VLVL2 the "War on Drugs", profits & the US police state

[pynchonoid]

Selling property confiscated from suspected drug
dealers, and thus making this law enforcement project 
a self-sustaining operation, is just one of several
ways the so-called "War on Drugs" is itself a
profit-making operation that appears to aim to manage
drug trafficking not stop it.

Many _Vineland_ readers will find interesting a new
book by Curtis Marez:

[...] Although official rhetoric focuses on ending
drug abuse, state policies have often had the opposite
effect. In the 1970s, for instance, the Nixon
administration supported Southeast Asian heroin
traffic in order to fund the war in Vietnam.
Subsequent administration in the 1980s and 1990s
backed client states in Latin America that were
directly involved in the cocaine trade. The Reagan
administration supported the "Cocaine Coup," a
right-wing military takeover in Bolivia that was
funded by drug barons; along with his successor,
George Bush, Reagan also sponsored Manuel Noriega's
Panamanian dictatorship, which turned out to be a
major launderer of drug money; and perhaps most
infamously, the Reagan administration supported the
cocaine trade in the United States in order to fund
the contras' attack on the Nicaraguan revolution. The
exercise of state power centrally includes forms of
drug interdiction, but drug enforcement is part of a
larger set of ideologies and practices that might be
better described as the management of drug traffic. 
Nancy Reagan's infamous injunction notwithstanding,
the United States, along with other states, has often
said "yes" to drug traffic by annexing it to state
power. [...] 

The war on drugs has also precipitated a qualitative
shift toward the militarization of police power [...]
Through the drug war the United States has partly
integrated local, state, and federal police forces
into a larger system of military power in the
Americas. The Reagan administration practically
nullified the Posse Comitatus Act, a law that made it
illegal to use the military to conduct civilian police
actions. Such legal changes enabled the military to
share training, intelligence, and hardware with
domestics police powers. The opportunities that drug
traffic provides for the expansion of military power
in part explain the state's relative disinterest in
educastion and treatment. This is because the demand
for drugs is not, strictly speaking, the enemy of
state power; rather, drug demand is a sustaining
object of power. [...] 

The aeropace industry (which supplies drug enforcement
planes, helicopters, and other technology), chemical
companies (which produce the poisons that are dropped
on drug fields), and the prison industry directly
benefit from the drug war and hence actively lobby for
its continued expansion. [...] It is estimated that
illegal drug traffic generates about $400 billion a
year, accounting for roughly 2 percent of the global
economy. Transnational corporations headquartered in
the United States profit from this economy by serving
as formal and informal laundries for drug money. [...]


read it all:
_Drug Wars
The Political Economy of Narcotics_
by Curtis Marez
http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/M/marez_drug.html


	
		
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