Boozehounds And Fatties Can Both Drop Dead
In America there are plenty of scare stories about the "obesity epidemic", which is caused by too many Yanks eating too much junk food, and does bad things to public- health statistics. Clearly this obesity problem needs solving, and here's how: poison the nation's sugar and fat supply so anyone who eats too much will immediately drop dead, and serve as a warning to children and other impressionables.
Why not? Last week, science writer Deborah Blum reported the US government pulled a similar stunt during prohibition, only with alcohol rather than sweets. Since bootleggers often stole industrial-grade alcohol to resell in drinkable form, the feds figured they'd dissuade potential customers by ordering industrial alcohol manufacturers to spike their wares with poison. Over Christmas 1926 the toxic hooch killed 31 partygoers in New York City alone; estimates for the poison programme's total death toll go as high as 10,000.
More details about our government's compassionate and completely non-psychopathic attempts to eliminate America's health problems once and for all can be found at the Guardian's America blog.
posted by Jennifer Abel at 11:45 AM
2 Comments:
Jennifer:
Thank you for illuminating this important and mostly ignored perspective about the accepted collateral effects of drug prohibition. Users are the most obvious collateral damage but there are also much bigger victims and far more egregious threats to society that are considered acceptable risk for he drug warriors.
There are two situations where the war on drugs is considered, U.S. policy makers, to be more important than 1. the safety of western children and 2. all of society from the risk of terrorism itself.
Since 1998 there have ben news stories relating how the alQaida and bin Laden consider heroin to be more than a source of income. They consider it to be an asymmetric weapon targeting the decadent children of the west. As the world Trade Center and Pentagon still smoldered Sen. John Kerry, a leader in the U.S. drug war policy making, told reporters,"That's part of their revenge on the world," Kerry said. "Get as many people drugged out and screwed up as you can." 21 Sept. 2001
In 1998 the Indian Times reported, "The crop will be opium and the farmer will be Osama bin Laden, the most wanted terrorist in the world. Bin Laden, accused by the United States of bombing two of their embassies in East Africa this summer and a string of other attacks, sees heroin as a powerful new weapon in his war against the West, capable of wreaking social havoc while generating huge profits, according to sources in eastern Afghanistan and in Pakistan." Dec 1998, Indian Times
In 2003 NewsWeek gave the campaign a name, "Some militants view opium as something more than a source of cash; they say it's a legitimate weapon in what they call a "silent jihad." Khurshid, a 20-year-old Nangarhar native, says drugs are Afghanistan's way of striking back at the West for sending "liquor, obsceneTV and pornographic films" into Afghanistan: "Immoral Western culture destroys the minds of our children, so it's only just that we export opium and heroin to destroy Western youths." July 2003, Newsweek
Knowing this the leaders of the U.S. and British drug war continue to leave the distribution of billions of dollars a year in heroin in the hands of America's sworn enemies.
Direct national security threat.
In 2004 the Congressional Research Service of the U.S. Congress issued this report, "Illicit Drugs and the Terrorist Threat:Causal Links and Implications for Domestic Drug Control Policy"
They summarized the issue this way:
"The international traffic in illicit drugs contributes to terrorist risk through at least five mechanisms: supplying cash, creating chaos and instability, supporting corruption, providing “cover” and sustaining common infrastructures for illicit activity, and competing for law enforcement and intelligence attention. Of these, cash and chaos are likely to be the two most important."
The same report irrationally concluded:
"American drug policy is not, and should not be, driven entirely, or even
primarily, by the need to reduce the contribution of drug abuse to our vulnerability to terrorist action. There are too many other goals to be served by the drug abuse control effort."
What "other goals" could be more important than reducing our "vulnerability to terrorist action"?
The risk of terrorism and the danger to children exposed to street drug black markets are all just acceptable collateral damage to the drug war fanatics.
Prescription heroin would alleviate this threat. Reduce it almost to zero. Our authoritarian drug war extremists 'just say no'.
Jen:
yes, and in more recent times (70's) we had the damage done by paraquat pot.
Post a Comment
<< Home