Surviving Capitalism (Not) : White House Makes a Big Deal of New Heroin Efforts--But Says Nothing about Stemming the Flow or Why We're Still at War in Narco-State Afghanistan

We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Friday, April 8, 2016

White House Makes a Big Deal of New Heroin Efforts--But Says Nothing about Stemming the Flow or Why We're Still at War in Narco-State Afghanistan

Click here to access article by Meryl Nass, M.D. from his blog Anthrax Vaccine.

I have recently noticed many news reports over local media (Washington state) citing an epidemic of heroin addictions and trafficking (read this and this). It would seem to me that solving this problem would be easy for law enforcement simply by interrogating low level distributors to find out who their supplier are, and then to reach on up to major suppliers. But nothing of such efforts is reported. "War on Drugs"--what war on drugs? John Erlichman, an intimate member of the Nixon administration that created this "war", was right when he recently reported what the "war" was really about. Instead of police reports about their efforts to halt the distribution of heroin, we see many reports of the problem only in terms of sensationalism and the lack of treatment facilities.

Anyway Nass provides an excellent report with a lot of questions about the epidemic and the extensive growing operations in Afghanistan.