Monday, February 22, 2010

Historical Controlled Substance Insanity

The American legal system on substance abuse: It's always been vicious, brutal and insane. Here's the story of how the government poisoned industrial alcohol during prohibition, killing thousands of people.

Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.

DEA, FBI, ATF, local drug enforcement. All vicious, all brutal, all insane. Why else would 800,000 mostly minority men be in prison or jail for doing what Barack Obama freely admits doing hundreds of times? And of course Clinton and W denied doing so, but their denials are widely disbelieved. I think it's category error: we see something as a problem that can be fixed when it is in fact a condition of man.

Utopian projects are always ugly. They attract thugs and breeds brutality into their psyches.

Our government is such a bloody mess.

No comments:

Post a Comment