The war on drugs is working perfectly! "It turns out that nature has no respect for patents."

By End the Lie Guest Writer: Click to see full size (Image credit: Fee.org)

I see countless articles about the unfairness and futility of the war on drugs but not a single mention of why drugs have to be illegal.  It’s because without strict controls that limit the supply, most street drugs would be nearly worthless.  It’s their illegality that makes them so profitable.
I must assume that people who write articles bemoaning the war on drugs are either propagandists or stupendously ignorant of natural laws.  If marijuana were legal it wouldn’t be long before you’d have to give it away.  It’s a weed!  It will grow anywhere in any soil.  It will grow in the cracks in your driveway.
Opium poppies are a little fussier but they’re no more difficult to raise than tomato plants.  Without very strict controls the bottom would fall out of those markets in a single growing season and thus the profits would similarly drop off.
“If the [drug] trade is ever legalized, it will cease to be profitable from that time. The more difficulties that attend it, the better for you and us.” – Director of Jardine-Matheson, multinational corporation, incorporated in Bermuda and based in Hong Kong.
The banking, legal, and private prison systems thrive on those laws too.  In fact, a very big part of the world’s economy depends on those barbaric laws that keep the price of drugs inflated beyond reason.  The U.N. pegs the yearly illicit drugs trade at $1.5 trillion and most of that money would simply disappear from the economy if drugs were to be legalized.

Marijuana is too cheap
Contrary to the evil qualities that authorities attempt to associate with marijuana, the plant’s real sin is that it’s too common and cheap.  Californians were afraid of proposition 19 for that reason.  They knew that the market would soon be flooded and/or the corporate growers would take over and monopolize the trade.
Either way, prices and profits would plummet for the independent growers.  Everyone on both sides of the law breathed a sigh of relief when proposition 19 failed.
The criterion that determines if a system is working properly is the profit made by that system.  Is the system making money?  Yes, it is, which means that the drug laws are working fine and so is the prison system because lots of people are making lots of money on them.
Of course the general public is suffering, but they are not and never have been a concern.  Business profits are all that matter.
Business sees the public as merely sheep to be shorn and little else, and don’t let any dewy-eyed idealists tell you differently.  No system or enterprise is going to be abandoned, no matter how inefficient or unjust it may be, as long as it’s making money.  In fact, the more inefficient and unjust it is, the more likely it will succeed indefinitely.
Business runs the world, it always has and it always will.  Governments are the enforcement arms of business.
With any piece of legislation, whether local or federal or international, if a person investigates the sponsors of the legislation they will usually find some business concern or corporate family expecting to use the legislation to increase their profits and stifle competition.
It’s no different with illegal drugs.  Deregulation and a more open market would upset the profiteering on both sides of the law.
“The average American doesn’t realize how much of the laws are written by lobbyists. It’s shocking how the system actually works.” – Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, to Atlantic editor James Bennet at the Washington Ideas Forum.
To easily understand the war on drugs, the next time you see an article that’s critical of it, try this tip:
As you read along, wherever you see the word “costs” replace it in your mind with the word “makes.”  This is because what costs one group money makes some other group money.
The war on drugs is a big money-making multi-ring circus of cash hogs all lined up with their snouts and hoofs in the taxpayers’ wallets.  Agencies, bureaucrats, courts, lawyers, prisons, police, and private companies are all making boatloads of money fighting a war that can never ever be won.  And they all love that it can’t be won.  It’s the ultimate job security.
You can also apply this costs/makes tip to the “War on Terror” and every other “war on” the government has ever invented.
Any problem the government tackles is likely to get worse because the bureaucracy depends on that.  Bureaucracies thrive on failure.  They need it.  Failure is what drives the whole system, because failure calls for bigger budgets, more bureaucrats, more legislation, more taxes, more bids on more contracts, and more meetings with more committees.  The ultimate drive is always for more, more and more.
So from the government’s standpoint, failure is actually success.  And conversely, success would be failure.  This sounds completely insane, I know, but it’s absolutely true.
Incidentally, if you haven’t read Sibel Edmonds’ book, Classified Woman, I earnestly recommend that you do.  It’s a well-written and absorbing insider’s account of the perverse workings of big league bureaucracy.
As for legalizing marijuana, the legalize-pot initiatives are not necessarily being driven by benevolent forces, though there are no doubt some sincere but naïve people in the mix.  The feds – DEA, courts, prisons, etc. – hate to give up any power or careers, and the same goes for the mafia types, so both factions will fight legalization for some time.  But the really big money guys – the oil and pharmaceutical industries – may win in the end.
The following is an excerpt from this long but worthwhile article:

If corporations like Monsanto, GW Pharma, Bayer and HortaPharm are allowed to carry out there interests, they will hold the genetic copyrights to all Cannabis strains on the planet. GW Pharma and HortaPharm have stated their intent to engineer Cannabis strains similar to Monsanto’s terminator seed technology. Their strains seem to be artificially manipulated to produce “one-off sterile females” which prevents reproduction of harvest-able seeds. These are the kinds of strains that are waiting to be controlled, regulated, licensed and taxed after the potential passage of proposition 19 in California and many similar initiatives across the United States being funded directly by Monsanto shareholders.

The one interesting quirk about pot, though, is that being a true weed it’s likely to behave like one in the long run and big pharma’s attempt to corner it might backfire by producing a rampantly spreading pest.  We’re already seeing the appearance of “super-weeds” caused by genetic engineering and herbicides.  It turns out that nature has no respect for patents.

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