Simpletons.

Editor,

War is claimed to be winding down in Afghanistan and over in Iraq, so naturally the U.S. turns to its mainstay killing fields in Latin America to keep its military-corporate machine employed.

The "War on Drugs" has been nothing but a disaster from the moment it was conceived. All those dollars spent on CIA adventures, military dictatorships, the DEA, domestic prisons, and ever more militarized police have only boosted the market value of heroin and cocaine and stimulated more creative distribution channels.

Read Alfred McCoy's "Politics of Heroin" if you want to experience a little heartache.

The U.S.A.'s problem with drugs is a problem of demand. Instead of using demand for drugs as a pretext for yet more killing, what is politically impossible in this country is the only sensible course of action: demand reduction, drug treatment, decriminalization.

But prisons and arms merchants can't make money if we go that route, and spending money on someone else's psychological problems is so downright un-American there is no possible way to sell that to the simpletons who run and inhabit this country.

Re: "Don’t Return to a Grim Chapter of Our History" (5/8/2012)