When the government talks about “Zero Tolerance” in the War on Drugs, they are of course only talking about some drugs, and not only that, but some people who sell some drugs. For example, when Afghanistan was run by the Taliban, there were no drugs because the penalty for growing them was death. Now, 90% of the world’s heroin comes from Afghanistan, making it the number one export, but you won’t hear anything about it being a problem because that would endanger the lives of 3 million farmers. Of course the US could care less about that — they’ve destroyed the lives of plenty of cocoa growers in South America — but that would in turn bring public resentment against us, which undermines our war efforts there.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/2007-05-20-edit_N.htm

During the Iran-Contra scandal, the CIA made an investigation of itself, and although it never admitted to selling cocaine to fund revolutionaries, they did admit to “getting in bed” with drug dealers in order to achieve their objectives.

The threat of drugs has also been used to further the immigration agenda of conservatives through the story of the cops who shot a Mexican drug carrier in the butt when he tried to evade them. The border agents, knowing what they did was wrong, picked up the shell casings and then filed a false report to cover up their actions, yet conservatives have tried to make these would-be murderers into heroes. Of course, if the man was white it would never have been a big story, but aside from the cover-up, it’s just what conservatives need to get the racist right wound up on their immigration policy, so the part about the coverup is routinely dropped. But ask those same conservatives if they would have appreciated it if their own son or daughter was shot while trying to flee the police in order to escape a drug conviction and that the cops then tried to cover the crime up and i’m sure you’d hear a different story.

http://www.cnsnews.com/Nation/Archive/200701/NAT20070126a.html

Immigration is of course a worthy topic of discussion, but rather than blaming liberals for convincing Bush (as if he would listen), conservatives should look at their own platform. Democrats may have a stronger Mexican vote, but its the business sector that has all the influence with the Republican Party and its in their best interests to keep illegals coming across the border because it means cheap labor for them. While conservatives are talking about constructing a giant wall and creating a mass transit system to move millions of illegals out of the country, they could have simply devised a system of making employers check their employees before they hire them. If illegals couldn’t get jobs here, they’d go back on their own, but that won’t happen because its not profitable for the Republicans who matter.

Meanwhile, the War on Drugs have gotten so out of hand that our Right to Free Speech has not become its newest casualty. Joseph Frederick, an 18-year-old adult, displayed a banner saying “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” in his car. The message is nonsensical and obviously made only for humor’s sake. The principal of his school took it down and suspended the student, despite the fact that the car was on a public sidewalk outside the jurisdiction of the school. But apparently jurisdiction and free speech are meaningless as long as there is a “reasonable” chance that a message implicitly promotes the illegal use of drugs, according to Bush’s Chief Justice appointee, John Roberts. As Justice John Paul Stevens said, “This case began with a silly nonsensical banner, (and) ends with the court inventing out of whole cloth a special First Amendment rule permitting the censorship of any student speech that mentions drugs, so long as someone could perceive that speech to contain a latent pro-drug message.” The Bush Administration is, naturally, on the side of the principal, and its hard to doubt that John Roberts got the message before his own decision on the case.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/LAW/06/25/free.speech/index.html

But this opens up another case, while we’re sacrificing our civil liberties to the War of Drugs, the government is aiding and abedding the “enemy” for the sake of the War on Terror. Regardless of the circumstances, helping some drug deals while putting others away is nothing more than Protectionism, keeping prices high for one supplier by doing away with the competition. The gospels say, “you can not serve two masters,” and in the same way, you can’t fight two enemies with equal zeal. If the War on Terror really is the most pressing concern America has, then we shouldn’t have the time and money to be fighting this other unwinnable war. By legalizing or at least decriminalizing drugs, it would help bring down the black market and help put an end to all the violence associated with the drug trade. But that would be “declaring defeat.” Of course we haven’t even had a president who “just said no” in the past 15 years, but if its one thing conservatives are good at, its deluding themselves into believing in a an undefinable victory far, far into the future.