Operation Alesia

The deal is going down in Shasta County. Blackhawk helicopters are assisting officers and soldiers from 17 executive agencies of the American government in the eradication of Marijauna from 28,000 acres of land in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest. This local news article describes the situation in detail with a map, a chart, some pictures, and a video.

(Alesia, in case you're wondering, is the name of a battle that took place 52 B.C. in which the Romans, led by Julius Caesar, put down a rebellion in Gaul, securing the territory for the Roman Empire (which at that time was still pretending to be a republic). A band of 80,000 Gaullic rebels had taken refuge in a small town, which Caesar laid siege to, eventually defeating the rebels and taking their leader, Vercingetorix, captive. Caesar imprisoned Vercingetorix until his Triumph of 46 B.C., when Caesar had Vercingetorix put on display as a war trophy and then ritually strangled.)

Ok, so let's ignore for a moment the weirdness of the name of this operation. What we have here is a Latin American marijauna cartel planting, irrigating, and harvesting millions of plants on thousands of acres of Californian national forest land. Their purpose is not to smoke all that ganja themselves, but rather to sell it on the black market in order to make money. That's their motive- money. The global black market in illegal drugs is somewhere in the neighborhood of a trillion dollars. Why? Because people want drugs. And they're willing to pay for them, illegally, if necessary.

As long as there's a trillion dollars floating around, people will compete for that money, violently, if necessary. Making drugs illegal didn't stop people from using drugs (as the trillion dollars can attest to). All it did was turn the millions of people who use drugs into criminals and create a trillion dollars in profit. This is really stupid. All it would take are the strokes of a few hundred pens in national executive offices around the world to make that trillion dollar black market disappear. Legalize drugs. No more money for thugs to fight over. And guess what? Your prison population is suddenly cut by half or more. Saves the taxpayer money. Also, you could get rid of the DEA and all the related executive offices that try in vain to fight the drug problem. Saves the taxpayers more money. Then police can focus on arresting violent criminals.

But there are all of those vested interests to contend with. The drug cartels don't want it to be legalized- their profits derive from it. The DEA and other anti-drug agencies don't want it legalized- they'd be out of a job.

The Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy (who the media can't seem to stop calling the "drug czar", which is almost as creepy as the name "Operation Alesia") says that buying drugs on the black market supports terrorism.

I agree.

So I propose that we grow our own. Problem solved. See how easy that was? Maybe I should be the Director of the Office of Drug Control Policy. If I was, I wouldn't let news reporters call me the "drug czar". I would make them call me "the drug dude". I would hire psychopharmacologists and psychoanalysts and neuroscience experts to study drug addiction and use the tax money we'd save on prisons to fund more and better rehab programs. The world could be a tangibly better place in a decade if we simply had the honesty and political will to stop punishing people for their misery and try to address the root causes of drug abuse. Drug abuse is a symptom, not a cause.