Tuesday, March 25, 2014

HOO BOY... Portugal Drug Legalization Held Up as a Model for America?

2012 pro-decriminalization meme that is still circulating on Facebook.

To Which I Reply...

Socialist Portugal just opened all the doors and windows in 2001 and let the drugs flow and dealt with the addicts after the fact, using other people's money. Yep, that sounds fairly Socialist, alright.  Not surprisingly, the Democrat Socialist Party was voted out of power in Portugal in 2011, ten years after legalizing all drugs.  Yet, U.S. proponents of drug legalization still seize upon Portugal as a model for success.

To put this in perspective, the entire nation of Portugal has a population of only 10 million people. That's just slightly more than the population of New York City. Without fail, these "success stories" of legalized drugs and nationalized healthcare are always found in comparatively tiny countries that represent little more than classroom experiments.

Socialism can be made to work in the classroom; but it consistently FAILS when implemented in populations of hundreds of millions.

It would make more sense, to me, for the super-nations to secure their borders and try to keep illicit drugs (and Socialism) on the outside, rather than to permit the cancer to spread throughout the population, draining the economy, dividing society, and fracturing national will.

The citizens of the Russian Federation and the European Union can tell you all about depleted economies, divided societies and fractured national will; but, then again, the Russian Federation and the European Union are accustomed to a thousand years of decadence and oppression and brutality and submission.

The United States, however, is not a submissive country.  Traditionally, the USA tends to fight back.

As one of the most militarily-imposing nations the world has ever seen, the United States has a history of approaching our various national challenges as "wars" — not just military operations, either, but social challenges, such as the "War on Cancer" and the "War on Obesity" and the "War on Poverty" and the "War on Terrorism" and the "War on Drugs," et cetera, ad infinitum.

I mean, it's not as if the United States ever actually pursued a real "War on Drugs" or a "War on Poverty" or any of those other "wars"... We did NOT pursue them, except to give the American people vigorous lip service. This is not unlike our repeated "Immigration Reform" initiatives that go thoroughly unenforced.

I contend that we have never tried to staunch the flow of drugs into this country in any manner that could be accurately described as a "war"...  Rather, we pumped billions of dollars into the corrupt governments of Colombia and Mexico, presumably to prop-up their "wars" against drug cartels; however, the cartels OWN so much of the government in Latin America, I'm sure that most of our money went straight into the cartels themselves. 

That's a leadership problem in the USA; that's the scheme of throwing money at a problem but never taking definitive ACTION.  When such schemes fall flat on their faces, the U.S. government retreats to its ivory tower, offering only denial and obfuscation, and relying on the state-run press to divert the public's limited attention elsewhere.

Even when we hear about these bloody shootouts on the Mexican/U.S. border — precipitated by debacles such as "Operation Fast & Furious," through which the Department of Justice PROVIDED illegal weapons to drug traffickers in Mexico — our press somehow distorts the the story into a lament over the "proliferation of guns" in the USA.

Which is not what it's about.  Not at all.

These shootouts with drug traffickers who are packing American-made weapons are a testament to our ineffectual and backwards border security policies.

For godsake, our U.S. federal government is trafficking weapons and money and drugs into and out of foreign nations under the pretense of "U.S. National Security"; that is more than mere lip service or a lie to the American people, it's TREASON, inasmuch as our government is instigating and participating in highly illegal activities that are killing American citizens.

For the billions of dollars that the USA has spent on the bogus "War on Drugs," we could've constructed a 1500-mile-long steel-and-concrete barrier 20 feet high along our entire southern border, manned with observers and the highest-tech surveillance equipment and weaponry available — thus stemming the flow of illegal aliens and drug traffickers and potential terrorist threats.

Instead, our federal government has actively financed and supplied and enabled all of these illegal activities and made the problems exponentially WORSE than they were.  Now their "solution" is to grant amnesty and citizenship to tens of millions of illegal aliens (the very rumor of which has increased illegal immigration and border violence by 25% in the last 3 years), and then address border security after the fact.

Whereupon we're right back to "throwing open all the doors and windows," permitting a virtual invasion from Mexico, and passing the consequences on to the American taxpayer.

This sort of thinking — legalizing that which is illegal, opening the floodgates, and then sorting out the aftermath using other people's money — is entirely backwards and counter-productive. If we would only take decisive and timely and committed action from the beginning, instead of playing Socialist politics, we wouldn't HAVE most of the social and economic crises that we endure today in America.


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