everyone is that smart. To keep saying, over and over and over and over, that people can’t choose to stop taking drugs, is a fatal position.

Yes, families help, and yes, friends can help, and yes, there are groups that can help. But the user is the one who decides.

You have to ask yourself this: what culture is better and stronger and safer? The one that regards freedom and choice as primary values, or the one that claims these qualities don’t really exist at all?

So now we come to pharmaceutical drugs, which in the US kill, at minimum, 106,000 people a year. (See Starfield, JAMA, July 26, 2000, “Is US health really the best in the world?”)

The CDC has just reported that a staggering 6.4 million American children under the age of 17 have been diagnosed with ADHD. This figure includes one out of five boys of high school age. Every one of these children has, of course, been prescribed Ritalin or Adderall.

This corporate-government juggernaut wants more control than it has now. By legislation, by edict, by regulation, people will no longer be able to refuse medication—that’s its goal. Under Obamacare, the ability to achieve this objective improves.

Patients can be intimidated. They can be told they must obey their doctors if they want to stay in the program. They can be exiled if they’re labeled “resistant” or “non-compliant.”

But as with street drugs, the onus would fall on the user, and he would make the choice. Say yes or no to a drug. Regardless of consequences, the choice is there.

Freedom and choice. This society is moving away from these values like an express train. The ticket to ride is “victim status.” You buy that, you’re on the train.

You keep telling people who live hard lives they have no choice, they’re suffering from social injustice and diseases of addiction, and so forth, and you draw in believers. Whether you’re right or wrong in your assessments of other people’s problems, if you deny choice and freedom, you’re helping to kill hope at the deepest level.

You may like what you’re hearing yourself say, you may believe you’re on the side of the angels, you may feel better, you may be able to argue your position cogently, but you’re in the killing fields with a scythe.

The pundits on television with their careful hair and their bland smiles and their earnest expressions are waving scythes, when they cite all the social and economic reasons people can’t rise up on their own. These social critics are trying to create a culture in which only the powerful criminals survive. They may as well be peddling crack on a street corner.

“We just want to help the less fortunate,” delivered with a goonish thrust, is the same lie it always was. It’s superiority in sheep’s clothing.

The drug dealer sees through that in a second. Put him on television and let him speak uncensored, and very soon you’ll notice a real and inconvenient truth swim to the surface: people make choices.

The dealer knows that. His job is to make those choices as hard as possible. He works that angle all day and all night. If he bothers to listen to the pundits, he celebrates their lies. They’re helping him do business. They’re peddling the psychological equivalent of physical addiction.

Addiction to the idea that there really is no freedom:

“Nobody can say no and nobody can say yes. It’s all up to the machinery turning in the brain. It’s all social and economic. It’s all predetermined.” That’s the big infomercial and the big sales campaign and the big lie.

It’s taken root. The roots are so deep even middle-class kids are trying to figure out how they can qualify as victims with a disability. ADHD is right up there on their list.

The street drug dealer and the doctor are basically operating on the same premise. Use every available strategy to cut off the possibility of choice by the user.