Will prohibition destroy the Iraq turnaround?
There’s nothing like prohibition to fund gang violence and to corrupt government officials. I think that if alcohol had been illegal in 1787 the United States would not have survived long enough to become a stable country. Alcohol prohibition was bad enough here in the twenties, and prohibition-related gang violence today is still endemic in some parts of the country.
Now, after months of reduced violence in Iraq and Iraqi gangs coming in from the heat to join the democratic process, comes news that opium is taking root in Iraq. This has the potential to derail the good things happening in Iraq and turn it into another narco-state like Columbia and, increasingly, Mexico. Prohibition may well nurture too much violence and corruption for a young Iraq to handle.
We don’t have to legalize heroin to undercut opium trafficking any more than we had to legalize pure alcohol to undercut alcohol trafficking. Re-legalize opium and it will drastically cut demand for the stronger forms of the drug. But the time to undercut the black market in opium is now, and the only way to do it is to bring opium out of the black market.
- Baghdad Security Improved Tenfold
- “Ten times more neighborhoods in Baghdad are secure now than at the start of the surge, according to the US military, and 75% of the Iraqi capital now qualifies for that status. The remarkable improvement comes on the anniversary of the shift in strategy and tactics known as the ‘surge’, and it highlights the dramatic turnaround in Iraq over the past year.”
- Opium fields spread across Iraq as farmers try to make ends meet
- Nothing like making a crop illegal to make the crop more profitable and to fund gang warfare. “The move of local warlords into opium farming is a menacing development in Iraq, where local political leaders are often allied to gangsters. It is they, rather than impoverished farmers, who have taken the lead in financing and organising opium production in Iraq.”
More prohibition
- The Great Illusion: An Informal History of Prohibition
- Herbert Asbury’s book has to rank as one of the greatest arguments ever written against the drug war; this book about alcohol prohibition chronicles and forecasts all of the problems with modern prohibition that we see today.
- Cannabis Britannica
- Subtitled “Empire, Trade, and Prohibition”, this is an in-depth history of how prohibition came about in Britain, and ends up describing how marijuana prohibition came to the forefront of international attempts to ban opium.
- We’re all drug lords now
- Will we still support prohibition when we all know someone who died because of it?
- Has welfare failed us?
- Has welfare failed us, or have we overwhelmed the welfare system through other policies that encourage dependance and discourage economic development?
- Another victim of prohibition
- “Chalk it up as collateral damage, and add Hoffman’s name to that of Isaac Singletary and Anthony Diotaiuto, three deaths of non-violent, non-threatening Floridians in just the last few years, thanks to the drug war.”
- 22 more pages with the topic prohibition, and other related pages
More Iraq
- It is right to stop genocidal dictators
- “No free nation can remain indifferent to the steady erosion of freedom around the globe. The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands.”
- Turning Republicans into heroes
- With the war turning around, filibustering Democratic withdrawal proposals is almost a no-lose situation for Republicans.
- Al-Qaeda tea-parties in Iraq?
- Did Saddam Hussein support terrorists? According to the Washington Post, yes. It’s all a matter of how you read their article.
- The ultimate question of Bush, Iraq, and genocide
- News sucks. Really, I just don’t understand how headlines and stories are chosen. Dog bites man can be a story, if that man is George Bush.
- Mistakes were made
- Rice admits that “thousands of mistakes were made”. Obviously, then, the result must be flawed.
- Five more pages with the topic Iraq, and other related pages