The Drug War Thing....

A great friend of mine, currently living in Mexico, sent me a note today with a link to a piece from the Christian Science Monitor on the failure of the war on drugs in Mexico. I see things like that and shake my head. I guess the reporter is just young and new to it all. Still, we need voices if we're ever going to end this thing.
But this was my response:
X: Yeah. I won three awards for my story on this a couple of years ago but it didn't stop the damned bloodshed. I worked for 16 years for High Times writing about the horrors produced by prohibition, but it didn't stop the bloodshed. I write a monthly column now for Skunk magazine and I still have not stopped the bloodshed. Why the power boys won't admit that ending prohibition eliminates the violence overnight and brings things down from a boil to a simmer or less, is beyond me. Well, not really. Too many people make their living off prosthelyzing prohibition, off building and filling prisons, off being lawyers or parole officers or running drug treatment houses, or supplying guns and ammo, or building bulletproof cars or a million other things. They'd all lose their positions, their importance and their money if we went the way of rational thinkers. Imagine: In the last 4 years in Mexico, more than 18,000 people have died as a direct result of the war on drugs. During that same time, in the US, we have not lost 18,000 people to all the overdoses, suicides and drug-related medical deaths together. But we're willing to give that many up in Mexico, and another couple of ten thousands in the US, to the war on drugs in that period, to stop.....what? To stop what? Nothing has been stopped. Not one person who wanted to get high last night could not find his or her drug of choice within half-an-hour of looking. Hell, it takes me an hour to go buy a whiskey here in Joshua in the middle of dry Johnson County. I could find drugs--any freaking drug I want, in half the time--and I don't know a single dealer. So the drug war exists to...what, exactly?
Oh, right. To be righteous and make money for some people who live off prohibition and for some others who thrive in the black market.
Now that makes sense, eh?