Illegal and prescription drugs: “Impossible Situations”
As the fall presidential election rhetoric predictably becomes, to quote author Jonathan Safran Foer, “extremely loud and incredibly close,” it is an excellent time to consider a broader perspective of recent events which cloud the bipartisan horizon like swarms of mosquitoes at the summer family reunion. In short order the Fast and Furious AFT gun smuggling scandal has devolved: the Republican-controlled House has reduced its critique of the AFT scandal to a call for Attorney General Eric Holder Jr., to step down. But there is still a remarkable and disturbing absence of the facts in this case. For instance, there is still no factual link established between the guns used to kill Border Patrol agent Brian Terry in 2010 and the guns unaccounted for in the AFT’s bungled border operations (Whitney Phillips, “Four Suspects Linked to Fast and Furious,” AP, 7 July 2012).
And while the names of the four at large suspects in the murderer of Terry were at last being released to the media, along with a $1 million reward for information leading to the arrests, Mexico had one of its 6-year presidential elections. In spite of virulent charges of election fraud by the two major opposition parties, Enrique Pena Nieto is the new president of our neighbor to the south. As such, Nieto represents the best interests of the PRI, the very same political party that spawned and nurtured Mexico’s drug cartels throughout the 1980s and 1990s.
Most recently our own DEA denied any major changes in drug policy even as it ramped up hands-on operations in Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala. At the same time the DEA organized new units in Ghana, Kenya, and Nigeria (Damien Dave and Michael S. Schmidt, “U.S. Strategy is upset as cocaine use falls,” International Herald Tribune, 17 July 2012; Charlie Savage and Thom Shanker, “U.S. Drug Fight Turns to Africa, Gangs’ New Hub,” New York Times, 22 July 2012).
Lest we forget the common denominator in all these events, it is illegal drugs. It is equally important to remember that our present drug policy is at heart identical in almost every respect to President Reagan’s “War on Drugs,” first declared on 14 October 1982. After Reagan referenced the First World War’s infamous Battle of Verdun in which 700,000 French and German soldiers massacred each other in vicious trench warfare, Reagan quoted a French soldier who said that, “There are no impossible situations. There
