"The Fast and The Furious" was a 2009 action movie centering around an Irish lad named Brian O'Conner, who worked for the FBI in LA. He teams up with Dominic Toretto to bring down a heroin importer by infiltrating his operation.
But the Fast and Furious I heard about on the news today, was the name of a weapons sting by the Federal government that went horribly wrong. The result is thousands of weapons supplied by us, have been used by drug cartels to kill hundreds of Mexican citizens, soldiers and police, as well as killing one of our own officers.
But this is just one story story in a long list of stories that are symptomatic of a much greater problem we have been facing due to the criminalization of drugs.
The Taliban and Al Quaeda make enormous profits off of the opium poppy crop in Afghanistan. This product is refined into heroin where it is shipped to Europe and America to keep the heroin addicts supplied with their fix. The profits are used to wage war against western civilizations.
Didn't we learn a lesson during the Prohibition days when alcohol was made an illegal substance in the United states? The only ones who gained from this social experiment was organized crime, certain American political dynasties and the armies of law enforcement who devoted their energies to sniff out illegal alcohol.
Instead of eliminating alcohol in the US, Prohibition caused consumption to skyrocket and Americans drank more than ever.
What is apparent in this decades old "war on drugs" is that this "war" is a failure. Our prisons are full and the drug use continues. Lets face it folks, people want to escape reality, it is an age old human condition.
If drugs were de-criminalized the prison/legal systems would be decimated. What would we do with all of these empty prisons and empty court dockets? Use the prisons as rehabs & the army of judges and lawyers could get jobs in the private sector, or learn how to be drug counselors.
Lets turn the direction of this war to treatment rather than punishment and that's what we could do if we took out the criminal element of drug use.
The time has come to look at this honestly and remember: The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different outcome.
For other points of view visit Carroll Standard:
http://www.carrollstandard.com/
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