Fidel Castro: More Honest Than The DEA
Fifty-one years after imposing Communist rule on Cuba, dictator Fidel Castro finally admitted Communism is a failure: "The Cuban [economic] model doesn't even work for us any more."
Kudos for his honesty, though merely saying "Oops, my bad" doesn't possibly atone for a half-century of injustice: over those five decades, how many innocents suffered or even died in hellish prisons for refusing to conform to their government's unrealistic models of behavior? How many people were denied their full potential by a stiflingly unjust legal system?
Yet if the American government were as honest about its policy failures as Castro finally was regarding his -- which is to say, honest enough to only wait fifty-one years before admitting that the policies they implemented to presumably alleviate human suffering and degradation only served to inflict more -- then back in the 1980s the United States would've admitted "Those drug-prohibition laws we enacted in the 1920s and '30s aren't working for us." But we didn't scale back the War on Drugs; we turned it up to eleven.
When I was young and naive this revelation would've left me dismayed. Today, fortunately, I possess the wisdom and maturity to damned well know better than to expect my government will show the same honesty and integrity as a murderous Cuban dictator.
Kudos for his honesty, though merely saying "Oops, my bad" doesn't possibly atone for a half-century of injustice: over those five decades, how many innocents suffered or even died in hellish prisons for refusing to conform to their government's unrealistic models of behavior? How many people were denied their full potential by a stiflingly unjust legal system?
Yet if the American government were as honest about its policy failures as Castro finally was regarding his -- which is to say, honest enough to only wait fifty-one years before admitting that the policies they implemented to presumably alleviate human suffering and degradation only served to inflict more -- then back in the 1980s the United States would've admitted "Those drug-prohibition laws we enacted in the 1920s and '30s aren't working for us." But we didn't scale back the War on Drugs; we turned it up to eleven.
When I was young and naive this revelation would've left me dismayed. Today, fortunately, I possess the wisdom and maturity to damned well know better than to expect my government will show the same honesty and integrity as a murderous Cuban dictator.
posted by Jennifer Abel at 9:54 AM
3 Comments:
Awsome post, although I think drug prohibition arguably started with the Opium Exclusion Act of 1909 (giving us a full century of FAIL) so the Castro-esque enlightenment should have hit about 1960.
Excellent observation. Even as it's becoming politically acceptable to question the philosophy behind the drug war, law enforcement drug warriors seem to be hellbent on ramping it up further, now campaigning for easy access to people's medical records so they can more easily find people that meet their definition of prescription drug abusers (which could probably mean just about anything).
Carter actually DID scale back the war on drugs. It became a hot-button issue and all it took was one teenage overdose and a few Republican victories to make the Democrats change their minds.
The War on Drugs will never be scaled back in this country during my lifetime. There is far too much money and power at stake. It'll be the 2030's or 2040's before there the subject is even allowed to be mentioned within in a major political party. Admitting failure or calling a truce takes guts; continuing an existing, failing war is the easy thing to do for chicken-shits.
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